Infamous British MP George Galloway will not be coming to Canada this month as the bureaucrats at Citizenship and Immigration Canada have decided that Galloway is inadmissible to Canada. It is the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration’s prerogative to grant an exception, but Minister Kenney has chosen not to do so.
Galloway has a history of being a supporter of organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and has spoken warmly about Saddam Hussein.
The department of Public Safety lists Hezbollah and Hamas as banned terrorist groups in Canada.
Here is a video of Galloway speaking in support of Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah at a protest in London in 2006,
Galloway tells the crowd,
“I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah. I am here to glorify the leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.” — George Galloway
“My visit has more than one reason. The first one is to walk a step toward lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip.
The second is to tell the whole free world that they can do anything real to you.
The third and the main one is to stand beside the legal Palestinian prime minister, [Hamas leader] Ismail Haniya. The entire world knows that he was elected, apparently, democratically. I have offered him corporeal and financial support.” — George Galloway
Galloway has also offered friendship and comfort to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
The NDP, showing that its still not ready for prime time, published a news release on this via their immigration critic Olivia Chow,
OTTAWA – Canadians interested in hearing international experts deliver anti-war messages will now have to leave the country to do so. British MP George Galloway, who was schedule to talk on resisting the war in Afghanistan, was banned by Harper’s government from entering Canada.
“Harper’s Conservatives are wrong to bar MP George Galloway,” said New Democrat Immigration Critic Olivia Chow. “The Minister of Immigration is becoming the ‘Minister of Censorship’. This bunker mentality indicates a government afraid of hearing contradictory points of view.”
The seal hunt has always been heated debate in Canada. This country’s Conservative government has been supportive of the Maritimers that depend upon sealing as part of their livelihoods while support from other parties has been ambiguous.
Liberal Senator Mac Harb is the leading Canadian political voice against the hunt. His Bill S-229 would outlaw the commercial seal hunt.
Just a few blocks away, a Lush Cosmetics store has also made its position clear in the debate. The store, among the over 40 Lush locations nationwide, is protesting the seal hunt. Present on the front of the Lush website is a white baby seal with the words “End Canada’s license to kill” emblazoned overtop in red.
“For the campaign LUSH has partnered with Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a direct action group that has been at the forefront of defending baby seals against slaughter for over 30 years. Sea Shepherd volunteers risk their safety and face the possibility of arrest to document and witness the killing of baby seals (illegal to do without the permission from the Canadian Government). They go directly onto the ice packs of Eastern Canada to document the cruelty of the seal hunt and expose the truth to the world.”
For $19.95 you can buy a “charity pot” of lotion “gorgeously fragranced with ylang ylang, geranium and marigold essential oils” with “every penny of the retail price (excluding taxes) [going] directly into a charitable fund to support animal rights, environmental protection and humanitarian concerns.” Currently, Lush Cosmetics is supporting the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
What is the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, you may ask? Are they heroic documentary filmmakers? The organization started as a splinter group from Greenpeace and its activists regularly engage in not only protest, but the destruction of commercial property and in the endangerment of the lives and safety of fishers.
The group has harassed and attacked Japanese and Canadian vessels. In a string of incidents involving the Japanese, activists from Sea Shepherd threw butyric acid on the decks of three vessels injuring a crew member in one incident. The group has also used its own ships to caused extensive damage to commercial fishers. Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson boasts,
“Yes we have sunk whaling ships, rammed whalers and drift netters, boarded poaching vessels and destroyed equipment used for illegal exploitation of the oceans and we believe that these are valid tactics.”
In this video, the Sea Shepherd’s vessel the Steve Irwin rams a Japanese fishing ship.
On the tragic deaths of four fishers who perished after their sealing vessel sank while a Canadian Coast Guard vessel was towing it after it had been disabled (unrelated to Sea Shepherd activities), Watson wrote,
“The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy.”
“One of the sealers was quoted as saying that he felt absolutely helpless as he watched the boat sink with sealers onboard,” said Captain Paul Watson. “I can’t think of anything that defines helplessness and fear more than a seal pup on the ice that can’t swim or escape as it is approached by some cigarette smoking ape with a club. This is a seal nursery and these men are sadistic baby killers and that might offend some people but it is the unvarnished truth – they are vicious killers who are now pleading for sympathy because some of their own died while engaged in a viciously brutal activity.”
Watson was criticized by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the remark
“It’s despicable that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society would use the death of Canadian sealers to try and advance its campaign of misinformation against the seal hunt.”
The Fisheries minister at the time had this to say about Watson’s statements,
“By attacking and trivializing the memory of these men who tragically lost their lives, Mr. Watson has proven to the world that he is gutless, shameless, and has not one shred of human decency. His lust for media coverage knows no bounds.
On behalf of the Government of Canada, I want to once again express our condolences to the family and loved ones of these sealers.
