I am on vacation except that something happened to which I feel the need to respond right away. I do so now and resume my vacation until next year when I shall see you here again.
I write this missive in response to the speech that was given in Oslo by the Chairman of the Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland when the Peace Prize was awarded on December 10, 2010 to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The missive speaks to the people of the Nobel Committee but it is also an open letter to the leaders of China.
Because people form an opinion early on about the intent of the message they are reading, I shall begin by making my intention clear as to where I am coming from lest there be a misunderstanding as to what I mean. To that end, I pose this question: Who do you think is worse; a disciplinarian parent that may at times resort to harsh measures to discipline his child or an apparently sociable parent that keeps his daughter hidden in the basement of the house a lifetime without feeling remorse or pity but uses her to satisfy his sexual appetite which never seems to get satisfied? You get my drift, I hope.
Mr. Jagland of the Nobel Committee made comparisons between what he called democracies and what he called dictatorships. He left no doubt in the mind of the audience that he believes all democracies are lumped together and are good because they are sociable; and left no doubt that all dictatorships are lumped together and are bad because they are disciplinarian. Jagland put it this way: “During the cold war, the connections between peace and human rights were disputed. Since the end of the cold war, however, peace researchers and political scientists have almost without exception underlined how close those connections are. This is, allegedly, one of the most 'robust' findings they have arrived at. Democracies may go to war against dictatorships, and have certainly waged colonial wars, but there is, apparently, not a single example of a democracy having gone to war against another democracy.”
Since this was the moment in the speech when Mr. Jagland seemed to be lecturing to the world, I am going to be so bold as to give him a friendly advice: he should never, ever again lecture about the “robust” findings he discovers in the publications that are put out by the Jewish organizations if he wants his credibility to remain intact for, the findings that these organizations make are always fabricated and always self-serving. In fact, the researchers and the political scientists he mentions have concocted that specific finding to respond to questions regarding the war-like rhetoric that emanates from some circles in Israel and in America to win votes and get elected every time there is an election. Those characters fabricated the findings to justify Israel's colonial assault on Palestine, justify its never ending wars of aggression against its neighbors and justify its never ending incitement of America to attack one country, to bomb another and to kill people just about everywhere else. Since all of this is done in the name of democracy, it has been argued, it is kosher, halal and blessed like the good heart of the Virgin Mary. What do you say about that Thorbjorn Jagland?
When asked about America's clandestine wars against the democratically elected governments of Iran and Chile in decades past, those same characters had no answer and neither did the non-Jewish Americans who participated in the various debates that ensued. And then, the self-described democracies of Israel and America went around knifing the new born democracies in their cribs such as happened in Palestine and Venezuela when the people there voted for leaders and parties that refused to slavishly follow the dictates of Israel or America. And the analogy here, if you still need one, is that of the sociable parent who goes into the basement in the middle of the night to knife the children he fathered when he impregnated his own daughter. Apparently, all of this has escaped the notice of Mr. Jagland who still believes that no democracy has gone to war against another democracy which makes it so – in his mind at least -- that the colonial wars which are periodically waged by the self-described democracies are more palatable than the actions of a disciplinarian parent such as the government of China represents. What kind of garbage is this?
Unlike him who made no effort to distinguish between the various shades of dictatorships and the various shades of democracies that exist today, I am of the opinion that the existing regimes around the world are so complex and so varied that the best of the benevolent authoritarian regimes can be more preferable than the worst of the democracies, let alone those that pretend to be democracies. I am here using the terms authoritarian regimes and democracies in the way that they are commonly defined because I don't want to create more confusion than exists already. But if it were up to me, I would call all those regimes by different names. To expand a little more on these points, I must tell something I did not want to tell at this time but find it necessary to do so now.
I wrote a few times on this website about my friend Ralph Cohen, the well known and well respected Jewish lawyer who died a few years ago. He was a friend of John Diefenbaker, the Canadian Prime Minister who first brought to Canada the Bill of Rights. Cohen was basically a divorce lawyer but he became interested in human rights and if fact, traveled several times to South Africa on missions pertaining to human rights. In the meantime he had amassed a huge clientele in Montreal, one that kept calling on him socially at a time when the Province of Quebec was turning increasingly more French thus squeezing out the uni-lingual English lawyers like him. This meant that people came in and out of his office all the time but they generated little income for him. In view of this, I and a number of people who, on occasions, had free time on our hands would go to his office and take the phone calls or meet the people who dropped in while he was in court or out conducting other business. We called ourselves the Friends of Ralph; we lived near the area where he had his office and we got to know each other closely. If we did not meet in his office, we met in the nearby pub or in one of the restaurants where we talked and exchanged news and stories while he was alive, and for a while after he died.
