Queer, is it not, how The McGill Daily – supposed defender of the disenfranchised since 1911 – has so far neglected to mention the recent popular uprising in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Not a word. Queerer still, wouldn’t you agree, how freely space is donated to anyone willing to ooze a few words regarding Gaza, anarchist soccer, or anything transgender-related?
I have no interest in recounting for the reader what’s happened these past eight months in the Iranian streets. In the admittedly unlikely event that your news diet consists solely of twice-weekly Daily consumption – in which case I would recommend either a doctor or the immediate stimulation of your gag reflex – you should do a little research.

If I may say so, I just raised a very interesting point. If I left it at that, a little joke about your news diet and how if you read The Daily you have no idea what’s going on in the world, I can imagine the letter published after reading week: “Nobody only reads The Daily. Kreitner neglected to quote from section 2.1 of the Statement of Principles: ‘The fundamental goal of The McGill Daily shall be to serve as a critical and constructive forum for the exchange of ideas and information about McGill University and related communities.’ Why would a Canadian student newspaper write about some civilians being killed at the hands of a government halfway around the world?”

I mention this predictable objection here, rather than wait for the inevitable letter, only to save this hapless hypothetical correspondent the unnecessary effort and embarrassment. My response begs itself: last Monday’s cover article was titled “The crippling of Gaza’s health care.” The article inside, an interview with a doctor who was in Gaza during the conflict last January and recently spoke at McGill (“Emergency in Gaza,” News, February 7), doesn’t mention McGill or Canada, and Montreal only in passing to represent a place with better water quality than Gaza. Its 1,500-plus words included this gem directed at Israel, with which the interviewer cleverly chose to conclude her article: “You have to come to the negotiation table, we have to find a solution, you can not kill all these civilians – period.” It’s that simple.

Point being, of course, that The Daily has no interest in limiting itself to “ideas and information about McGill University and related communities.” Anything that fits the agreed-upon narrative is more than welcome in its pages.

Take Afghanistan. Its August elections were patently fraudulent – an observation The Daily devoted a 600-word editorial to confirming. That particular post-election mayhem fit the narrative. Characteristic Western diplomatic obfuscation? Check. Military plans gone awry? Check. Rather weak but sufficiently plausible insinuation that Afghanistan is no better with a flawed, struggling democracy than it was a decade ago under the dominion of a sadistic crime syndicate? Check!
But Iran? The Iranian elections, after which dozens of people died, after which thousands upon thousands took to the streets pleading for democracy, after which this writer couldn’t look at videos of those protests without being affected on a fundamental, emotional, human level?
Iran was Bush’s next target. Iran isn’t a bad place. That’s what the military-Zionist-industrial complex wants you to think! Anyone desiring the “exportation” of supposedly Western institutions to other nations – neo-cons, all! White Man’s Burden! Imperialists, Islamophobes!
So when the Iranian people exhibited to their leaders and to the world their willingness to die in the name of democracy, of course The Daily wasn’t going to find an Iranian professor to interview, wasn’t going to write an editorial decrying the unfairness of elections halfway around the world. Young Muslims clamouring for democracy don’t fit the narrative. Iranians wanting regime change don’t fit the narrative. The West having something non-Westerners want doesn’t fit the narrative.

Again and again, The Daily proves itself far more interesting for those notes it doesn’t play than for those it actually does.

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Gold argued that I shouldn’t consider them “emblematic of the movement as a whole.”

She claimed I did this in the following line, which I completely forgive her for amputating from its original context: “My mother grew up in the Long Island tradition of Reform Judaism, which essentially reduces religious observance to thrice yearly family gatherings in vague recognition of what ancestors considered major holidays” (the italics being, of course, the parts of my original sentence Gold chose to include in her recent article). It is only Gold’s deliberate mutilation of my sentence that she objects to. Were it what the Tribune published, I would certainly agree with her criticism of both that fine newspaper and its “ever-controversial columnist.”

As a former Daily columnist, I trust your newspaper’s audience is capable of noting on its own that the original sentence implies something distinctly less than the “universalization” Ms. Gold critiqued. To those from Long Island who object, I wholeheartedly apologize – for everything.

I readily admit disrespect toward the half-assed religiosity of those among whom I was reared. However, as my article’s title and narrative form illustrated, I never express it as anything more than my personal opinion, one Tribune readers are free to accept or reject as their various personal experiences implore them to.

Bonne chance with your mitzvoth though, Gold.

Ricky KreitnerU1 Philosophy & Political ScienceTribune columnistFormer Daily columnist

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Your recent editorial recited the standard diatribe faithfully: “It’s no accident that once-colonized countries have weak economies today. The economic status of the countries in the Global South is the result of centuries of colonial violence and exploitation that continue today.”

It’s no accident you used the noncommittal vocabulary you did, curiously neglecting to declare exactly how colonialism led to the present situation. No one still believes “dependency theory” accounts for discrepancies in economic development across the geographical spectrum, mostly due to East Asia’s astounding economic success in recent decades. Had you attempted to plunge into the depths of the literature looking for an answer, you would have floated to the surface sooner or later, panting for fresh air. Why even bother?
You probably expected readers not to really trouble you about it. Nothing wrong with a little moral absolution with your morning coffee.

The same day, Niko Block happened to gloss over a perhaps inconsequential fact regarding a boatload of Tamils sitting in a small Indonesian port (“Sri Lankan Tamils file for refugee status,” News, November 3). In her [sic] zeal to really make the grade for the special “Migrants” issue of The Daily, Block wrote, “Both [Australia and Indonesia] have refused to let the passengers ashore.” The BBC disagrees: “The Tamils themselves have said they will not leave the ship voluntarily and have refused to co-operate with identity checks.”

Perhaps your science columnist, Daniel Lametti, can help us understand these two strange mistakes. He wrote recently (“Controversy clouds opinion,” Science+Technology, November 3) “When it came time to thoughtfully consider information that went against what they believed in, the subjects simply couldn’t – their reasoning was coloured by emotion.”

