Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - September 03, 2013, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A13 Winnipeg Free Press Tuesday, September 3, 2013 A 13 POLL �� TODAY'S QUESTION Do you think it's time to open Portage and Main to foot traffic? �� Vote online at winnipegfreepress. com �� PREVIOUS QUESTION What's the best part about going back to school? Seeing friends again 38% TOTAL RESPONSES 2,267 Winnipeg Free Press est 1872 / Winnipeg Tribune est 1890 VOL 141 NO 287 2013 Winnipeg Free Press, a division of FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. Published seven days a week at 1355 Mountain Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 3B6, PH: 204- 697- 7000 BOB COX / Publisher PAUL SAMYN / Editor JULIE CARL / Deputy Editor " Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." So the British Parliament decided it didn't want to be shamed by following another prime minister into another unwinnable war on the basis, yet again, of shoddy intelligence reports. It voted 282- 275 against committing British forces to the planned American attack on Syria. After the vote on Aug. 29, Prime Minister David Cameron admitted former prime minister Tony Blair had " poisoned the well" by leading Britain into the Iraq war in 2003 on the basis of false intelligence reports about Iraq's non- existent " weapons of mass destruction." That was why neither the public nor even some members of Cameron's own party now trusted his assertions on Syrian " WMD." " I get it," Cameron said, and promised Britain would stay out of the coming war. On the next day, U. S. President Barack Obama followed the British government's example by announcing he would seek the approval of Congress before launching strikes on Syria. He still felt the Syrian regime should be punished for using poison gas, he said, but it turns out the operation is not " time- sensitive" after all. Everything can wait until the U. S. Congress resumes sitting on Sept. 9. This came as a great surprise to many people, but it shouldn't have. Obama is probably secretly grateful to Britain for pulling out, because it has given him an excuse to postpone the attack - maybe even to cancel it, in the end. He foolishly painted himself into a corner with his tongue last year by talking about a " red line" that he would never allow the Assad regime in Syria to cross, but he wasn't elected to be policeman of the world. That was the role George W. Bush tried to play, but American voters want no more of the wars that come with it. Obama got U. S. troops out of Iraq, and they'll soon be out of Afghanistan as well. He doesn't want to end up fighting a war in Syria, and that will be hard to avoid that if he starts bombing. " Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next," wrote Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only one month ago. " Deeper involvement is hard to avoid." Retired general Anthony Zinni, former U. S. commander in the Middle East, expanded on that with brutal clarity. " The one thing we should learn is you can't get a little bit pregnant. If you do a one- and- done ( a few days' punitive airstrikes with Tomahawk cruise missiles) and say you're going to repeat it if unacceptable things happen, you might find these people keep doing unacceptable things. It will suck you in." Obama's problem is he has fallen into the clutches of Washington's foreign- policy establishment, which has enduring purposes and prejudices that usually overpower the particular views and wishes of passing presidents and Congresses. Consider its six- decade loathing of Cuba and its 35- year vendetta against Iran. ( It hates to be successfully defied.) This establishment has no problems with weapons of mass destruction so long as they are on its side. It has never renounced the right to initiate the use of nuclear weapons, although they are a 100 times deadlier than poison gas. It didn't even mind the Shah of Iran working to get them, back when he was Washington's designated enforcer in the Middle East. But it has never forgiven the Iranians for overthrowing the Shah. Washington then switched to backing its new ally, Saddam Hussein, who used poison gas extensively in his war against Iran in 1980- 88. U. S. Air Force intelligence officers helped Saddam to plan his gas attacks on Iran's trenches, and the Central Intelligence Agency tried to pin the blame for Saddam's use of gas against the Kurds on Iran instead. Now Saddam is gone and Iraq is Iran's ally ( thanks to George W Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003). But Iran is still the main enemy, and the game goes on. Syria is Iran's ally, so Washington has always seen the regime in Damascus as an enemy, too. More than 1,000 Egyptians murdered in the streets of Cairo by the army that overthrew the elected government last month is no cause for U. S. intervention, because Egypt is an ally. More than 1,000 Syrians killed in the streets of Damascus by poison gas require an American military response, because Bashar al- Assad's regime is the enemy. Assad's regime must not be destroyed, because then al- Qaida might inherit power in Syria. But it must be whacked quite hard, so it dumps Assad - and with him, perhaps, the alliance with Iran. The gas is a pretext, not the real motive for the promised strikes. Obama doubts this will work, and rightly fears even a " limited" American attack on Syria could end up as a full- scale war. The events in London have won him some time, and " letting Congress decide" is his best chance to escape from his dilemma. What could possibly go wrong? Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. Also: Obama must lead the world, an editorial by the Washington Post, at wfp. to/ comment. W ASHINGTON - While her brother was arming the cannon of August and aiming them at a Damascene despot, Barack Obama's sister- fromanother- mister was all rainbows, roses and moonbeams. " Great ideas come gently as doves," she said, quoting Camus, but the cooing was scarce heard amid the guns below. We had come to the Center for American Progress, a well- funded left- wing wellspring, to see and hear the ravenhaired Maya Kassandra Soetoro- Ng, MA, MA, PhD, the Jakarta- sired, Americanmothered, Canadian- espoused younger sibling of the first Nobel laureate since Henry Kissinger to make more war than peace. Engaged in far- off Honolulu as an instructor of peace education for the humanities at the University of Hawaii, Soetoro- Ng was appearing here in support of an organization named Odanadi that invades brothels in India and spirits off young slaves to safety, assailing yet another nexus of misery in an age - like all human ages - of intractable hatred, calumny, violence, vengeance, exploitation and woe, with her big brother Barry foundering in the whirlpool. She is nine years and 11 days younger than Obama. " You have more soft power than your brother," a Vietnamese woman informed her during her presentation, while the headline on the Washington Times in a box outside on H Street hollered: Obama's ' soft power' policy in a world of hurt. " With grasshoppers by my feet may I walk," the president's sister sighed in response, invoking a Navajo prayer. " It is finished in beauty." In Hawaii, Soetoro- Ng told us, she encourages her students to dig to " a more multi- faceted version of the truth." She called for " powerful acts of storytelling," reported she yearns to teach warring, factional tribes how to tend gardens of peace and boasted of how she trains former youth- gang leaders to sheathe their shivs and " engage in benevolent leadership." (" This course will be project- centered and will have no final exam," noted her syllabus for the 2012 school year, but students were required to keep a Daily Journal of Reflection and to write a reconciliation plan for a current global conflict. Neither of Barack Obama's bestsellers was on her list of required texts. " Prof. Soetoro was really smart," one matriculant gushed on ratemyprofessors. com. " Plus, this is definitely the best- looking professor I've ever had in my life.") Her innate tendency toward peacefulness, she said, had been sown and sewn into her own soul through the agency of her extraordinary mother's uncommonly colour- blind and progressive world view. Through Stanley Ann Dunham, the white mid- American seeker and social anthropologist who married first an African and then an Indonesian man, she said, " I was granted comity, I was granted tolerance, I was granted artistry, I was granted sweetness." " When she was dying," the president's mother's daughter said, " she asked for her ashes to be cast to the sea. She said, how else can I see all the beautiful places and the people I love so much?" In glimpses like this of his origins, we see the Barack Obama that Barack Obama most deeply might wish to be - the commander- in- chief of a " reset," not with Vladimir Putin or Bashar Assad, who are incorrigible and ultimately irrelevant to the universal hopes of men, but with the human heart itself; to wield the power, in his half- sister's words, " to take something soft and make enormous changes to something jagged and explosive." Two years ago, Maya Kassandra Soetoro- Ng, whose husband, Konrad, also an educator at the U of Hawaii, is from Burlington, Ont., wrote a children's book that was inspired by a Georgia O'Keeffe painting and titled Ladder to the Moon. In it, a little girl's deceased and semi- mythical grandmother - the embodiment of Stanley Ann Dunham - emerges in a dream and leads the child to the moon, where they grant succour to victims of the 2004 tsunami (" a 50- foot wave sweeping from the ocean to the land") and the World Trade Center (" two tall towers that trembled and swayed on quaking soil"). Lifted thus from mundane tragedy, the children drink moon dew from silver cups and are joined by " people whose hand pointed upward from a synagogue, a temple, a mosque, and a steepled church... connecting with each other in hope's massive stream." " They're praying," the grandmother whispers, " For one another, and for us. And to make the fighting stop." Gripped by the same desire, but with no weapon other than to wage even more war, a fatherless, motherless president prepared to pull the trigger. A few blocks away, his closest living kin spoke of King and Gandhi, and of building " a bridge between the self of the learner and the many people who are