Blog about politics (mideast and pro-Israel, Canadian and local Montreal), world events, and random thoughts.

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The World I Know is updated on a semi-regular basis by segacs.

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12:56 PM
There's been another suicide bombing in Russia, on a crowded Moscow commuter train. At least 39 are dead, over 100 injured. Vladimir Putin blames Chechen terrorists:

Putin condemned the blast, calling it terrorism.

"Only with the united efforts of the world community can we deal with this plague of this 21st century," Putin said, according to Interfax.

The president said he would not exclude the possibility that terrorists were trying to pressure the Russian leadership ahead of March elections, and restated his position that the government would never negotiate with terrorists, Interfax reported.

In Grozny, Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov denied that Chechen rebels were behind the blast.

What Putin doesn't mention is that the "plague of the 21st century" was the "plague of the 20th century" in Israel. People didn't combat suicide bombings in Israel because they figured that the terrorism was "Israel's problem". Now the tactic has spread - Riyadh, Baghdad, Moscow - and containment is tougher because the terrorists know that their weapon of choice is effective.

My condolences to the victims of today's cowardly attack and their families.

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12:44 PM
Evan waxes nostalgic about his childhood.

I'm around Evan's age (a little older... shhhh) and agree with him that most of the things in the age 35+ e-mail forward also apply to us. We played hopscotch by drawing with chalk on the street. We built snow forts on the front lawn. We didn't have "smear the queer" (can you imagine a school allowing a game with a name like that today?) but we had tag, soccer, and a game that involved throwing a tennis ball against a wall with maximum force and trying to get people "out" if it bounced back and hit them. Once a year, the school janitor would go up to the roof to retrieve all the tennis balls that had gotten caught up there, and us students would run around underneath hoping to catch them as he threw them over the side. These days, the school could get sued if one of the tennis balls were to actually *hit* a student.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing, though. We all romanticize our childhoods and assume that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket for anyone coming afterwords. Despite excessive video games, pollution, political-correctness, self-esteem, and a distinct lack of playing outside, I have an inkling that the kids being born today will make it through somehow. Call me crazy... but we human beings have been at this for a while.

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2:43 PM
North Korea finally made mainstream media headlines... but the story is about an asylum applicant being deported by Canada back to North Korea and - he claims - certain death:

Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board has rejected the asylum case of a North Korean dissident even though the board agrees the man will likely be executed for treason if deported to his homeland.

The IRB has allowed the man's six-year-old son to remain in Canada, because as the son of a dissident he would face persecution, while a removal order has been issued for his father, his only living parent.

Song Dae Ri, a trade official, was posted to North Korea's embassy in Beijing before he defected to Canada with his son and wife in August, 2001. His wife was lured home by her parents before she had a chance to make a refugee claim, and in April, 2002, was executed in North Korea.

[ . . . ]

IRB member Bonnie Milliner ruled that Mr. Ri will likely be executed for treason if returned home, but said he was not "deserving of Canada's protection" because he was complicit in crimes against humanity merely for being a member of Kim Jong-il's government. She made that ruling despite written assurances from Canada's War Crimes Unit that Mr. Ri was "not a person of interest to them" and that there was no evidence he had committed crimes against humanity.

I don't like to leap to judgements about indivudual cases, because there is usually more to a story than what makes the paper. That said, if the Globe and Mail article is accurate, this is a terrible miscarriage of justice on the part of the Canadian Government.

Even the IRB isn't claiming that Ri was involved in wrongdoings beyond simply living in North Korea. Obviously, they have some kind of rule that any member of the government is ineligible for refugee status... but in a communist country, where virtually everyone is a member of the government in some way, this rule is pretty ridiculous. Furthermore, they are allowing Ri's son to stay on the grounds that his life is in danger because of persecution of his father. That seems pretty self-contradictory to me.

Ri is becoming yet another "poster case" for activists lobbying for a more open refugee system in Canada. If he deserves it, I hope the government reverses its decision and allows him to stay. The flip side, of course, is that if it turns out he really was involved in the horrible crimes against humanity being perpetuated by Kim Jong-Il's regime, that it will only make it that much harder on legitimate refugee claimants to garner sympathy. From the looks of it, though, all Ri did was lose his wife and just barely manage to escape with his son. If that's true, than sending him back is tantamount to state-sanctioned murder.

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10:47 AM
Cherrygate?

With all the priorities out there for our tax dollars - health, education, infrastructure - it looks like the new big priority is investigating Don Cherry:

Don Cherry's recent remarks about Francophones have launched a government investigation.

An aide to Dyane Adam revealed Wednesday that the official languages commissioner is investigating Cherry's comments about francophones aired during the Jan. 24 instalment of Coach's Corner on Hockey Night In Canada.