Ricky KreitnerU1 Philosophy & Political Science

EDITOR’S NOTE: From the BBC article (“Australia refuses Tamil refugees,” 28 October) that Kreitner cites: “Australian authorities have said 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Indonesia will not be taken to Australia, their intended destination.” Further on: “Indonesia agreed last week to take the group to have their claims examined, but local officials are refusing to allow the Australian vessel to dock.”

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– Jean-Paul Sartre

My dad likes to preface his stories and spiels by warning, “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but….” He jokes that it gives him license to say anything he wants; I respond that it gives me license to ignore anything he says.

Perhaps I should have begun every column this year with my dad’s caveat. Of course, it would have been mostly true.

Jean-Paul Sartre divided his autobiography, The Words, into two sections, from which I culled the epigraph for this, my last column of the year. The first section of Sartre’s book is “Reading,” and describes his extraordinary childhood, during which he learned to read by the age of three and not long thereafter immersed himself in mathematics and classical music. The second part, “Writing,” describes his later life, and how the self can only be realized through the act of creation.

Sartre’s dichotomy has resonated with me ever since I attempted in vain to read The Words in high school. The two acts seem entirely incompatible. Must you read everything before you can write anything? If yes, then who the hell do I think I am, writing about as issues as weighty as those I have been, and only in my first year of university?

Being responsible for 600-700 words of opinion every week for eight months is a stressful experience, not so much because I sometimes had nothing to say, but because I sometimes wavered during those little moments of epistemological incertitude that made me hesitate to claim the right to have the opinion.

I think the only farewell-type advice I’ll leave you with is that anger is okay. Well-channelled anger can be productive, rejuvenating, healthy even. I would recommend that everyone begin each day with a glass of orange juice and a single serving of fresh, justified, palpable anger.

The journalist Alexander Cockburn relates an interesting anecdote in his introduction for Noam Chomsky’s Chronicles of Dissent: “Chomsky went to the dentist, who made his inspection and observed that the patient was grinding his teeth. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky disclosed that teeth-grinding was not taking place during the hours of sleep. When else? They narrowed it down quickly enough to the period each morning when Chomsky was reading the New York Times, unconsciously gnashing his molars at every page.”

Similarly, Christopher Hitchens checks every morning to see whether the New York Times’s famous front page slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” still strikes him as “smug, pompous, idiotic…obviously complacent and conceited and censorious.” If it does, he knows he’s still alive.

As I reported in my article on the November massacre in Mumbai, there is a Times article hanging over my desk in which it is written: “The police in Kandahar Province arrested 10 Taliban militants they said were involved in an attack this month on a group of Afghan schoolgirls whose faces were doused with acid…. A high-ranking member of the Taliban had paid the militants 100,000 Pakistani rupees ($1,275) for each girl they managed to burn. The girls were assaulted by two men on a motorcycle, apparently because the girls had been attending high school. The men drove up beside them and splashed their faces with what appeared to be battery acid.”

Every time I reread that article, I am immediately jolted out of my Sartre-induced inferiority complex, and I recommit myself to fighting for what I unapologetically believe in. You should have some kind of device like that, too, although it need not necessarily involve the New York Times.

I also think of that article whenever I’m in a course conference and someone argues something like, “Those are just our Western values, you know, like, we can’t go imposing our values on other people,” or, “Yeah, there’s free speech, but you can’t shout fire in a crowded theatre, you know?” or, “Who are we to tell other countries what to do?” Every time I hear these things, I pledge to myself that I will do everything in my power for the rest of my life to keep these people and those like them from possessing any serious responsibility for anything.

That has been the aim of this column, which I hope to bring back next year if The Daily will have me. If not, cheers, and thank you for reading.

Well folks, that’s all he wrote. Get in touch at pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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– Albert Einstein

Throughout the year, this column has repeatedly defended worthless, tasteless, obscene, ugly, and otherwise thoroughly contemptible persons in the name of fighting off a more threatening and popular groupthink. But in this, my penultimate piece, it is necessary to defend such characters once more, and publicly admit that there actually is a Matt Damon film that I enjoy.

Naturally, I feel disinclined to admit that I am a massive fan of Good Will Hunting, for I can’t stand the three main actors: Damon, Ben Affleck, and Robin Williams. So why, against all odds, am I such an admirer of that movie?

First, I guess I’m old-fashioned in that I think all effective male university professors should have thick, Rasputin-like beards that exude confidence and connote wisdom. Second, absolutely nothing brings tears to these baby hazels with such unavoidable consistency like a wrong-side-of-the-tracks/metaphorical-rags-to-riches/carpe diem feel-good narrative.

But most of all, I like the educational philosophy espoused by Damon’s character, Will Hunting. I’m thinking of that scene in the Harvard bar in which Matt Damon completely schools the Michael Bolton look-a-like by showing that he’s really the more well-read and original thinker of the two, even though he’s paid only $1.50 in public library late fees compared to the Harvard student’s $150,000 tuition. (And Damon got the cute girl’s number.)

Beneath all the unrealistically witty Gilmore Girls-style dialogue, so grating to my ears, there is a pertinent message: formal university education is, more or less, contrived bourgeois bullshit. If all these books that we liberal arts majors read here at McGill are available at any local library, what, really, is the point? Where is the value added? In only my first year I’ve already taken a handful of classes in which the intellectual apex of my week is reached while reading the texts rather than in the conferences or lectures, some of which are little more than PowerPoint-generated distillations of the week’s readings. Some Arts professors are merely unenergetic curators of content for unreflective slack-jawed students.

The value added, as alleged by Mr. Hunting and proudly admitted by his Harvard adversary, is in the middle-class prestige that accompanies the leather-sheathed diploma. It is a ticket to success that costs me, as an international student here at McGill, roughly $60,000, and says, “This kid is not only good-looking but also passably informed. Hire him, if you can tolerate the scathing wit and casual misanthropy.”