Ralph Cohen did the legal work that allowed me to open my school upon which I got busy and ceased to go sit in his office. One day he called and asked me to go see him on an urgent matter. When I got there he told me that an organization helping people in distress around the world wanted me to do them a favor. It wanted me to register in my school people that will not take the course but wished to remain in Canada despite the fact that they were denied the status of refugee or were likely to be denied. This request was so unusual and made so little sense that I asked questions. From his unsteady answers, I got the feeling that Ralph himself was uncertain as to what was involved. And I was taken aback when he said that I may never get to see the would-be refugees but must issue the registration papers and sign them while I leave blank the name of the student and the date, all of which will be inserted when the time comes. For this, I was going to be paid the usual registration fee but I could double it if I so wished. I told Ralph I could not do any of that; he said he understood and he would not hold it against me. I left the office suspicious that something very serious was going on but was not quite sure what it was and why Ralph was involved with it.
I went back to the school that afternoon, and went home that night thinking and searching all the time for a possible scenario that will piece together all the elements that came to light and tell me what was going on. It slowly dawned on me that someone wanted me to make a mistake whereby they could blackmail me and get me to make more mistakes thus become their running dog and obey them on command. This was clearly an attempt to entrap me but why would someone want to do that, and how much of this was Ralph Cohen aware of? And then it hit me that two or three days before Ralph had called me, I tried to participate in a phone-in television show carried coast to coast on the CBC's World News channel. We were at the beginning of the first Gulf War and I called to say that we should tell the Americans not to cause too much collateral damage to the civilian population in Iraq but was cut off by the host of the show who hung up on me because I was a moderate Arab voice and she was a running dog of the Jewish organizations that ran the CBC at the time the way they run most of the North American media today. Even though I was yanked off the air in the middle of the talk and denied the chance to say all that I wanted to say, they thought I should still be turned into a running dog serving their causes or made to commit a crime for which they will blackmail me or obliterated me by denouncing me to the authorities. This was the first time that the full horror of the Jewish style democracy hit me in the face. Thorbjorn Jagland, wait till you find out what you will be dragged into now.
A few weeks passed before I went to see Ralph Cohen again and right off the bat I could see that he was a different man. I started telling him what I had concluded but he seemed to know it already except for a few details he was missing on. Other than that, he said very little during the discussion and was only prepared to listen to me while he expressed sorrow with facial expressions and body language. He was more sad than I ever saw him, more pessimistic and more doubtful of the goodness of his fellow human beings. Every time I alluded to his friends at the organization that purported to help would-be refugees, the words seemed to hit him like a sword piercing his heart. Because I knew he was diabetic and had a weak heart, I decided to end the conversation here; to leave him and go away. A few weeks later the news hit the media throughout Montreal; Ralph Cohen was pacing the floor at the courthouse when he had a massive heart attack and dropped dead. They killed him, I said to myself; they betrayed him so very badly that he did not want to live anymore and died of sorrow. The bastards killed my friend Ralph Cohen and I was mad like hell.
I wanted to find out who the bastards were. Being younger at the time, I had a good memory through which I rummaged in search of a scrap of information that may tell me who might have engineered this episode. I stumbled on a discussion I had with Ralph Cohen about human rights during which he spoke fondly of John Diefenbaker. But his mood changed abruptly every time he mentioned someone else, someone more contemporary who was a lawyer but was an absolute fake – in Cohen's words -- when it came to human rights which is what preoccupied him, the man insisted. But now that Ralph was dead, I had no way of discovering who that man was except maybe through the Friends of Ralph who may have known more than I did about Ralph's list of good people and evil people. I kept asking questions until I was able to narrow my choices down to one man and his organization. He was affiliated with the McGill law school, practiced law, was interested in politics and was active in the Federal Liberal Party of Canada. Even though Ralph did not like him, he still communicated with him and tried at least initially to drag me into a scheme that could have turned me into a rabid running dog of the Jewish causes or landed me in a jail cell if I refused to bark their refrains.
Eventually the evil character ran for office, got elected and was appointed Minister of Justice at some point in time. As a lawyer, he took up cases where very little wrongdoing was committed, one of which netted him close to 10 million dollars while his client got less than a million. But unable to stomach the transfer of a million dollars to his client, he convinced a clown who is the current Minister of Immigration in Canada to give him a consolation check in the amount of a million dollars for a reason that cannot be explained. Only in Canada, eh!
And guess what happened on the morning of December 10, 2010. I was watching on television the Nobel ceremony in Oslo when the camera panned to show the audience. And there sat the Canadian delegation represented by none other than Tweedledee and Tweedledum themselves; the killer of my friend Ralph Cohen and his mentally challenged bank-roller, the Canadian Minister of Justice. What infamy!
As to what I wish to say to the leaders of China, I do not know what Mr. Liu Xiaobo did to merit 11 years of imprisonment but no matter what it is, there is always a way for a nation as ancient and magnificent as China to forgive her children however bad they may have been and let them go free or at least reduce their punishment. Liu Xiaobo will never again try to hurt his country, I am certain of that.