There will be no emancipation for
women anywhere on this planet until the Western
domination of this planet is ended. And more than
ever, more than ever, we need to heed those words.
Especially as all of us are being herded into the
possibility of a massive war at the behest of the
United States. We need to hear those words even more
clearly today.
We have seen and all of us have
felt the traumatic pain of watching those attacks and
trying to grasp the facts of the numbers of peoples
who died. We feel the pain of that every day we have
been watching it on television. But do we feel any
pain for the victims of U.S. aggression? Two-hundred
thousand people killed only in the initial war on
Iraq. That bombing of Iraq has continued for 10 years
now. Do we feel the pain of all the children in Iraq
who are dying from the sanctions that were imposed by
the United States? Do we feel that pain on an
everyday level? Share it with our families and our
communities and talk about it on every platform that
is available to us? Do we feel the pain of
Palestinians who now for 50 years have been living in
refugee camps?
This new war against terrorism
that's being launched, it's very old. And it's a very
old fight of the West against the rest. Consider the
language which is being used to mobilize people:
calling the perpetrators evil doers, irrational,
calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized,
intent on destroying civilization, intent on
destroying democracy. They hate freedoms, we are
told.
Every person of colour, and I would
want to say also, every aboriginal person, will
recognize that language. It was used to justify our
colonialization by Europe. We were colonized in the
name of the West bringing civilization, democracy,
freedom to us.
All of us recognize who is being
talked about when that language is being used. The
terms crusade, infinite justice, cowboy imagery of
Dead or Alive posters. We all know what they mean.
People in the West also recognize
who this fight is against. Cries heard all over the
Western world: We're all Americans now. People who
are saying that recognize who this fight is against.
People who are attacking Muslims or
any person of colour who looks like they could be
from the Middle East, without distinguishing,
recognizes who this fight is against. These are not
just slips of the tongue that Bush quickly tries to
reject. They reveal a thinking, a mindset.
And it's horrific to think that the
fate of the world hangs on the plans of people like
that. This will be a big mistake for us, if we just
accept that these are just slips of the tongue. They
are not. They reveal the thinking, and the thinking
is based on dominating the rest of the world in the
name of bringing freedom and civilization to it.
Reject this kind of jingoistic
militarism and recognize that as the most heinous
form of patriarchal racist violence that we're seeing
on the globe today.
The women's movement has to stand
up to this. There is no option for us. We have to
fight back against this militarization. We have to
break the support that is being built in our
countries for this kind of attack.
The lesson we have learned and the
lesson that our politicians should have learned is
that you cannot slaughter the people into submission.
For 500 years they have tried that strategy.
The West for 500 years has believed
that it can slaughter people into submission and it
has not been able to do so. And it will not be able
to do so this time, either.
© 2001
National Post Online
National Post Online is a Hollinger / CanWest
Publication
Thobani's disgusting
statement
Wednesday, October 03,
2001
L. IAN MACDONALD
Montreal Gazette
The moral-equivalency crowd was out
in force Monday at a feminist conference in Ottawa
where Sunera Thobani said United States foreign
policy was "soaked in blood."
Thobani, a former president of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women,
also called the U.S. "the most dangerous and
powerful global force unleashing horrific levels of
violence."
So that's it. The Americans got
what was coming to them. Six thousand people are dead
under the rubble of the World Trade Centre. Guilty of
going to work in the morning, they obviously deserved
their terrible fate. Hundreds of thousands more have
lost their jobs, and it's all their fault.
Perhaps Thobani could explain her
views to the widowed spouses, orphaned children,
broken families and grieving communities, including
dozens in Canada. Perhaps she could elaborate her
position to the people who have been thrown out of
work, including thousands of Canadians.
Fry Said Nothing
Sitting beside Thobani, as she made
this intellectually disgraceful and disgusting
statement, was Hedy Fry, the secretary of state for
the status of women.