This seems ridiculous. Why should a candidate’s fitness for a job be predicated on how and where he received his knowledge rather than what knowledge he received?

Even the concept of receiving knowledge wrongly implies that one needs to pay someone more learned for the service of providing the knowledge, a sophistical notion that Socrates, Wikipedia, and I stand firmly against.

With Matt Damon’s beneficent guidance, we should affect a dramatic shift in our philosophy of higher education. One possibility is to substitute meaningless diplomas for agreed-upon certification tests that would assess a candidate’s abilities rather than the brand recognition of the university printed on his or her or her mother’s bumper sticker. A good example of this process is that which public accountants must go through to become certified in their profession.

Of course, I’m preaching what I’m too much of a coward to practice: unfortunately for my opponents who constantly (and rather disturbingly) meditate in these pages on how much they’d like to pop my piñata, I’m not going anywhere, because I’m a sucker.

Leaving my personal flaws aside, surely any reader who has lived through a year in residence will agree that not every undergraduate at McGill is quite temperamentally cut out for pursuing a four-year degree. The societal overemphasis on attaining one is unhealthy and thoroughly counterproductive.

If anyone needs more evidence that a prestigious degree does not necessarily equate to an competent grasp of the material, I urge you to note that former President George W. Bush – a bicycling Bartlett’s of blunder and an utter failure at every attempted business venture, including the presidential – earned degrees in history from Yale and in business from Harvard.

[i]Ricky’s got one left. How do you like them apples? Tell him that it’s not your fault at pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com. [/i]

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– Luke 6:43

Last week I wrote that “if human rights language is to be anything more than the collective moral masturbation of supposedly civilized people…free speech must be defended even – nay, especially – when it is the most difficult to do so.”

It truly discomforts me to use the same metaphorical device two weeks in a row, but when its twofold application is so just it would be more risky to deliberately avoid the resemblance than it is to possibly appear redundant by employing it again this week.

That said, let’s discuss another recent event that struck me as profanely masturbatory: the annual police brutality riots that devolved into violence, yet again, in the heart of downtown last Sunday.

I’ve been shocked by the local media’s dispassionate treatment of this incident. Some say it was just a few bad apples committing the violence. The Gazette actually quoted a civil rights lawyer contending that 99 per cent of the demonstrators were “protesting in good faith.” Bullshit. I was there; maybe 15 per cent of the marchers were protesting in good faith, and those were probably the ones like me who joined in the middle because they had nothing better to do that afternoon.

I was catnapping in Square Phillips on Ste. Catherine, enjoying what was practically the first day of spring, when a mass of masked marchers bounded across my vision, heading west. Overwhelmingly young, leaving nothing unsettled in the street or on the sidewalk, halting all traffic, surprising and scaring the shit out of drivers and shoppers at The Bay, they waved signs in the faces of passers-by, and wielded bottles, bricks, toy drums, and, worst of all, Leftöver Crack patches on their grandfathers’ leather jackets. In essence, an unstoppable force seeking, like Newton’s apple, an equal and opposite foe to reckon with.

That opposing force was provided gratis by a cordon of Montreal police officers, in full riot gear, motionless at the intersection of St. Urbain and Ste. Catherine. Provoked by the mere presence of these fascist pigs, the protestors now relieved themselves of all remaining bottles and bricks in their possession, and were thoughtful enough to also relieve the surrounding businesses of any loose articles in their vicinity, including signs, tables, and other totable wares.

And the police just stood there. They just stayed and stomached it, sometimes quite literally. They tried to use their shields as umbrellas to defend against the incoming projectiles raining down upon them, but sometimes the rain was so heavy that the effort was perilously futile.

About 100 of the rioters retreated a few hundred metres away and began constructing a blockade with wooden planks and steel barriers torn from a nearby Ste. Catherine construction site. It was like a bunch of kids in a sandbox: you can tell me some of them might have been on the receiving end of police violence in the past, but by 4 p.m. last Sunday, any remnant of legitimate moral outrage had dissipated into hundreds of sunlit smiles adorning the gleeful faces of juvenile people relishing the opportunity to do with a few city blocks whatever they pleased.

I saw one kid wildly applauded as he rammed a construction barrier into a parked blue sedan. A paunchy middle-aged man jumped out of the driver’s seat and started punching the kid, as another tried to separate them. A third hit the driver with a stolen two-by-four until they were all broken up and the man told to drive off, an order he promptly though frustratingly obeyed.

Of course, I can only speak of the two hours or so of the march that I witnessed. But of those last few hours, I can say with confidence that the accepted storyline, “A few bad apples ruined the whole pie,” is a myth whose proponents have precious little credibility on any other related questions.

The cause of fighting police brutality deserves more respectful and respectable advocates. It defeats the entire purpose when violence and vandalism foreseeably ensue year after year. Moreover, the City of Montreal is complicit in these inevitable crimes if they allow the marches to continue in their present form, routes and faces disturbingly undisclosed.

Pissed that Ricky used the same old argument two weeks in a row? Holler at him: pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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– Noam Chomsky

On February 20, the Turkish professor and Armenian genocide denier Türkkaya Ataöv, invited at the behest of the Turkish Students Society (TSS) and to the chagrin of the Armenian Students Association (ASA), spoke to a very divided McGill audience. I’ll allow others to outline the historical evidence, but suffice it to say that nearly everyone agrees that more than a million Armenians were systematically disposed of by the Young Turk government in 1915 in what is accurately labeled as the first modern genocide. Professor Ataöv is simply, empirically, historically wrong.

The ASA argues that universities cannot sanction genocide denial in the name of free speech. They could not be more wrong.

The McGill Tribune quoted Mardig Taslakian, Vice President External of the ASA, asking, “What would the University’s reaction be if neo-Nazis invited someone to come and preach that the Holocaust didn’t happen?” I can’t speak for McGill, but I hope its reaction would be to politely ask the neo-Nazis to keep the noise down and clean up after themselves, and I would be right there screaming bloody hell if their reaction were anything but. The distinction between denying past violence and inciting future violence is not an insignificant one.