Our government has said that it will stand up for the safety and security of sealers, and I want to confirm that the militant actions of the Sea Shepherd Society have not gone unnoticed are currently under investigation.” — Canadian Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn
“We have always pledged to take a non-violent approach to saving the whale,’ said Holden. ‘We are not going to compromise on those ideals and we are not going to help people who have said they will use violence. We are here to save the whale, not put the lives of whalers at risk.” — Greenpeace spokesperson Sara Holden speaking about the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
Here’s an alleged history of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s activities (originally published at The Institute for Cetacean Research, the aforementioned Japanese group attacked by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society)
But there’s your neighbourhood cosmetics store taking a stand for “social justice”, for the “environment”, and for “animal rights” but one wonders if they’ve done their research on the folks with whom they’re now sharing a bed. Customers will hopefully ask themselves that by patronizing Lush, buying their “charity pots” are they instead enabling something more sinister?
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL: Paul Watson describes the use of the seal hunt as a poster campaign for environmental groups.
I’m hopeful that Lush and its customers don’t want to enrich Watson and enable his attacks elsewhere. We should all call upon Lush to drop its association with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Here is their email if you’d like to contact them:
In the dark world of politicking, political gamemanship and attacks on political opponents, the new Liberals are a bit more sophisticated that their purged Dionista bretheren. With the backdrop of a global economic crisis, governments working together to “rescue” (that’s another debate) the worldwide economy through spending and bailouts, political parties in Canada are somewhat reluctant to play partisan games to avoid being cast in a bad light themselves among the voting public that does not have an appetite for attacks.
For this reason, the Conservatives post-Dion have been relatively quiet on defining the new Leader of the Opposition. Every opposition leader from Manning to Day to Harper and yes, Mr. Dion, has been ruthlessly defined by the governing party of the time. We have yet to see the Conservatives unload on Mr. Ignatieff with even a hint of the fire they rained down on the hapless Stephane Dion.
No party can been seen to have initiated a wave of negativity during this time so perhaps the Conservatives have strategically been holding off on firing the first volley.
Though, as I’m coming to realize, the Liberals may have been sniping at the Conservatives for a few weeks now though as insurgents that have shed their Liberal uniforms.
Take, for example, this video by “theGritGirl”:
theGritGirl joined YouTube on March 10, 2009 but is already cranking out broadcast quality vignette’s attacking the Conservative government. Surely skill doesn’t automatically mean that a big P partisan professionalism is at play here. But go to 9 seconds into the video to committee testimony by Minister Jim Flaherty. If you exist off of the Hill, you might have seen this testimony on CPAC and if you exist on the Hill, you may have seen it on that same channel or through the internal House of Commons feed. Note that this TV-quality feed lacks “CPAC” designation meaning that this video capture likely occurred on the Hill from the House of Commons feed. This professional video (with titles produced with a professional video suite like After Effects) was also first seen on Warren Kinsella’s blog. The lack of CPAC designation and Warren Kinsella’s distribution may mean that the Liberals produced the video and are the first to “go neg” during this time of economic crisis. If the Conservatives are looking for an opening to unleash a barrage against Ignatieff and the Liberals this may be it as their actions would appear to be defensive rather than offensive.
Further to more Liberal attack, we see this entry by Liberal war room chief Kinsella on March 2 featuring a letter from James Turk, the head of the Canadian Association of University Teachers complaining to Minister Goodyear that a staffer told Turk and his colleagues them to “shut up” during a meeting. After looking into this incident, I learned that Turk and his associates had given the Minister a brow-beating for about an hour without bringing up new business (ie. that he hadn’t already read in published op-eds by Turk et al). The letter is carbon copied to Marc Garneau (Liberal S&T critic) Stephen Harper, Tony Clement, and Jim Maloway (NDP S&T critic). The document on Kinsella’s site is a scanned copy of the fax sent to one of those individuals (let’s say Garneau) and then passed onto Kinsella.
In today’s Globe and Mail, we read that Jim Turk has an immediate comment available regarding the balancing of one’s job as Minister of S&T and one’s own personal faith. Here’s Turk,
“The traditions of science and the reliance on testable and provable knowledge has served us well for several hundred years and have been the basis for most of our advancement. It is inconceivable that a government would have a minister of science that rejects the basis of scientific discovery and traditions,”
Outside of Goodyear’s tangential though unwise hedging on evolution, we see this Globe and Mail piece write up Turk on Goodyear without the context of their previous run-in. Turk is presented as an unbiased voice on Goodyear. Also, Turk and Goodyear didn’t spar over Goodyear’s unknown views of a particular field of science or how public policy is or is not informed by those views. Further, this Globe piece is timed perfectly for those that would gain from a Conservative stumble on Goodyear as the government held a high profile event last night honouring NSERC award winners. In communications, that was supposed to be the story that Conservatives wanted whereas, the Liberals got quite a gift today.
Finally, if we check out Kinsella today, we find him going along the same attack as that unleashed against Stockwell Day. Kinsella will be dusting off his Barney doll to chase away religious constituents that Ignatieff is said to be courting.
Have the Conservatives used proxies to level attacks agaist their opponents in the past? Of course. This is nothing new; every political party does it. But in this latest post-Dion, post-economic collapse round of the war where everyone is supposed to rise above, if the Conservatives are holding their fire so they won’t be blamed for playing politics during this economic crisis, the Liberals and their proxies have just given them the green light and the media wouldn’t hold much credibility if they said the Tories fired first.
