News and views from SA Canada Did Canada’s intervention in Middle East prompt Ottawa shootings?
2014Evan Engering 2014-11Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 8 →
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and BARRY WEISLEDER Immediately after two Canadian Forces soldiers were killed in separate incidents on Oct. 20 and 22, Conser vative Prime Minister Stephen Harper called the assail ants “terrorists.” Leader of the Official Opposition New Democratic Party, Tom Mulcair, disagreed, citing a blend of factors, psychological and political.
Harper seized on the gun fight in a hallway of Parlia ment, in which a deranged man with a rifle fell in a hail of police bullets, to step up his assault on civil liberties. Mulcair and the labour-based NDP opposed Harper’s words, but should oppose his direction on principle, not just on semantic grounds.
Against a backdrop of widespread grief for the dead soldiers and their families, Harper and the business me dia stoked the fires of patriotism, which spilled over into Islamophobic acts across the country.
The assailants, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Cou ture-Rouleau, recent converts to Islam, were not linked to ISIS. What is not known is whether they lashed out for political or personal reasons. Thus, their actions can be seen as an indictment of Canada’s faltering mental health care system. Or they can be cited as “blow-back” from Western military intervention in the Middle East. Or both.
In any event, the context of the attack on the soldiers, and the Conservative government’s rhetoric in response to it, reveal another crack in the myth that Canada is a peace-keeping state.
In early October, Prime Minister Stephen Harper com mitted fighter jets, pilots, and ground crew to join the U.S.-led bombing campaign in war-torn Iraq and Syria. That came on the heels of 13 years of Canadian military intervention in Afghanistan, and Ottawa’s involvement in NATO wars in the former Yugoslavia, in the Persian Gulf, Libya, and Somalia. This is not to mention Harper’s brash support for the Israeli apartheid state, and for its brutal summer 2014 onslaught against the people of Gaza.
Conservative foreign policy makes many enemies at home and abroad, but individual attacks against mili tary personnel on Canadian soil play directly into the hands of the capitalist rulers, fanning the flames of prowar sentiment, racism, and jingoism.
Stephen Harper and his collaborators, by their en gagement in military interventions in the East, have certainly outraged peoples there, fanning the flames of their discontent with the West. Every bomb dropped by Canadian, American and allied fighter jets on Iraq and Syria brings fresh recruits to ISIS. plague the peoples of the Middle East. Canada joined the World War at Britain’s behest to fight for the class interests of the Triple Entente rulers against those of the Central Powers. Arms producers became obscenely rich, while millions of workers died in trenches, at sea, and by aerial bombardment.
That conflagration was sparked by an assassination in Sarajevo that detonated an already tense situation. For the Arab and Kurdish peoples then living in the coun tries now under attack, it meant the drawing of artifi cial borders along lines beneficial to the British and French colonial powers. The foreign rulers called that infamous arrangement the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It is no surprise that the current prime target of the Western rulers, the Islamic State, pledges to abolish the borders imposed by Sykes-Picot.
Prime Minister Harper, in the wake of the Ottawa shootings, made an emotive speech that was broadcast live. In it, he condemned any and all who attack Cana dian soldiers as somehow attacking all “Canadians as a free and democratic people,” and he doubled down on his “national security” plans. But one is hard pressed to recall the Prime Minister’s making such a hard-line speech regarding the hundreds of missing and mur dered aboriginal women. He continues to refuse to launch an inquiry into that ongoing tragedy.
In the face of Conservative plans to legislate U.S. Pa triot Act-style infringements on civil liberties, progres sive and working-class people should stand up to the government and its insidious plans. We should expose the big lies—the false claims that the Canadian state has a duty or right to interfere militarily in the Middle East, that the Canadian Forces are serving to protect all rath er than uphold the interests of corporate Canada, and that we should accept the expansion of the surveillance state for our own good.
Instead, the streets should be filled with demonstra tors demanding: Canada out of NATO! Ottawa, Washing ton, London and allies, Out of the Middle East! n