2. Multiculturalism and the politics of immigration

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's proclamation of multiculturalism as official government policy in 1971 inaugurated a period in which immigrant communities in Canada have tended more often than not to give a preponderance of their votes to candidates of the federal Liberal Party. There may be some irony to this, since the policy was not fully enshrined in law until the passage of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act by Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government in 1988. But immigrant communities have not wholly forgotten that the Trudeau Liberals who inaugurated multiculturalism were likewise responsible for a shift in immigration policies leading to the abandonment of previous openly racist admission criteria (and their replacement, one might add, by criteria of social class).6 The persistence of this memory has no doubt been assisted by the enduring presence of racist anti-immigration sentiment in the parties of the right-most distinctly within the Reform Party, which many Canadians suspect underwent no more than cosmetic changes when it absorbed the struggling remnants of Mulroney's old party to form the new (no longer 'progressive' even in name) Conservative Party.

How has current Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper sought to manoeuver within a situation in which the votes of immigrant communities, both European and non-European, are recognized as a determining factor in many urban ridings across the country, and hence potentially decisive in his pursuit of a parliamentary majority in the next election?

He has, in brief, tried to distance himself from his party's (and his own) sometimes openly disgraceful past record on immigration issues, to take advantage of the failure of Paul Martin's Liberal government to abolish an unintelligent and widely resented "Right of Landing Fee" on new immigrants, and to make use of potentially divisive issues like gay marriage as a means of appealing to 'social conservative' elements within immigrant communities. He has at the same time played to exclusionary and racist tendencies within his most reliable block of supporters (former Reform Party members and residents of predominantly white rural communities) by cancelling the previous government's commitment to a large-scale infrastructure program for native communities, and by treating refugee claimants and illegal immigrants with the utmost severity. (The latter tactic carries the risk of backfiring in such vigorously multicultural cities as Toronto and Vancouver-but only, Conservative strategists hope, in ridings where the Tories already run too distant a third to the New Democratic Party and the Liberals for it to make any difference to their electoral fortunes.)

Two currently ongoing events permit us to define more closely the orientation of this government in relation to immigration issues-and perhaps more generally as well. One is the occupation since February 2006 of contested land at Caledonia, near Hamilton, Ontario, by the people of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee (a situation that may help to remind Canadians that a nation which developed out of colonial settler colonies has large unpaid ethical and material obligations to the indigenous peoples whose lands we have not ceased to appropriate and whose cultures we continue to violate). The other is the arrest on June 2, 2006 in Toronto of seventeen Canadian Muslim men and youths on charges of plotting terrorist atrocities. Both, as it happens, are plausibly connected to Canada's participation in the Bush regime's fraudulent and spurious 'War on Terror.'

Analysis of these unfolding events in relation to the faultlines evident in Stephen Harper's positions on immigration will suggest, I think, that a government more deeply subservient to the dictates of American geopolitics than were the Liberals of Jean ChrŽtien or Paul Martin is finding it convenient to exacerbate intercommunal hostilities involving both Onkwehonweh or First Nations people and Canadian Muslims. But before proceeding to this analysis, I should explain my reasons for applying what may have seemed disconcertingly strong adjectives to George W. Bush's 'War on Terror.'

3. Faking the 'War on Terror'

The 'War on Terror' is spurious because there is strong evidence that the events to which it is purportedly a response-the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001-were orchestrated not by Osama bin Laden (whose partisans or minions served, however, as useful patsies), but rather by high-placed elements within the United States government. There are several converging lines of evidence: taken separately, they cry out for investigation; taken together, they appear seriously incriminating.7

There have been substantial developments during the past year in the assessment of material, photographic and testimonial evidence relating to the collapses of the three towers of the World Trade Center (the 47-storey WTC 7 as well as the 110-storey Twin Towers). These include scientifically informed analyses which demonstrate the physical impossibility of the official account of the Twin Towers' collapse,8 analyses of statements by fire department personnel and by survivors that there were numerous secondary explosions in the buildings in the interval between the airplane crashes and the collapses,9 video and photographic evidence that structural steel in the South Tower was being cut and melted by thermate charges during the final minutes before the tower's collapse,10 videos and photographs of the collapses of the towers in which "squibs" (explosive horizontal ejections of dust and debris) are visible well below the lines of collapse,11 and laboratory analyses of structural steel from the towers which point to its having been cut by thermate charges.12