Did Fry get up and leave the hall
in disgust? Did she summon reporters and disavow
Thobani's remarks? No, she simply did not join in the
applause and a standing ovation.
"People in this country are
allowed to say what they want," she later told
the Commons. "I did not support it. I did not
applaud it. I got up and left immediately following.
I stand in the House right now and say I condemn the
speech."
There is no doubt that the U.S.
made some foreign-policy choices in the 1980s that
have since come back to haunt it, notably supporting
Iraq's Saddam Hussein against Iran, and the
mujaheddin against the invading Soviets in
Afghanistan.
But from there to suggest that
America's hands are soaked in blood, or that it is
the most dangerous force in the world, is simply
odious.
But wait, there's more. Thobani
wondered who felt the pain of "the victims of
U.S. aggression."
The victims of aggression are
precisely the women of Afghanistan who suffer under
the unspeakable cruelties of the Taliban theocracy, a
tyrannical and repressive regime that publicly
executes women in soccer stadiums.
Who is speaking up for them? Not
the women at the Ottawa conference, dripping with a
sanctimonious sense of Canadian superiority.
Such offensive smugness could only
be found in a country such as ours, which has lived
for a half a century under the security blanket of
the United States, which also buys half of everything
we produce in the private sector.
The Americans don't need or deserve
to hear, at a conference funded by government
($80,000) and attended by a minister of the crown,
that their hands are soaked in blood.
Unfortunately, there appears to be
a constituency for this intellectual garbage, at
conferences attended by the radical left, at town
halls staged by the CBC and on campuses such as
Concordia University - all funded by taxpayers.
Fortunately, Canada and the U.S., unlike Iraq and
Afghanistan, encourage such dissent among our
fundamental freedoms of speech.
Bad Taste
We even encourage free speech when
it is demonstrably misinformed and repulsively in bad
taste. But as an American judge once observed,
freedom of speech does not extend to yelling
"fire" in a crowded theatre.
Of course, what happened in New
York and in Washington can never happen here, and if
it did we would expect the Americans to come to our
aid. We would be outraged if they said that, in our
smugness, we got what we deserved.
Can't happen here? This just in
from France, where Le Monde has reported on the trial
of 24 members of one of Osama bin Laden's terrorist
cells. The incriminating evidence includes the
details of a chilling plan to explode a bomb on each
of Montreal's métro lines if terrorist demands were
not met. The plot, now confirmed by Montreal police,
was apparently foiled only with the arrests.
These are the bad guys. They murder
thousands of innocent people. They have experimented
with biological terror. And if they could get their
hands on nuclear weapons, they would use them.
Whereupon, in the warped logic of moral equivalency,
it would be the fault of the U.S. for inventing them
in the first place.
- L. Ian MacDonald's e-mail address
is imacdonald@generation.net.
© Copyright
2001 Montreal Gazette
Copyright © 2001 CanWest Interactive
a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp.
500 cheer Thobani's
critique
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20011002/716241.html&qs=Sunera%20Thobani
October 2, 2001
Jane Taber, with files from Joe Brean National Post,
with files from The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - A leading voice of
feminism in Canada told 500 cheering women at a
conference yesterday that U.S. foreign policy is
"soaked in blood" and only a fool would
fail to examine the power of the United States in the
wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Sunera Thobani, a women's studies
professor at the University of British Columbia, said
the United States is "the most dangerous and
powerful global force unleashing horrific levels of
violence.
"From Chile to El Salvador to
Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of U.S. foreign policy is
soaked in blood," said Ms. Thobani, a former
president of the National Action Committee on the
Status of Women.
Ottawa contributed $80,000 to the
three-day conference.
The conference is called Women's
Resistance: From Victimization to Criminalization.
One of the conference organizers characterized Ms.
Thobani as a popular speaker and an important
intellectual voice in the country.
Ms. Thobani said she felt the pain
of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, but wondered
who is feeling the pain of "the victims of U.S.
aggression?"