Cherry, who turned 70 on Thursday, was discussing the merits of protective visors as mandatory equipment in the NHL when he said: "Most of the guys that wear them are Europeans and French guys."

I don't watch Don Cherry. I find him obnoxious. But millions of Canadians disagree with me, and he's somewhat of a national icon of political incorrectness... not to mention bad wardrobes. So what was it about those remarks that were so offensive as to necessitate an Official Languages Commissioner investigation?

Mind you, the Official Languages office is pretty much the champion of squandering tax dollars on pettiness. That is, next to the OLF. (Anyone remember the dreaded unilingual matza ball?)

As to Don Cherry, I think a caller on the radio this morning put it best when he said that "using tax dollars to investigate Don Cherry is like commissioning the Canadian Space Agency to investigate the House of Commons for signs of intelligent life".

'Nuff said.

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4:15 PM
More on North Korea: Instapundit linked to a Washington Post article by columnist Anne Appelbaum about why nobody seems to care:

Auschwitz Under Our Noses

Nowadays, it seems impossible to understand why so few people, at the time of the Auschwitz liberation, even knew that the camp existed. It seems even harder to explain why those who did know did nothing. In recent years a plethora of respectable institutions -- the Vatican, the U.S. government, the international Jewish community, the Allied commanders -- have all been accused of "allowing" the Holocaust to occur, through ignorance or ill will or fear, or simply because there were other priorities, such as fighting the war.

We shake our heads self-righteously, certain that if we'd been there, liberation would have come earlier -- all the while failing to see that the present is no different.

[ . . . ]

In the days since the documentary aired, few other news organizations have picked up the story either. There are other priorities: the president's budget, ricin in the Senate office building, David Kay's testimony, a murder of a high school student, Super Tuesday, Janet Jackson. With the possible exception of the last, these are all genuinely important subjects. They are issues people care deeply about. North Korea is far away and, quite frankly, it doesn't seem there's a lot we can do about it.

Later -- in 10 years, or in 60 -- it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.

Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.

That emphasis was mine. And it pretty much sums up why I keep coming back to this story and feeling that it's so important. Sure, there are plenty of horrible human rights abuses going on right under our noses. But the parallels with this one have crept under my skin, because of how we - as individuals and as a society - may go down in history for failing to pay any attention.

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3:27 PM
The R-word may be a dirty word here in Quebec, but for Ariel Sharon, a referendum on the Gaza pullout may not be such a bad idea:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon revealed on Wednesday that he would be willing to support proposals from Likud MKs to hold a referendum on his plan to withdraw from settlements.

"I do not rule out going to a referendum," Sharon told reporters in the Knesset cafeteria." I think it's a good idea. I don't rule it out and I will look into the idea. It's important to gauge the opinion of the public."

There are two reasons why I think this is the best course of action on Sharon's plan, neither of which has anything to do with bolstering his leadership. Firstly, we're not talking about sovereignty-association or other such nonsense; we're talking about people's security, people's lives. The people deserve a say. And secondly, because Israel - as a country with more opinions than citizens - needs to make sure that any drastic steps can be backed by the will of the people. A referendum will foster public debate among citizens, and will lead to more angles being considered.

Unfortunately, even Sharon acknowledges that there is no good answer to this one:

Singling out the Geneva Accord and the Saudi plan, Sharon said his plan is better than the alternatives.

"It's never a choice between good and bad," Sharon said. "It's a choice between bad and even worse. You always have to look at what is more dangerous."

Personally, I think that unilateral withdrawal is the "more dangerous" option because it sets a precedent of rewarding terror and swapping land without peace. But then, only Israelis will be able to vote in a referendum, and I'm not Israeli. The people whose lives are most directly affected should be the ones doing the deciding.

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3:16 PM
Gay Marriage in Mass.:

Who woulda thought that Massachusetts would reach this conclusion even before Canada?

Massachusetts gays won another major victory on Wednesday when the state's highest court told lawmakers to allow full-fledged marriage for gays and said anything less would make them "second-class" citizens.

Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court, whose landmark ruling last year struck down a state ban on same-sex marriage, said in an opinion that only marriages for gays, not civil unions, were valid under the state's constitution.

The court's 4-3 ruling echoed its November decision, and left no wiggle room for state lawmakers who were pushing for a law that would create civil unions -- essentially a parallel form of marriage for gays and lesbians.

I guess Boston now has a new tourist attraction to advertise. In the meantime, Canadians are still waffling on the issue... and I suspect that will continue for the forseeable future. Change - even change that's right and necessary - takes time.

