Honest Reporting, Student Behaviour, Location? Or Connections? China-US, UN Sex Abuse, Bat Ye'or Eurabia-Dhimmitude, Skewered with Panache & More

The Photo That Started It All

Introducing the 2004 DishonestReporting Canada Awards Jan. 31, 2005

Neil Macdonald
The National; CBC News Sunday
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
(Bias by Selection of Sources, Distortion of Facts)

Alexandre Trudeau
W5 – “The Fence”
CTV
(Bias by Selection of Sources, Bias by Omission)

These are just a few examples; link for the details and other items.




Teachers plan charter to stamp out bad behaviour in schools Mar. 27, 05, Julie Henry, Education Correspondent

Teachers are to draw up a national charter of behaviour in an attempt to stamp out unruliness among pupils. The move has the support of parents who want it backed by government legislation.

Under the charter, children will face punishments from detention to expulsion for offences including failing to wear the correct uniform, talking back to teachers, bad language and violence. [. . . . ]

The details are worth reading for anyone involved with young people. The time has come, Canadians.



Location, Location, Location? -- Or Connection, Connection, Connection?

Moving contracts probed March 27, 2005, Stephanie Rubec

THE CANADIAN International Trade Tribunal is probing a lucrative federal contract to move public servants, RCMP officers and soldiers. The Tribunal has launched an investigation of a $154-million contract awarded last fall to Royal LePage Relocation marred by allegations of favouritism and mismanagement. [. . . . ]

Search: $131-million, $572 million, $500-million, $154 million




China, U.S. interests conflict Barton W. Marcois and Leland R. Miller

Barton W. Marcois, a principal at RJI Capital Corp., served as principal deputy assistant secretary of Energy under President Bush. Leland R. Miller, a China specialist, is a lawyer in New York.

Lost amid the responses to President Bush's 2005 State of the Union speech was that of China's phlegmatic Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan. Twice asked by a reporter whether China shared the president's hope that democracy would take root in the Middle East, Mr. Kong artfully evaded the question, merely hinting that the issue was not on China's agenda.

In fact, China's agenda is so different that it threatens to seriously undermine American initiatives in the Middle East.

The United States and China have never seen eye-to-eye in the region, but the reasons for this have evolved over time. . . .

In the new millennium, China's Middle Eastern strategy has shifted again, from part-time arms salesman to outright energy diplomacy. [. . . . ]

Note: Efforts to curb abuses were "ad hoc and inadequate" and that exploitative behavior was widespread.

Report Calls for Punishing Peacekeepers in Sex Abuse Mar. 25, 05, Warren Hoge

UNITED NATIONS, March 24 - A report on sexual abuse by peacekeepers recommended Thursday that offending soldiers and their commanders be punished by their home countries, that payments made to them be recovered and put into a fund for victims and that the United Nations make compliance with these measures a condition for taking part in its missions.

Secretary General Kofi Annan commissioned the report from Prince Zeid Raad al Hussein, Jordan's ambassador to the United Nations, after evidence emerged that blue helmeted peacekeepers and civilian staff members had had sex with women and girls in Congo in exchange for food and money, and, in some cases, had committed rape. The report also recommended that the United Nations make counseling and medical care available to victims and provide assistance for "peacekeeper babies" left behind when the troops rotate back to their own countries.

Prince Zeid, a former military officer and civilian peacekeeper in Bosnia, said that current efforts to curb abuses were "ad hoc and inadequate" and that exploitative behavior was widespread. [. . . . ]

The Civilization of Dhimmitude March 26, 2005, Bruce Thornton, Private Papers

Bat Ye'or is the world's preeminent historian of Islam, jihad and dhimmitude--the reduced state of non-Muslim peoples living under Islamic rule.

One of the first requirements in any conflict is to know the enemy [. . . . ]

As Ye'or documents, the key to Islamist terrorism is Israel, but not in the way most people think. For the jihadist mentality, Israel must be destroyed, if not by bombs and tanks, then by piece-meal concessions and sheer demography. It make take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but like the medieval Crusader kingdoms, this manifestation of the dynamic power of Western cultural ideals cannot be allowed to survive as a constant reminder of Islamic civilization's failure. Israel's war is our war, and until we forcefully assert that linkage in our public pronouncements and more important in our actions, everything else we do just buys some time, in which the forces of appeasement and the murderous energy of the jihadists will do their work [. . . . ]

Search: "the historical, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of his motives", important exception, Jihad can be pursued through, concept of jihad, Ye'or's thesis in Eurabia is that, Ye'or documents both, The central factor in this process, Playing upon Western ideals of tolerance, a careful analysis of the transcripts and communiqués from various conferences, the reduction of terrorism to a response to, Eurabian dhimmitude, unveiled the lethal danger of

This is lengthy and worth reading.