She added: "U.S. foreign
policy is soaked in blood. And other countries of the
West -- including, shamefully, Canada -- cannot line
up fast enough behind it.
"But the people, the American
nation that Bush is invoking, is a people which is
bloodthirsty, vengeful and calling for blood. They
don't care whose blood it is, they want blood. And
that has to be confronted."
The women in the audience --
academics, union members, mental health workers and
advocates for female inmates, embraced her
anti-American rhetoric, repeatedly interrupting her
with cheers and standing ovations.
Hedy Fry, the federal Secretary of
State for the Status of Women, and Landon Pearson, a
Liberal Senator and the daughter-in-law of the late
prime minister Lester B. Pearson, sat on the podium
with Ms. Thobani. Neither immediately denounced the
speech, but neither stood or applauded when Ms.
Thobani received a standing ovation.
Ms. Pearson could not be reached
for comment.
Later, Ms. Fry told the House of
Commons: "People in this country are allowed to
say what they want. I did not support it. I did not
applaud it. I got up and left immediately following.
I stand in the House right now and say that I condemn
the speech." Ms. Fry said she had expected the
conference to deal exclusively with the subject of
violence against women.
John Manley, the Foreign Affairs
Minister, told the House: "Mr. Speaker, we have
made it repeatedly plain that we view any kind of
attempt to create moral equivalency between anyone's
policies and what happened on Sept. 11 to be utterly
unthinkable, outrageous and indefensible."
Joe Clark, the Tory leader,
described Ms. Fry as a "continuing running
embarrassment" to the government and country.
Last spring, Ms. Fry incorrectly said crosses were
being burned on the lawns of Prince George, B.C.
Mr. Clark said Ms. Fry should have
walked away immediately, while Stockwell Day, the
Canadian Alliance leader, said: "For a minister
of the Crown to sit on that stage and not disavow
those remarks [at the time] was equally
horrendous."
Another speaker at the conference,
professor Julie Sudbury, from Mills College in
Oakland, Calif., said: "Sept. 11 has created a
blank slate for global domination of the Bush agenda
of militarism and global capitalism ... He's no
longer the Texas hangman. He appears to have become
the global hangman."
Lee Lakeman, of the Canadian
Association of Sexual Assault Centres, and one of the
conference organizers, said she supported Ms.
Thobani's remarks.
"I can certainly assure you
from the floor it was perfectly obvious that the
majority of the room wants to call for peace and
wants us to have supportive attitudes toward the
Third World and the aspirations of the third
world," she said, adding she considered the
$80,000 donated by the federal government to be
inadequate.
© 2001
National Post Online
National Post Online is a Hollinger / CanWest
Publication
Free speech in a
pristine vacuum
Wednesday, October 03,
2001
Pete McMartin
Vancouver Sun
In wake of
The Speech, the brave soldiers of UBC were taking to
the ivory towers Tuesday, manning the ramparts to
beat back the infidels who had come calling for the
head of Sunera Thobani.
Ms. Thobani -- who you have doubtless heard
of by now -- is the excitable former chair of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and
an assistant professor of women's studies at UBC,
which is to say, she is -- excuse me for a moment,
I've got something stuck in my craw -- a "public
servant." Ptui.
Thobani, I was informed by the UBC
media relations folk, is on "tenure-track"
-- working her way toward a coveted full
professorship and all the privileges that come with
it, including a really good parking spot and a
lifetime supply of graduate students to polish your
apples.
It was not in her capacity as a UBC
assistant professor, however, that Thobani delivered
The Speech to a convention of feminists in Ottawa
Monday.
But then I can't be sure, either,
if it was in her capacity as former chair of the NAC.
The NAC women, still spinning in the wake of The
Speech, are now quietly trying to put as much
distance between themselves and Thobani as they
decently can -- or as one flak-catcher for them
carefully said to me of one Thobani's more wingnut
ravings:
"That wouldn't be our analysis
of the situation, no."