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11:58 AM
Yad Vashem has expressed its outrage at North Korea about the horrible reports of gas chambers and human torture in concentration camps. Yad Vashem, as most of you know, is the main Holocaust Memorial Center in Israel. (Hat tip: Lynn):

Yad Vashem is appalled by reports of North Korea's use of gas chambers to murder and perform medical experiments on political dissidents and their families. Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev has sent an urgent letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in which he calls for a full investigation of this insidious abuse of human rights. The issue is all the more severe due to North Korea's status as a member of the UN. The internment, torture, and murder of North Korean political dissenters and their families was recently reported by the BBC.

In his letter, Shalev states with alarm that only six decades after the utilization of gas chambers to exterminate European Jewry, North Korea has apparently employed them against thousands of its own citizens. "The lives of untold thousands of North Koreans are in danger because their totalitarian government perceives them as a threat", Shalev writes. "Although the rationale, scale, and context are vastly different, the chilling image of the murderers coolly watching their victims' death agonies is all too reminiscent of Nazi barbarism."

The important thing here is Yad Vashem's reaction, not the seemingly ridiculously benign steps that it is requesting the UN to take. Everyone knows that in these situatuions the UN has no real power. But if enough organizations such as Yad Vashem start speaking out, maybe they can make a difference.

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9:28 PM
So you think maybe this is North Korea's attempt to deflect attention from the embarrassing reports of torture and death camps that emerged these past few days?

North Korea has indicated it is prepared to resume talks soon on its nuclear arms program, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Tuesday.

One round of talks involving North and South Korea (news - web sites), the United States, China, Japan and Russia was held last year in Beijing but ended inconclusively.

Come to think of it, it's doubtful, given how little news coverage the torture and experimentation reports have gotten. Maybe the regime is just trying to head it off. Or maybe they don't understand how willing the world is to ignore such atrocities.

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6:26 PM
This may not be exactly news... but speaking of the BBC, it boasts news in 43 languages... guess which one isn't included?

Mind you, I can't imagine what Hebrew-speaking broadcasters would actually want to work for the BBC...

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5:29 PM
Chris at FreeNorthKorea.net has republished an NBC News report from last year about the camps:

Among NBC News' findings:

* At one camp, Camp 22 in Haengyong, some 50,000 prisoners toil each day in conditions that U.S. officials and former inmates say results in the death of 20 percent to 25 percent of the prison population every year.

* Products made by prison laborers may wind up on U.S. store shelves, having been "washed" first through Chinese companies that serve as intermediaries.

* Entire families, including grandchildren, are incarcerated for even the most bland political statements.

* Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women so that another generation of political dissidents will be "eradicated."

* Inmates are used as human guinea pigs for testing biological and chemical agents, according to both former inmates and U.S. officials.

Chris wonders why there's been so little interest about North Korea this past year:

Why Does The World Ignore North Korean Concentration Camp Atrocities?
This article was published around a year ago. But, even though it was in a major news outlet, it seemed to have little or no impact on American policy. Why?

Now the evidence on North Korea's gas chambers has proved that the stories told by the defectors about the depraved chemical weapons tests on prisoners are true. A director of security for one of the biggest camps has defected and has even been interviewed on the BBC. Nobody is disputing what he has to say. But how many care? Asia has for so long, had a degree of suffering unmatched elsewhere on the globe.

[ . . . ]

Certainly, Kim Jong Il is a diabolical Hitler-like figure who is so blind to his people's suffering that he uses them to test weapons. But human rights figures near the bottom of the list of the US's goals for negotiating with North Korea. Can anyone, anywhere, be safe while this condition in North Korea persists? NO!

It's 13 months later now. And who posted about this last year? I'll be the first to admit that I didn't. But if embarrassment over not covering the story then prevents me from writing about it now, then shame on me.

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3:48 PM
Bundle up:

Yep, it's February 2nd, otherwise known as Groundhog Day. And if you believe the rat-looking furry creatures, it looks like we're in for six more weeks of winter:

During one of the coldiest and snowiest winters on record, Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia's best-known groundhog, got the weather-prediction wheel moving early Monday. He failed to cast a shadow upon emerging from his burrow, and according to legend that's a sign that spring is just around the corner.

But within minutes, Sam's sunny outlook was soon cast aside when Punxsutawney Phil, Pennsylvania's prognosticator, and Wiarton Willie, Ontario's weather woodchuck, saw their shadows after squirming out of their burrows.

Seeing a shadow, according to tradition, means six more weeks of winter is on the horizon.

That's ok with me, as long as "winter" means weather like today, and not weather like the majority of January.

In the meantime, Tom pointed me toward this absurd tidbit about the amusing - though somewhat annoying - 1993 Bill Murray comedy "Groundhog Day":

Unknown to Fred, and probably to most of the people in snow-bound Punxsutawney, Groundhog Day is now associated in the minds of many spiritual seekers with redemption, rebirth and the process of moving to a higher plane.

It seems Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and a host of other spiritual-seekers are convinced that "Groundhog Day" represents the basic tenets of their respective faiths.