A review of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'or. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 384 pages, $23.95

There are other books listed on Amazon by Bat Ye'or.




The justce and gun registry systems didn't work

Why was Roszko not in jail and how did he get his weapons?

Many people, including Roszko's older brother, have said that the killer fell through the cracks of the justice system. They argue that he should have been in jail for a string of alleged offences involving weapons, thefts and sexual assault in the 1990s but was able to remain free thanks to what has been called a campaign of intimidation against accusers.

Roszko was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and a 10-year weapons prohibition for the sexual assault of a young boy through the 1980s



Skewered with Panache by Victor Davis Hanson

The Seven Faces of “Dr.” Churchill -- Academia’s everyman. March 24, 2005 b

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

[. . . . ] Yet instead of seeing Churchill as no man, it is better to envision him as an academic everyman. In the alternate universe of the modern campus, any collective imbalance of wealth, education, health, happiness, or almost anything is explicable only in terms of deliberate present discrimination and systematic past oppression.

[. . . . ] Perhaps it is best to think of Churchill as our aging portrait of an academic Dorian Gray, in whom all the once-hallowed university’s vices and sins of the last half-century are now so deeply etched and lined.

You just have to read it.




Conservative Party of Canada -- Red Tory? -- David Mitchell

I was curious about David Mitchell who was supported in his bid for the Presidency of the National Council of the Conservative Party of Canada by some high powered former Progressive Conservatives and/or Quebeckers -- so rumour had it. I Googled "David Mitchell" and the first thing that came up was this website: Red Tory.

Council Forum to Focus on Candidates’ Plans for Rebuilding Party in Urban Canada News Release March 11, 2005

Conservative presidency candidates stress unity CTV.ca News Staff

[. . . . ] "We never said we were social Conservatives or Red Tories or Blue Tories or gay Tories. We were simply Conservatives. [. . . . ]

Multiculturalism is promoted so the power at the centre may have all the appearance of being diffused, and any lingering resentment or doubts about bilingualism may dissolve through celebration of ethnic diversity.

Canada's mushy middle March 26, 2005, Salim Mansur

[. . . . ] This success [convention of the Conservative Party ] was best described by L. Ian MacDonald of the Montreal Gazette, who wrote that because the party had signalled it was moving "to the centre, and the leader and party appeared competent in doing so, Canadians may now be more disposed to listen."
But where is this "centre"? Who defines it, guards it, and qualifies and disqualifies those seeking entrance?

[. . . . ] When protectors of the centre give approval to a party for having met their test, then, it is time to ask: Will electing such a party make any difference to the country, if all it serves up is more of the same bland political fast-food meals? [. . . . ]

Effects of global warming not clear Mar. 26, 05, Jim Chapman, London Free Press

At first, I thought last Sunday's Free Press editorial (The canary is dead, March 20) was an attempt at irony -- a deliberate exaggeration of facts to make a point I didn't get.

Then I realized it was no such thing. For whatever reasons, the author rolled out the hyperbole in pursuit of the politically correct but scientifically suspect theory of inevitably catastrophic global warming. [. . . . ]

"the city's 14th murder victim this year"

Ryerson student in the city which used to be termed "Toronto the good"? What is the common denominator in these murders, if any? What has happened in the last several years? Or is it that we have access to this information almost immediately?

Gunmen kill Rye student -- COPS HUNTING 3 SUSPECTS March 27, 2005, Ian Robertson, Toronto Sun

A RICH, party-loving architecture student was working on an essay when he was gunned down at the entrance to his apartment across from Ryerson University, grieving friends said yesterday. "People like Will don't die ... he had too many friends," Toronto bar waitress Jennifer Veinotte said of her pal, Will Kim, 30. [. . . . ]

Search: After interviewing numerous witnesses