She was referring to The Nutty
Professor's demonization of Western culture, and her
estimation of its culpabilities for our
post-September 11 world, of which she said:
"There will be no emancipation
for women anywhere on this planet until the Western
domination of this planet is ended."
Of course, Thobani uttered other
insights, including this:
"This new fight, this new war
against terrorism, that is being launched, it's very
old. And it is a very old fight of the West against
the rest."
Which she then topped with this
fatuity:
"The West for 500 years has
believed that it could slaughter people into
submission and it has not been able to do so. It will
not be able to do so this time, either."
All this, of course, she wrapped up
in the usual lefty cant about
"blood-soaked" U.S. foreign policy -- a
line of thought that asserts "They got what they
deserved."
This was not to say, she assured
everyone, that she wasn't really, really sorry about
all those dead people. Hey, she thought about them
every day. Every day!
"But do we feel any
pain," she asked, "for the victims of U.S.
aggression?"
Nothing new here. We've been
hearing this sly, and sick, linkage from our
terrorist apologists ever since September 11, who
clothe their real intent under a cloak of empathy --
"Gee, I really feel horrible about all those
innocent people who died ..." -- and then throw
back that cloak to reveal the "but"
underneath.
Loathsome.
But it takes all kinds. And with
apologies to Voltaire, I may not agree with what a
nutcase believes, but I will defend to the death a
nutcase's right to say it.
Still, one has to wonder why
Thobani is even here. I mean, why is she here, in the
West she so apparently loathes? This isn't a
rhetorical "Love It or Leave It"
chest-thump: This is an honest-to-goodness question,
because I am truly baffled.
If Thobani does indeed believe the
West is responsible for, as she sees it, the
enslavement of all women, then why does she remain in
the bosom of Western culture?
Is she finds it so devilish, why
does she accept its rewards, its privileges, its
guarantee of rights that allow her to spew political
garbage without being shot for it, its tax dollars
that constitute her pay? Why does she not flee back
to enlightened Tanzania, that beacon of feminism she
left to come to Canada? Or to Afghanistan, where
feminist seminars are held in soccer stadiums and the
instructor carries a Kalashnikov?
None of those questions were given
consideration, however, in the press conference out
at UBC Tuesday, when Barry McBride, the UBC
vice-president in charge of academic affairs, trotted
out, read a terse three-paragraph piece of empty
bumpf about free speech "as a cornerstone of
university culture" and proceeded to state that
UBC was four-square behind Thobani's right to insult
and demonize not just a nation, or a hemisphere, but
an entire culture with impunity.
And hey, you know what? So am I.
And I applaud UBC's zealous regard
for free speech.
Which is why I'd like to see some
of it from them.
For instance, what was McBride's
personal opinion of Thobani's characterizations, I
asked him?
"I don't have a personal
opinion ... that's not my responsibility."
Would he have any problem if she
taught such characterizations in her classroom?
No, he said, UBC has "bright
students," students who would challenge her
assertions.
Premier Gordon Campbell, I asked
McBride, did not feel any restraint in offering his
personal opinion of Thobani's speech (which he
admirably called "hateful"): Why couldn't
McBride offer his?
"I don't feel that would
contribute anything to the discussion."
Discussion? What discussion? Who at
UBC had anything to say about Thobani, or her
dangerous, deeply insulting, crackpot theories,
except to say they supported her?
Why wasn't the usually glad-handing
UBC president Martha Piper piping up, and offering
her two cents worth rather than remaining
"unavailable," as her receptionist told me?
Does the UBC brass feel free speech
exists in some kind of pristine vacuum, where we can
take it out from time to time and ooh and aah at it
and exclaim how wonderful it is, or does it believe
it has real impact, as Thobani obviously does? Or do
they see themselves as having to remain above the
fray, removed from the push and pull of democracy?
Don't know. They wouldn't say.
Rather, they preferred to keep
their heads low and invoke free speech so as to say
as little as possible.
I don't feel the same constraint.