living in the world." Allen Abel is a Brooklyn- born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D. C. W HAT is racism? Manitoba media outlets have been full of coverage of the charge that a 2012 email sent by deputy premier Eric Robinson was racist. The controversy took off after the media reported that Osborne House CEO Barbara Judt had filed a complaint with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission alleging racism. Provincial Tory Leader Brian Pallister and others have repeated that charge. As a result, as Free Press columnist Dan Lett puts it, " Robinson has been forced to fight the allegations he is a racist." Racism is repugnant and harmful. That's why what's most worrying about the ongoing furor is the confusion about what racism is - and isn't. In his 2002 book Racism: A Short History , historian George Fredrickson offers an excellent starting point for clarifying what racism is: " Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable." Fredrickson's summary contains three important insights. First, racism is a social or collective phenomenon, not simply a matter of individual behaviour. It involves a relationship between groups of people, one oppressing and the other oppressed. Of course, these groups are made up of individuals. People in the dominant group may actively practise racism, passively allow it to go on or consciously try to challenge it. Second, a group of people who experience racism are treated as being somehow inherently different than members of the dominant group. Skin colour, other physical features, religion and cultural practices have all been singled out by dominant groups to define what makes oppressed groups inherently different. Third, racism is entirely a creation of society. There is nothing natural about it or the different groups it creates. As Fredrickson and many other researchers have shown, racism hasn't always existed. It spread and became a global phenomenon as European powers conquered and colonized other parts of the world. Racism is quite different from how earlier conquerors sometimes treated the vanquished, and it's also different from how religious groups persecuted each other. With racism, the oppressed people are treated as inherently different and tainted. Two examples illustrate this. The ancient Greeks saw people as either civilized or barbarians but this status was not something one inherited. Jews were undoubtedly oppressed in medieval Christian Europe because of their religion. Sometimes they were even murdered by mobs. But if they gave up their religion, they would no longer be oppressed. In Fredrickson's words, " even the mobs did not regard Jews as beyond redemption. to be baptized rather than killed was a real option." The development of racism turned the persecution of Jewish believers into the oppression of people designated as Jews, regardless of individuals' religious beliefs. In anti- Jewish racism, what mattered was " blood" ancestry, not religion. Once we understand what racism is, we can see that in Canada today white people do not experience racism - on the contrary. White people as a group are not oppressed on the basis of their so- called race. The evidence is clear. Equal rights in law don't translate into social equality. Whether we look at income, wealth, health, housing, unemployment, treatment by the police and the courts, political power or any other meaningful measure, it is people of colour and indigenous people who collectively are worse off. Obviously many white people also have low incomes, live in poor housing or are treated badly on the job. This is a consequence of class division, not racism. The fact white people are less likely to experience such harmful conditions than indigenous people and people of colour shows who experiences racism in Canada and who doesn't. No one denies some individuals who aren't white may have hostile attitudes to white people ( given racism and colonialism past and present, is this any surprise?). The important point is such prejudices don't carry a lot of punch in a society in which white people as a group aren't oppressed. Such attitudes aren't manifestations of racism. Once we take a step back and see Robinson's email in this larger context, it's obvious the allegations of racism against him are wrong and misguided. In a racially divided province such as Manitoba, if there is anything positive about this situation, it's that there's an opportunity to sort out what racism is so more people can take effective action against it. David Camfield is an associate professor in the labour studies program at the University of Manitoba, where he teaches a course on racism and work. ALLAN ABEL DAVID CAMFIELD Commander Obama's younger sister embodies soft power Racism yardstick: It's all about oppression Congress Obama's last hope to escape dilemma EUGENE TANNER / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Maya Soetoro- Ng ( left) and her daughter, Suhaila Ng, 6, as they look at Soetoro- Ng's new book, Ladder to the Moon, at their home in Honolulu. Getting back to the books 12% New school supplies 9% Nothing good about it 41% GWYNNE DYER A_ 13_ Sep- 03- 13_ FP_ 01. indd A13 9/ 2/ 13 8: 09: 02 PM ;