Punxsutawney Phil as Jesus? Hey, why not?

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3:37 PM
Everyone's all aflutter with the "bombshell" news that Ariel Sharon wants to get out of Gaza:

"I have given an order to plan for the evacuation of 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip," Sharon said Monday in an interview with Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus. (The full interview with Sharon will appear Tuesday in Haaretz.)

"It is my intention to carry out an evacuation - sorry, a relocation - of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements," the prime minister added.

Allison and Imshin are pro. Frankly, I think most Israelis have been in favour of getting out of the Gaza Strip ever since, well, pretty much since 1967. Israel even tried to give it back to Egypt in 1978, but Egypt didn't want it. Israelis are bitterly divided over the West Bank and over the Golan Heights, but I think that most Israelis would wish the Gaza Strip "good riddance".

My concern is more about the "how" than the "if". I agree with Imshin when she points out that:

Yes, I wholeheartedly support getting out of there. But not like we got out of Lebanon. Not in a way that could be interpreted as a reward for terrorism. Not if it is interpreted as weakness and serves to feed the sick Palestinian propensity for murder and mayhem. We have to be very careful how we go about this.

Maybe I'm more cynical than she is... but I don't see how there could be any way of making this look like anything other than rewarding terrorism. First the prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. Now this. Gaza is a Hamas stronghold... and this would be the first major victory for Hamas's strategy of terrorism for land. No good can come of that.

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11:51 AM
The Blogosphere on North Korea:
As suspected, most of the major news outlets gave the North Korea story (see below) a cursory, back-page treatment.

I implored the blogosphere to do better. And some, at least, have.

Damian Penny wrote about the "People's Democratic Republic of Death Camps". David Janes astutely observed that "there's no obvious way to blame the US for this, so it's not really happening, is it?". Lynn B. urges us to read up and talk about it. Meryl Yourish has a brilliantly-written post entitled "North Korea is Not Our Problem".

I'll update this throughout the day with (hopefully) more. Let's not allow this to become a one-day headline.

Update: Paul Jané finds the words that failed me. Jonathan is feeling "curiously dispassionate"... which I find interesting in light of my reaction to the story, which was more emotional than even I expected. And Spin Killer weighs in.

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11:26 PM
North Korea: History Repeating

This is truly, horrifyingly frightening:

Report: N Korean prison camp has gas chamber

Witnesses say North Korea operates poison gas chambers at its largest concentration camp, Camp 22, media sources reported Sunday.

"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber," said one defector, former military attache at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing and chief of management at the camp. "The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."

The defector, Kwon Hyuk, is to appear on the BBC's This World program. He says he wants the world to know what is happening.

"The glass chamber is sealed airtight," he explained. "It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high. [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass."

Hyuk explained how he had believed this treatment was justified. "At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country."

The article goes on to describe other horrors, such as poisoned cabbage and "medical experiments". I don't use comparisons to Nazism lightly, but what other conclusion is there to be drawn here other than that the past is repeating itself in the worst possible ways?

Where is the public outcry over this? Where are the demostrations in the streets? Where are the plans of the governments of the civilized world to stop it? Where is the reaction from all of the people who spent their lives saying "Never Again"?

I don't know. But it's high time to find out, and to do something to stop it.

Update: The BBC has more about the information coming to light from a defected intelligence agent on Camp 22. His account of torture, chemical experimentation, and the massive bureaucracy built to support it is absolutely chilling. Almost as chilling is how little remorse even he seems to feel:

"For the first three years" he explained " you enjoy torturing people but then it wears off and someone else takes over. But most of the time you do it because you enjoy it."

One of the big questions about the Nazi regime was, why didn't the Allies bomb Auschwitz? Why, with all the information that came to light in the middle years of the war, was no action taken that could have spared millions of innocent lives?

Well here we are, in 2004. Sixty years later, where is the action in North Korea? Who will step up to stop what's going on there?

Oh, I know it's not that simple. Attacking North Korea could risk all-out nuclear war. The United States has a president with a worldwide reputation for being a war-monger, and he's trying to get re-elected. The European Union is gutless. The United Nations is even more gutless - when it's not being controlled by despots and dictators. There are a million excuses. And besides, North Korea just seems so far away, doesn't it? There are people dying every day in other horrible ways all over the world. People do what they can.

So here I am, wondering what one lone person can do in light of news that was always suspected but is now being shockingly confirmed. I don't know exactly, but I think that we need to start somewhere. I'd like to begin by urging people reading this, including other bloggers, to publicize these reports and raise awareness online. It may be a woefully inadequate first step, but at least it's something.

Update #2: For those of you looking for further information, a couple of good links are freenorthkorea.net and the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which has an October 2003 report on the prison camps that should make any normal human being's skin crawl.

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