Here's some free speech:
What Thobani said was stupid, but
at least she had the courage to say it.
What UBC offered, in response, was
meaningless, mewling, deflecting, and an abdication
of free speech, not an endorsement of it.
Pete McMartin can be reached at
pmcm@pacpress.southam.ca or at 604-605-2905.
© Copyright
2001 Vancouver Sun
Copyright © 2001 CanWest Interactive
a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp
Kumbaya
Watch: Feminists for the Taliban
The latest in
foolish commentary.
By Ross Douthat
October 5, 2001 12:45 p.m.
Anyone who thinks that American
academics are bad (and they are) ought to consider
the diatribe spewed out on Monday by one Sunera
Thobani, a women's studies professor at the
University of British Columbia. Thobani — the
former head of Canada's National Action Committee on
the Status of Women, whatever that may be — was
addressing a gathering of the Women's Resistance
Conference in Ottawa. With Canada's Secretary of
State, Heda Fry, sitting silently by, the good
professor offered up the following thoughts on the
current international situation:
This new war
against terrorism that's being launched, it's
very old. And it's a very old fight of the West
against the rest. Consider the language which is
being used to mobilize people: calling the
perpetrators evil doers, irrational, calling them
the forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on
destroying civilization, intent on destroying
democracy. They hate freedoms, we are told.
But Thobani
isn't buying it. "Every person of colour, and I
would want to say also, every aboriginal person, will
recognize that language. It was used to justify our
colonialization by Europe. We were colonized in the
name of the West bringing civilization, democracy,
freedom to us." And the same thinking, she
insists, is at work today — a "thinking
based on dominating the rest of the world in the name
of bringing freedom and civilization to it."
So what's a good
member of the Women's Resistance Conference to do?
Well, Thobani says, that's simple enough. Women must
reject this
kind of jingoistic militarism and recognize that
as the most heinous form of patriarchal racist
violence that we're seeing on the globe today
...The women's movement has to stand up to this.
There is no option for us. We have to fight back
against this militarization. We have to break the
support that is being built in our countries for
this kind of attack ... The West for 500 years
has believed that it can slaughter people into
submission and it has not been able to do so. And
it will not be able to do so this time, either.
So, to sum up,
Professor Thobani believes that the U.S., not the
Taliban, practices "patriarchal racist
violence." (Apparently, stoning people for
adultery doesn't make the cut.) She believes that the
U.S., not the Taliban, wants to "slaughter
people into submission." She believes that the
U.S., not the Taliban, represents the "forces of
darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying
civilization, intent on destroying democracy."
And she believes that her fellow feminists, champions
of women's rights all, ought to ally themselves with
the Taliban, and not the U.S.
Oh, and
apparently, for these ever-so-profound thoughts, she
received several standing ovations from the 500
delegates in attendance.
Feminists for
the Taliban. It's got a certain ring to it.
Thobani accused of
hate crime against Americans Complaint sent to Ottawa
police 'pure harassment', UBC professor says
Wednesday, October 10, 2001
Glenn Bohn and Kim Bolan
Vancouver Sun
A University of B.C. women's
studies professor who criticized U.S. foreign policy
has been accused of a hate crime -- publicly inciting
hatred against Americans.
An unidentified B.C. resident
alleged Oct. 4 that assistant professor Sunera
Thobani violated the Criminal Code of Canada during
an Oct. 1 speech to a women's conference in Ottawa,
RCMP Corporal Michael Labossiere of the B.C. hate
crime unit said Tuesday.
Thobani, a former president of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women,
said in an interview Tuesday she had not heard
anything about the complaint and she is curious to
know who made it.
"This is just pure
harassment," she said. "They are trying to
silence dissent in this country."
Thobani said her speech was
intended to explain how U.S. foreign policy has
affected life in many countries of the world.
"If you point to the factual
record of U.S. foreign policy, you are now accused of
spreading hate," she said. "It really is
unbelievable."