Taslakian wrote last Tuesday in The Tribune, “The falsification of history, denial of the Holocaust, or of any crime against humanity recognized as genocide by the international academic community can’t be protected by a false label of ‘freedom of speech.’” Pardon my language, but you bet your ass they can and must be. If freedom of speech means anything to you – and, of course, this entire discussion is predicated on my assumption that it does – it must mean that. If the TSS wants to drag its name through the mud by inviting this buffoon to speak, why not let them? McGill’s Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson made the sole defensible decision by allowing the event to go on.

As we turn now to another recent campus free speech issue, recall last week I wrote that an example of the new anti-Semitism can be found in “some posters on Canadian campuses – commendably not McGill’s – promoting Israel Apartheid Week [that] depicted an Apache helicopter labeled ‘Israel’ firing a rocket at a lone Palestinian boy carrying a teddy bear – a thinly-veiled modification of that old, trusty blood libel standby.”

Carleton University, among others, apparently agreed with my assessment and ordered the posters taken down, arguing that they violated the Carleton and Ontario Human Rights Codes.

But the ban was a terrible mistake. I’ll attack federal and provincial human rights codes in the future, but even if the posters do violate them, one simply must resist the sinister, illiberal passions of the offended mob. It’s easy to ban something for being “inflammatory and capable of inciting confrontation;” but if human rights language is to be anything more than the collective moral masturbation of supposedly civilized people, we must take the more difficult and nuanced position: to condemn the anti-Semitism and yet celebrate as loud as we can the right for others to proclaim that anti-Semitism from the highest mountaintops.

Anyone who reads the Carleton University Statement on Conduct and Human Rights, will be surprised to come across Section 6, which reads: “The University respects the rights of speech and dissent and upholds the right to peaceful assembly and expression of dissent” – all principles that the rest of the document goes on to systematically shred into barely recognizable fragments of their former selves. The vagueness of Section 6 renders it utterly meaningless, and the sarcasm is clear. Shame on you, Carleton University, for flippantly using these hallowed words, and for treating the ideals behind them with such unreserved contempt.

I am as proud of McGill for the fact that these posters did not appear on campus as I am for my stubborn intuition that the administration would have let them remain if they had.

In The Tribune’s editorial regarding Ataöv’s speech, they quoted H.L. Mencken lamenting, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels.” If anything at all is true in this sorry universe, it is that. Yet, as The Tribune urged, the fight must be fought. It is not easy, and nor should it be.

But free speech must be defended even – nay, especially – when it is the most difficult to do so. Though the pen is mightier than the sword, it’s still best to have thick skin.

Like free speech? Write to Ricky at pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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– Pierre-André Taguieff, French philosopher

Last week, several McGill groups hosted the annual Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), a weeklong event at which various speakers were brought in to discuss such catchy topics as “Reclaiming a Jewish Culture of Resistance: Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the nation-state.”

I was all set to write a scathing critique of IAW, denouncing it for its barely subtle conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. But after attending a few of the events, I was genuinely impressed with the depth of the discourse and the seriousness of the participants. The rampant sloganeering I expected was nonexistent, and the flickering outbursts of bigoted crazies were only reluctantly countenanced – though, I hasten to add, not directly repudiated – by the speakers and organizers of the event. By the way, I still think the name is needlessly inflammatory and hopelessly counterproductive.

Naturally, some things did not surprise me at all: the paltry exhibitionism; the balding-though-pony-tailed, aging, probably ex-Quebec Liberation Front Montreal socialists; the alarming symbiosis of the eager-to-impress with the easy-to-impress that has so frequently caused trouble; and, of course, the guy with the Nietzsche ‘stache.

It’s often said in why-can’t-we-all-get-along Hyde Parks that the whole darn mess could be solved if we try to see things from the other point of view, or if we greet each other with a pleasant “Shalom, Habibi!” But I’ve found this a nearly impossible task to undertake in some instances, and I am not alone. A relatively older Jewish questioner at one event fumbled his preface and remarked, “It’s been a while since I’ve had to debate Marxists, so I’m a little off balance.”

In response to a question, the lecturer at the workshop mentioned above said that he thinks a “secular, non-Zionist Jewish identity must come vis-à-vis capitalism.” Really? I wonder. Another question: “Is it possible to feel a revulsion for the deadly images of Gaza while also feeling some kind of an affinity for the Jewish nation-state?” After a rather revealing silence of no less than ten seconds, he answered, and I quote, “Suuuuuurrrrre.”

Having admitted, though, that these events were noticeably milder than I thought they might be, it also must be admitted that there have been frequent – though not as frequent as some Pavlovian defenders of Israel often say – transgressions of that fine line between rhetoric that is anti-Zionist and that which is anti-Semitic. For instance, some posters on Canadian campuses – commendably, not McGill’s – promoting Israel Apartheid Week depicted an Apache helicopter labeled “Israel” firing a rocket at a lone Palestinian boy carrying a teddy bear – a thinly-veiled modification of that old, trusty blood libel standby.

Since the Nuremberg Trials, it has become utterly impossible to be a self-respecting right-wing anti-Semite. You’d look ridiculous, and you’d almost never get laid. But it’s pretty easy to get laid when fighting for the supposed wretched of the Earth, when cloaking oneself in the rhetoric of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Conservatism gets you nothing; that’s why it’s called conservatism. Telling the meek that they certainly shall inherit the Earth has worked for just under 2,000 years.

I worry that cloaked hatred will creep its way into fashionable – but also otherwise important – causes that claim to resist oppression and exploitation wherever they occur. This is not a distant possibility; I see it everyday, forming at the intersection of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, the combination of which the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy calls “the new barbarism.”

There are legitimate critiques of Zionism, as there are of Israel’s recent Gaza actions, to which I am not the least sympathetic. But what I am not sympathetic to – and what I refuse to tolerate – is what Jonathan Kay described last week in the National Post: “The moral dimension of the conflict — terrorism versus counter-terrorism, a society seeking peace versus one that seems addicted to war — has been replaced by a sentimental Marxist-inspired tale of the virtuous oppressed rising up against an evil oppressor.”