Controlled demolition of course implies foreknowledge of the attacks as well as a complex pattern of organization-some aspects of which were made visible by Michael Ruppert, whose book Crossing the Rubicon revealed that the U.S. air defence system was effectively disabled on 9/11 by a network of air-defence and anti-terrorism exercises which transferred most of the available interceptor aircraft out of the northeastern U.S. to Alaska and Alberta, and for a crucial period that morning left the military air traffic controllers responsible for deploying the remaining jet fighters unable to determine which of the many apparently hijacked aircraft appearing on their radar screens were real, and which blips were merely part of a response-to-multiple-hijackings exercise.13 The likelihood that al Qaeda operatives could have organized the demolitions in the World Trade Center complex (whose security was contracted to Securacom, a company with close Bush family connections),14 as well as somehow coordinating airliner hijackings with what amounted to a planned disabling of the air defence system, is close to nil.

Add to this the destruction of material evidence at the WTC site, the extreme reluctance of the Bush administration to permit any inquiry into the events of 9/11, and the well-established fact-mendaciously denied by senior members of that administration-that foreign intelligence services, having evidently penetrated different parts of the 9/11 planning, gave them detailed advance warnings, and a pattern emerges that cries out for criminal investigation. Searching analyses of these issues, as well as of many features of the attacks, the ensuing cover-up, and the underlying geopolitics, have been published by Michel Chossudovsky and by other researchers,15 and the theologian and ethicist David Ray Griffin has produced magisterial summations of the evidence pointing to the Bush administration's implication in the events of 9/11.16

The 'War on Terror' is fraudulent, then, because its purported and actual goals are systematically at variance. Only in the most nakedly Orwellian sense can one claim that a project which began with apparent false-flag terrorist attacks that killed some three thousand people on American soil, and has since involved wars of aggression that have killed and maimed well over 25,000 American soldiers-not to mention killing scores of thousands of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and exposing millions of their fellow citizens to the murderous and ineradicable toxicity of depleted uranium-is in any sense concerned with enhancing the security of Americans, or of anyone else. The pretexts used to legitimize the invasion of Iraq have without exception been exposed as lies and disinformation17-an embarrassing fact that has not prevented the Bush administration, with the supine or active collaboration of the corporate media, and, to their shame, the diplomatic support of western countries including Britain, France, Germany and Canada, from constructing a parallel set of lies and deceptions to legitimize an apparently imminent attack upon Iran.18

It is less widely appreciated that the invasion of Afghanistan was likewise carried out under false pretexts. Planned and threatened months before 9/11, this act of aggression was carried out for geopolitical reasons enunciated more than a year earlier by the Project for the New American Century, a pressure group whose key members have all held high office in the Bush administration.19 It should be of some interest to Canadians to know that in September 2001 the United States rejected offers of the Afghani Taliban regime to deliver Osama bin Laden to Pakistan for trial there;20 to know that opium production, which the Taliban had nearly eliminated in the provinces it controlled, bounced back to a new high once the U.S.-backed warlords of the Northern Alliance came to power;21 and to learn that the appalling oppression of Afghan women by reactionary theocrats that the Bush regime adopted as an ex post facto reason for its invasion appears not to have significantly diminished under the Karzai regime.22 Canadians might also be intrigued to discover that in June 2006 a journalist who wondered about the absence of any mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's FBI Most Wanted listing was informed by Rex Tomb, the FBI's Chief of Investigative Publicity, that the reason for this absence "is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."23 This looks rather like an acknowledgment that the so-called "Bin Laden confession video" released by the U.S. in December 2001, and widely represented as justifying the attack on Afghanistan, is in fact not authentic.24

The 'War on Terror' is also fraudulent because while purporting, as Bush himself has declared, to confer upon others what Americans "wish for ourselves-safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life,"25 his administration has in fact sought through false-flag terrorism and shameless propaganda and disinformation to frighten Americans into supporting a resource-war geopolitics of unconstrained aggression. Concomitants of this endless warfare include the devolution of what is now called the "homeland" in the direction of a one-party state,26 a deliberate voiding of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a parallel extinction of international human rights law whose visible embodiment is an archipelago of prisons and torture houses extending from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Graib and Bagram.27

[much more at link]
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00244.htm