The RCMP's Labossiere wouldn't
disclose any more specifics about the complaint or
the complainant. He said he forwarded the complaint
to the hate crimes unit of the Ottawa-Carleton police
force, which has jurisdiction in the area where the
offence is alleged to have occurred.
Ottawa police Detective Frank
Corkery, a member of Ottawa's hate crime unit,
wouldn't confirm whether police there are
investigating Thobani.
Corkery said police generally don't
discuss ongoing investigations or reveal the subject
of an investigation until charges are laid and it
becomes public knowledge.
However, the detective added:
"Any complaint made to the hate crimes section
is taken seriously and is investigated on the
substance of the complaint.
Labossiere, who last week reported
bomb threats had been made against Islamic mosques in
Vancouver and Surrey, said he went public with the
complaint against Thobani to show that majority
groups can potentially be targets too.
"Here we have a complaint
against someone who is obviously from a visible
minority, whom the complainant feels is promoting
hate," he said.
"Normally, people think it's a
white supremist or Caucasians, promoting hate against
visible minorities . . . We want to get the message
out that it's wrong, all around."
Section 319 of the Criminal Code of
Canada allows for a jail sentence of less than two
years for anyone convicted of the "public
incitement of hatred" against an identifiable
group of people, when the comments lead to a breach
of the peace.
An "identifiable group"
is defined as any section of the public distinguished
by colour, race, religion or ethnic origin.
However, the same section also
provides some broadly worded legal defences. For
instance, no one can be convicted "if the
statements were relevant to any subject of public
interest, the discussion of which was for the public
benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed
them to be true."
Murray Mollard, a lawyer and
executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties
Association, said that, legally, a charge against
Thobani would be an uphill battle for the
prosecution.
Mollard also said the state
shouldn't prosecute someone who criticizes public
policies in a democratic forum.
"This is absolutely the wrong
thing to do," he said. "We need to have an
open debate about our response to Sept. 11."
Thobani received a standing ovation
at the Women's Resistance Conference in Ottawa after
she argued that the U.S. government -- not
international terrorists -- is the most dangerous
global force, "unleashing prolific levels of
violence all over the world.
"From Chile to El Salvador, to
Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of U.S. foreign policy is
soaked in blood," she said in comments that
received front-page coverage in Canada's daily
newspapers, including The Vancouver Sun.
Many Canadians said Thobani's
speech was an ill-timed and anti-American attack,
while others accused the mainstream news media of a
McCarthy-style witch-hunt.
Thobani said Tuesday she has been
stunned by the reaction to her comments.
While she said she has received a
lot of support, she has also been shocked by hateful
e-mails and telephone calls not just from within
Canada, but from the United States.
"It is just unbelievable what
it is like," Thobani said. "I am just
getting sent all this porn and hate mail."
She said the past week has made the
controversies during her term as president of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women
"seem like a piece of cake."
But, she said she doesn't want to
restrict her life because of the hate mail and
threats, even though it has disrupted her life and
her job.
"I have security outside my
class," Thobani said.
Convictions for public incitement
of hatred are rare in Canada, but not unprecedented.
In 1982, Alberta public high school
teacher Jim Keegstra was fired for teaching students
that the Holocaust -- where millions of Jews died in
Nazi concentration camps -- was a fabrication of a
"Jewish conspiracy" that wanted to destroy
Christianity. The courts later convicted Keegstra of
promoting hatred and ordered him to do 200 hours of
community service work.
In 1999, a Christian evangelist in
Ontario was convicted of inciting hatred against
Muslims in flyers he distributed and in a phone-line
message. Mark Harding received a three-month
conditional sentence and was required to perform more
than 300 hours of voluntary service for the Islamic
community.
© Copyright
2001 Vancouver Sun
Copyright © 2001 CanWest Interactive
a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp.
Sunera Thobani received several standing ovations from about 500 delegates attending the Women's Resistance Conference on Monday.