Activists must also universalize their cause. There needs to be a Burma Solidarity Week, and a Zimbabwe Reform Week, and a Pro-Afghanis-Not-Being-Forced-To-Live-Under-Sharia-Law Week. I find the absence of these events – and corresponding GA motions – curious, and yet not so much. The only defense against anti-Semitism is a sturdy and humanistic cosmopolitanism.

The early German socialist August Bebel famously called anti-Semitism “the socialism of fools.” Keen point. Frighteningly, the events of the past few months confirm the suspicions of many that the new anti-Semitism will come from nowhere if not the left.

Can’t wait until next week to hear from Ricky? Email him at the trusty pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

Also of note, he referred to Martin Lukacs as a scholar.

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– Michael Ignatieff, in his 2007 essay “Getting Iraq Wrong”

Ask my mom – she’ll tell you I’m terrible at admitting my mistakes: I pout; I throw a temper tantrum. Yet today, I humbly prostrate myself and beg forgiveness for a past error. I trust you shall readily grant me that mercy.

In 2003, I was too young to have formed an opinion on the invasion of Iraq. But as my consciousness ripened, as I saw the mounting death tolls and the Bush administration’s apparent disregard for and disconnect from reality – I concluded that the foreign troop presence in Mesopotamia couldn’t possibly yield any further benefits unless immediately discontinued.

But when I look at Iraq today, I am forced to admit that my previous conclusions were both premature and inaccurate.

This is not to say that the ends necessarily justify the means. Donald Rumsfeld screwed up the means by sending the military in with too few troops; L. Paul Bremer, the American civilian administrator at the beginning of the reconstruction, did the same by disbanding the Iraqi military – everyone screwed up. But the ends – the serious possibility of a democratic stability – do justify the idea that there had to be something done, and imploring Saddam Hussein to, as Obama would say, “unclench his fist,” was never going to work.

Iraq had provincial elections a few weeks ago. There were scattered episodes of violence, a handful of assassinations, sure – but there was certainly not even a semblance of the violence that plagued the Iraqi elections in recent years. Progress has been forged and maintained.

After all the talk of an impending and all-encompassing civil war, which would surely envelop the entire region in a protracted and bloody sectarian conflict; after Joe Biden’s ridiculous plan to partition the country into three separate and sovereign entities; after all the uproar about Bush’s surge – the Iraq War is well on the way to being a success.

Now, we former critics of the war need to ask ourselves: are we to disregard this success? Or shall we remain under the bizarre illusion that this all would have just happened one day, no violence required? How about after Saddam died and was replaced by his two sons, Uday and Qusay, both far more feared and sadistic than their father ever was: would it have happened then? Don’t send me hate mail unless you are willing to answer yes to all of these questions.

Also, I know it’s hard, but we should be able to admit that it was not a war for oil. I even remember posting on my AIM profile the acronym of, “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” as if I had used my super sleuth powers to discover the awful government secret. We were all so sure the oil profit windfalls would go directly toward offsetting the cost of annually replacing Dick Cheney’s pacemaker. But it looks like American companies might not even get those precious post-war oil contracts.

Now, we see a French president visiting Iraq for the first time since the 2003 invasion. “We say to French companies that the time has come to return to Iraq,” Nicolas Sarkozy said during a joint news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. “I came to show France’s willingness to take part in the economic development of Iraq, in the rehabilitation of its infrastructure. Our collaboration has no limits.” This is certainly an important step.

And can’t Michael Ignatieff admit that he was wrong about being wrong about Iraq? Apparently he cannot, and will not. Ignatieff wrote in the same essay quoted above: “Politics is theatre. It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel.” Sorry, I suppose it is, after all, too much to expect a politician to be candid. Silly me.

Former war critics will prove themselves complete hacks unless they voluntarily demonstrate the humility and the realism that they, for so long, declared missing in the war’s supporters. I went first; now you.

Thanks to our reading week hiatus, Ricky’s column won’t be back until February 9. Do like the man said and send hate mail to pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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Scuttlebutt is that the Faculty of Arts is considering, once again, to axe the Humanistic Studies program. This would be an enormous mistake.

Humanistic Studies is an interdisciplinary program offering both major and minor concentrations, with two required classes: Western Humanistic Tradition 1 & 2. Students choose all the other credits, which are spread across history of fine arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, to fashion specific concentrations in one of these areas.

When I was on the phone with my grandma during my first week at McGill, I told her I was enrolling in Humanistic Studies, and that the fundamental concern of the program was to examine what it means to be human. She asked me, “What do you need to study that for? I’m a human; I’ll tell you all about it.” Sweet woman. You’d love her.

I would also tell the would-be Humanistic Studies murders what I told my grandma: It’s way more than that. Humanistic Studies is a fantastically necessary program, a throwback to the Greek and Renaissance traditions of comprehensive education.

The existence of the program is predicated on the idea that modern collegiate education seems to focus on single-track, career-oriented, quasi-apprenticeship “training.” The typical student enters university to attain the knowledge that will be necessary for success in their chosen field, be that field law, medicine, kinesiology, or what have you. Everything’s so specific. All is decided; the student just needs to be provided with the necessary tools of the trade.

But is this really a practicable method, especially in an era when people cycle through several careers throughout their lives?

Comprehensive liberal education is crucially important. Perhaps it’s unnecessary for the person who’s set on becoming a specialist in neurodegenerative diseases in bovines. But for others who care naught for such specialization, it is vitally important. The primary goal is not to teach how to do, but how to become.

Further, the Humanistic Studies program fills a niche that would otherwise go unfilled. There is a certain type of student – me – who would otherwise be without an academic home at McGill. This type of student comes to McGill not to amass, but to explore.

Despite all this, Humanistic Studies is not a perfect program. One of the reasons why I’m a minor and not a major in the program is because there are not enough mandatory courses for it to feel like a cohesive curriculum. The number of required courses should be bumped up to four, which would allow the classes to cover material in more depth. It is not as if they could ever run out of material. It is, after all, about everything. There is no reason for discarding the entire program when all it needs is a little concentrated reform.

If McGill follows through on its plan to cut the program, students currently enrolled in the program would still be able to finish their degrees; so this cancellation would not apply to me. Yet the fight certainly must be fought, if only for those future students who would wish to reap the many fruits of a comprehensive liberal education.

I don’t expect an undergraduate uprising over the proposed demise of some obscure interdisciplinary program, but I do expect the administration to take notice that some would perceive its action as a forceful declaration that the idea of a comprehensive education is, in fact, effectively moribund as far as McGill is concerned.

Humanistic Studies is certainly not a program for everyone. Some students either don’t require or don’t wish to acquire a broadly liberal education. Fine. Best of luck to them. But those who threaten the existence of the program need to recognize that its proposed cancellation would amount to the official alienation of a portion – and by no means an insignificant portion – of today’s young adults: namely, those who wish to manifest at McGill the keen aphorism by William Butler Yeats that appears on the glass walls of the Cyberthèque: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

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It’s 8:45 a.m. on the morning of November 2, 2004, and the streets are crowded. Nice day out. Suddenly the man in front of you is blindsided by an attacker, shot, and repeatedly stabbed. He is able to crawl across the street in a futile attempt to escape. The attacker, a man in a long robe known as a djelleba, takes out his butcher knife and slits his victim’s throat. He then stabs him again, this time lodging on the victim’s body a note, a part of which reads: “Islam will be victorious through the blood of the martyrs. They will spread its light in every dark corner of this earth and it will drive evil with the sword if necessary back into its dark hole.”

What was the victim’s offence, that he deserved such nasty fate? Well, he made a movie critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

But here’s the catch: On what city’s streets do you think this might have happened? Islamabad? Kabul? Tehran? No.

Amsterdam.

And what did the Queen of the Netherlands do? She skipped the funeral and instead visited a Moroccan community centre, the nationality of the assailant, to express solidarity.

Look now, four and a half years later, at Amsterdam, that temple of liberal freedom. Last week, a Dutch court demanded that Geert Wilders, a controversial member of Parliament, be charged “for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs.”

Some background: Wilders made a short film last year called Fitna, which, according to a Turkish newspaper, is Arabic for “disagreement and division among people.” The 16-minute, amusingly low-budget film interspersed scenes of Islam-inspired carnage with rather bellicose and (arguably) cherry-picked verses from the Koran. The film caused a massive international row; the Dutch government supplied its embassies and consulates around the world with evacuation plans in the event of emergency.

Afraid of repeating the events that unfolded in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, they then told him to shut his mouth. He didn’t shut his mouth. So they’re hauling his ass off to jail.

Saith the court: “Mr. Wilders’s views constitute a criminal offence. [He] has insulted Islamic worshippers by attacking the symbols of the Islamic faith.”

Repugnant and impolite though Wilders’s foolish statements may be, surely we can all agree that his illiberal transgressions are hardly worse than those of this censorious court?

John Stuart Mill writes in his seminal essay, “On Liberty,” that when a society restricts free speech it is really the society itself that suffers: “Unless [the received opinion] is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will…be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.”

I suppose we can consider that the “received opinion” the Dutch court is trying to protect is religious plurality. Mill goes on: “The meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”

We do both disservice and disrespect to Islam when we handle it with kid gloves; we impeach the integrity of religious plurality when we preserve it in a padded playroom.

Of course Geert Wilders is a schmuck. In 2007, he wrote a column in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant saying that the Koran should be banned. He’s no better. And of course, he provokes just to get a rise out of people, not just Muslims. He knows what he’s doing.

Still, nothing changes. Alas, the debate here is not about Islam, but freedom of expression. Banning books is never okay. Neither is prosecuting someone merely for “inciting discrimination.” Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, I’m looking at you.

Please don’t rely on my brief introduction to the case. Look it up for yourself, and see how you feel about it. Your reaction will say a lot about the content of your character. To quote Christopher Hitchens, “I don’t ask what people’s politics are. I ask what their principles are.”

Ricky’s column appears Monday. Send schmucks and freedoms to pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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– George Meredith

There is nothing of any import that I could possibly add to the heaps of commentary about Barack Hussein Obama being inaugurated as the 44th American president. I don’t need to tell you how great this is for black people or, more interestingly, how great this is for white people.

I have no innovative way to look at all this. But I have a warning.

Over the last week or so, I have taken upon myself the responsibility of breaking awkward silences by asking of those present, “So what do you think of this Obama guy?”

Generally, people break into a conversation about how great it’s going to be for the Bush presidency to finally be over, how reluctant their parents were to vote for him, how cute the Obama girls are, etc. But then there’s always one person. And how I loathe that person.

She’s the girl who thinks she’s being so chic by being preemptively, and vapidly, cynical. She – the same girl who bought a Black Sabbath shirt at Urban Outfitters and cannot name three of their songs – looks around and sees everyone else praising him and being genuinely excited, and she can’t stand it.

It’s the same thing that happened when Vampire Weekend got big. She was a big fan, but then everyone else saw them on MTV2. Suddenly Vampire Weekend sucked. (They actually do and always did.)

This is my fear: empty, watery cynicism is going to become the next big thing. Hating Obama in 2009 – for no reason except that everyone else adores him – is going to become loving Fleet Foxes in 2008.

Don’t you get me wrong. People have gone way overboard, and to an outrageous extent.

Arianna Huffington, whom I personally consider the Antichrist of the Fourth Estate, wrote a syndicated column titled, “We’re all being inaugurated on Jan. 20.” I beg to differ, ma’am. Ben & Jerry’s inaugurated a new flavour, “Yes Pecan!,” which their web site describes as “amber waves of buttery ice cream with roasted non-partisan pecans.” And we have the headline of the New York Times, which I’m unfortunately going to be obligated to show my grandkids, proclaiming, “Obama Takes Oath, and Nation in Crisis Embraces the Moment.” (Just the news, thanks.)

But Obamamania has always been cheap. We see him in Philadelphia giving a very mediocre speech, whose goal was only to temporarily keep Jeremiah Wright’s ugly face off my TV for a couple months, and it’s lauded as opening a whole new chapter in America’s ongoing conversation about race.

During the general election we saw him backpedal on an awfully lot of issues that he had used to define himself during the primaries, i.e. wiretapping, campaign contributions, the right to bear arms, capital punishment, Iraq troop withdrawals, faith-based initiatives, abortion restrictions. And yet no one on the left batted an eye.

One of my high school classmates had a Facebook status Tuesday morning that read, “fuck yeah Obamas [sic] our president.” Do you think she’s aware of those aforementioned flip-flops? Do you think she knows Obama’s policy on admitting Georgia into NATO? Or how about an easier one: do you think she can name his Treasury Secretary-designate? Doubtful.

But then the pendulum swings the other way, and we have Steven Stark in the Boston Phoenix comparing Obama unfavourably with Socrates.

Please, don’t let yourselves be seduced by some ahead-of-the-curve, unfounded idolatry, or cynicism. He is not a brand that you like or don’t like. He is not an indie rock band that you were into before they got cool. Pay attention to his policies, his personnel, and his pragmatism. And form your own damn judgment.

Obama’s inauguration does not mark the end of irony. At the same time, let’s not ruin our chances here for real change. If he screws it up, let’s hold him accountable. If he pulls it off, here’s to him.

Ricky’s column appears every Monday. Test the man’s Sabbath knowledge at pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com. Word around Rez is he only knows “Iron Man.”

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– Turkish PM Recep Erdogan

I did not closely follow the debate in these pages a few months ago over the QPIRG funding of Tadamon!, the Montreal artists “activist” collective whose name means “solidarity” in Arabic. Apparently the debate revolved around a certain Isaac Blinkovitz not wanting to vote for a QPIRG fee increase because he disapproved of their association with the Tadamon! collective. In light of the recent events in Gaza, I decided to go back and look at the debate, and at Tadamon! to see what all the fuss was about.

After minimal research, I’ve come to the conclusion that Tadamon! represents exactly what I can’t stand about human beings: we’re so damned opportunistic.

One thing that opportunists do is take undeniably horrible circumstances and use them to their own advantage. And not in a good way like that Hilary Swank movie where her young husband dies so she goes on a long vacation that he had previously planned out for her. Poignant. Rather, think of 9/11, which George Bush used to pass the Patriot Act and the New York Yankees used to finally ban spectators from bringing their own food and drinks to the stadium. (My dad’s rants about the Yankee Stadium policy were surely formative in shaping my political philosophy.)

Tadamon!’s bulletin is updated several times a day, and seems to be barely trying to convince even itself of seriousness. One of these posts on January 5 read: “Demonstrations in Montreal also targeted the Canadian government support for Israeli military actions in Gaza which have heavily targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza.”

So, let’s review the situation. Under threat of untimely death, Hamas forces Gazan civilians to allow their homes to be used as terrorist bases to launch rockets at Israeli civilians. Israel warns those Gazans to expel either themselves or the intruders from their homes. But the mustachioed guy with the Uzi at the door doesn’t like either of those options. Israel, because it (justifiably, and unlike Hamas) ranks the protection of its own citizens as its first priority, bombs the home, killing the captives with the captors. And Tadamon! says that Israel has “heavily targeted civilians?”

Let’s lower the rhetoric decrying Israel’s “disproportionate response.” The American cartoonist Chip Bok had an excellent cartoon last weekend depicting an Israeli soldier, in the first panel saying, “The UN is calling for a proportional response.” In the next frame, the soldier is lighting a fuse and says, “Random rockets aimed at civilians.”

Those who raise the disproportionality issue fail to convince me that Hamas’s ineptitude and inefficient weaponry somehow relieve them of the moral responsibility for trying.

Furthermore, high Palestinian deaths hurt the public relations cause of the Israelis more than it hurts the political cause of Hamas, and Hamas knows it. Israel knows it too. What does Tadamon! think is Israel’s reason for “targeting civilians?” Spreading the blood of non-Jews on their heads for Passover, as one commentator sarcastically offered?

Let me make this clear: If Israeli soldiers die, Hamas wins. If Israeli civilians die, Hamas wins. If Palestinian civilians die, Hamas wins. The only way for Israel to win is to kill Hamas soldiers, but that’s hard when they hide behind the horribly literal skirts of Gazan civilians.

But do not consider my defense of Israel an absolute one. Israel needs to publicly define its goals. Those goals need to be reachable. Are you taking out the tunnels or are you taking out Hamas? I sympathize with the need to keep this information away from Hamas, but I resent being asked to continue to support a military effort the intended results of which I have not yet been fully informed.

Yes, Israel has made mistakes, both moral and political. But let us not oversimplify. More importantly, let us (if I may be so bold as to say there is an us) never allow the nihilists to use our own morality against us.

Ricky’s column appears every Monday. Send your literal skirst to pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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– Winston Churchill

I think some part of me thought George W. Bush was just making them up. They didn’t really exist. And if they did exist, they were somehow W.’s fault.

I used to make excuses for those kinds of people, thinking they were somehow bringing America’s chickens home to roost. But now I realize they are wicked creatures that bastardize Islam, and these evil people need to be destroyed.

Some combination of factors last Wednesday led me to discard a large chunk of what I’ve believed since I was far too young to be wrestling with such thoughts.

I was born in New York City, though regrettably was raised the last 15 years in the soulless suburbs of northern New Jersey. I remember 9/11 with more clarity than I remember yesterday. That is not an exaggeration at all. I remember the early-morning feeling beforehand, queuing up in the first day of gym class to have my hair checked for lice. I remember walking to lunch, overhearing a classmate say they toppled into the river just. like. this. I remember the bomb threats and the crying mothers and my mother who wasn’t crying. And dad was in Maryland on business and I was worried. With a notable wave of hysteria, I remember being afraid to go to the bathroom by myself that night, because I thought a six-and-a-half-foot terrorist was lurking there waiting for me. He was in the backyard, too.

And then I recall my parents taking me into the City four or five days later – just for the experience, they said. I don’t even need to close my eyes to be there. The burned buildings. The foul smell that Holocaust survivors reportedly recognized immediately. The endless posters searching searching searching, but even at age 11 I knew they’d never find. The deformed signs. The bicycles covered in “dust” – the remains of human skin.

The Blimpie’s near my house was pierced with bullet-holes because it had the gall to be owned by Pakistanis, or Sikhs, or…whatever. The gunmen didn’t care.

And then as I grew older, I read the platitudinous pacifists and their hissings at the silly illiterate cowboy. I internalized the knee-jerk clichés; I learned to repeat the insipid arguments. I know the bombast that passes for thought in the relativistic community. I know these people: I was robotically one of them.

Until about last Wednesday, when the disturbed Mumbai night became irradiated with the unmistakable flames of the True Believers. But it was also the knowledge that people at this very University would try, with the blood not yet dry and the hostages not yet secured, to find some excuse for these murderers in the numerous crimes of the imperialist West.

A few hours earlier, new information revealed that al-Qaeda began planning in September a massive attack on the New York subway system during the impossibly congested holiday season. I thought of the London bus bombings and how inevitable it always was that yet another emblem of cosmopolitan modernity would be twisted into an infernal tinderbox of infidel flesh, my father, who was so eager to see the Thanksgiving Day parade for the umpteenth time, among the ritually incinerated. (I mentally contrasted this image with what has now become the default status of old New York subway cars when their services are no longer needed; they are dutifully sunk off the coast of New Jersey to serve as reefs for the grateful fish).

That morning I had read an article from The New York Times about ten Taliban militants who were arrested in Afghanistan for having thrown acid in the faces of teenage girls in retribution for the apostasy of attending high school. I printed out the article and hung it prominently over my desk.

There seems to be an alarmingly popular myth out there that the terrorists’ admittedly heinous means are somehow justified by noble ends, or at least can be explained as working toward such desirable ones. But such apologists don’t understand that the means are themselves the ends. Killing “infidels” is not a strategy; it is a goal.

Furthermore, if you find yourself unable to read a piece like this without obtusely raising the false spectre of Islamophobia, please be prepared for irrelevancy, and good riddance.

Let us not resort to the specious comfort of the effortless jeer. These people are evil. They do not represent anti-imperialism; in fact, they are its antithesis. Now: Are you ready to admit that these people have forfeited their right to existence and confront them accordingly, or are you not?

Bon hiver.

Send your Jersey memories to pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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– William Blake

The worst thing about being granted a columnist position at The Daily is the scrutiny one is bound to receive under such public circumstances.

I am not referring to the scrutiny of a few able-minded fact-checkers or even that of my many ideological enemies. I earnestly lust for such disagreement and wholeheartedly encourage you to send me your thoughts and your fatwas.

The unwanted scrutiny to which I refer is that of my fellow American citizens 20 or 30 years down the road. Consider what you, my loyal readers, know about me so far:

You know that after a full two weeks of University, I had the balls to apply for a weekly column, mistakenly under the bizarre assumption that somebody would care to hear the thoughts that were otherwise so kind as to stay within the confines of my oversized skull.

You know that as early as eight years-old I was sufficiently plugged in to the American political discourse to have made sure my arts ‘n crafts projects reflected the ideological outlook of their humble craftsman.

And any reader unfortunate enough to be my three-dimensional acquaintance knows that they have for themselves a grossly opinionated and obnoxiously gregarious friend who still will not shut up about the American election.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the carefully discerning reader will behold a faint glimmer of political ambition behind these hazel eyes. There is a chance that one day I will choose to run for elective office in the U.S.

I know what you’re thinking. “Ricky, you can’t run, you’re a dim-witted atheistic Jew with an insatiable desire to grow facial hair. Furthermore, I once saw you at a party, and, friend, you weren’t looking too good. There’s a better chance of Idaho voting Democrat than of you being elected to office.”

Nonetheless, my ambitions thoughtlessly persist. My fear, however, is that dirty opposition researchers will one day dig through The Daily’s archives – so conveniently found online – searching for the smallest evidence of political incorrectness. Such an effort would not be unprecedented.

During the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton made a big deal out of a kindergarten essay that Obama wrote entitled “I Want to Become President.” If they were able to find that piece of fine literature, they will surely be able to find this one.

I acknowledge the possibility of a political career not with Obama’s cold, calculating conviction, but instead with the humility of a first-year Political Science major who really has no idea what the hell he wants to do with his life.

In a single day last week, two family members separately sent me emails warning me to watch what I say. The first cautioned, “If you want a career in politics – you seriously need to be careful what you write,” whilst the second seconded with, “If you have any inkling toward a career in politics one day well into the future, or with any employer for that matter, then you might want to keep in mind that all of your McGill Daily writing will be available for all to see years from now.”

I thanked them for their concern and noble intentions but gently informed them that politics is not an activity with which I will involve myself if the populace of the future is so concerned with the ramblings of an eager-to-impress undergrad.

Therefore, it is my humble opinion that a declaration of journalistic independence is in order.

Daily readers deserve more than self-imposed censorship from one of their Monday columnists. I understand that I issue such a declaration with an utter lack of prudence, but honestly right now I don’t care. Right now, all I want to do is write the best commentary I can and hopefully leave readers with thoughts that survive even after they turn avert their eyes to Johanu Botha’s dazzling prose (shout-out).

May the future hold what it may. Prudence is overrated.

Send your familial scrutiny to pinatadiplomacy@mcgilldaily.com.

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