On a quest for secular piety: Reviewing Tarek Fatah's Chasing a Mirage
by Justin Podur, ZNet, June 22, 2008.

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which also published long excerpts of CM and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek), CM hardly needed a review from me to get attention. I therefore took the request as a signal of a serious desire to engage with people who might disagree about the ideas of the book.

CM's basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

Racism in the Tar Sands: exploiting foreign workers and poisoning indigenous people

By Macdonald Stainsby, June 12, 2008, reposted from Oil Sands Truth

The giant corporations that are determined to exploit the Alberta tar sands face a major problem — a serious shortage of local labour to do the actual work. So the Canadian and Albertan governments have a plan, ideal in their eyes, to solve the crunch.

Currently, employers desperate to find needed hands, backs and minds for the vast production targets of the “Gigaproject” are flying workers from the Maritimes from their homes for shift stretches and then back again, but that effort faces limits in terms of workers available. Nary a day goes without a business page article somewhere in Alberta bemoaning the lack of workers. Many of the Newfoundlanders who would have come out this way in the past will now work in Newfoundland premier Dany Williams’ new off shore oil and gas ventures, using skills learned in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Power to the Brown People

By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, ColorLines, May/June 2008

IT WAS AN IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ORGANIZER’S dream come true.

On December 10, 2007, with just a few hours notice, close to 2,000 South-Asian Canadian immigrants flooded Vancouver International Airport. They paralyzed the international departures section and surrounded a cab taking a severely disabled 48-year-old Sikh refugee, Laibar Singh, to his deportation flight. The crowd did what no other protest in North America had done before—using civil disobedience, it stopped a deportation proceeding in its tracks.

The protest prompted a tense, hours-long standoff at the airport. Officers of the Canadian Border Services Agency announced, a bit nervously, that they were unwilling to wade into the crowd. And after eight hours, the cab—well, it just started backing up. Someone helped Singh climb out of the cab, and he was ushered back to the Sikh place of worship (a gurdwara), where he has sought sanctuary while awaiting a resolution of his legal challenge to stay in Canada.

GATHERING OF MOTHER EARTH PROTECTORS

Sovereignty Sleepover: Toronto, Queen’s Park May 26th – May 29.

Rally: Queen’s Park May 26th, 5 p.m. – dusk.

Respect the right of First Nations to say no to economic exploitation and environmental destruction.
No jail for saying no.
Free Bob Lovelace and the KI Six.

On May 26th Indigenous communities and our supporters will gather at Queen’s Park to uphold our duty to protect the land, forest, water, and air and to promote respect for our Indigenous rights to say no to economic exploitation and environmental destruction. It is time to end the jailing and harassment of our people for protecting mother earth and traditional ways. Please come to our large rally on May 26th at the legislature. We are also inviting supporters to join us in four days of ceremony, speakers, workshops, music, and a three night sovereignty sleep-over directly on the front lawn of the legislature.

Right now Indigenous communities across Ontario are taking a stand to assert our right to protect our traditional territories and the future of our peoples. Our communities are peacefully protesting destructive industrial projects that the government is permitting on our traditional lands without community consent.

By Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, courtesy of illvox.org

From: Special issue of “Social Justice” entitled “Race, Racism and Empire: Reflections from Canada”. Guest Editors: Narda Razack, Enakshi Dua and Jody Warner. In Press.

INTRODUCTION

In continuous conversations over the years, we have discussed our discomfort with the manner in which Aboriginal people and perspectives are excluded within anti-racism. We have been surprised and disturbed by how rarely this exclusion has been taken up, or indeed, even noticed. As a result of this exclusion, Aboriginal people cannot see themselves in anti-racism contexts, and Aboriginal activism against settler domination takes place without people of colour as allies. While anti-racist theorists may ignore contemporary Indigenous presence, Canada certainly does not. Police surveillance is a reality that all racialized people face, and yet Native communities are at risk of direct military intervention in ways that no other racialized community in Canada faces.

Black Power From the Inside

Chris Harris

Muhammad Ahmad. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960-1975. Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2007

Toronto’s Black community has long suffered a crisis of increasing poverty, racism, and violence. This is largely the result of the oppression that African-Canadian people have endured through the implementation of neoliberal policies and the expansion of both the police state and the prison industrial complex. In Canada, African-Canadian people (the majority of whom are located amongst the lowest ranks of the working class) are confronted with two primary problems. First, a growing Black underclass is unable to compete for scarce decent paying jobs. Second, the Canadian ruling class – responding to the crisis of neoliberal globalization with their wars on drugs, guns, and gangs – is criminalizing Black working-class youth and expanding the prison industrial complex. In recent years, the Black left has responded to this crisis by trying to organize Black youth at the grassroots level, and by trying to build new mass organizations that can continue the legacy of militant
anti-racist struggle that characterized the Toronto-based Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sunera Thobani is an assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on race and gender relations, and migration, citizenship, and nation-building. She was the first woman of colour to serve as President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) between 1993 and 1996. During that time NAC, along with the Canadian Labour Congress, organized the National Women’s March Against Poverty. She made national news in October of 2001 as one of the first critics of US foreign policy and the “war on terror” when she stated, “From Chile to El Salvador, to Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of US foreign policy is soaked in blood.” Thobani is one of the founders of the cross-Canada Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity (RACE) and is currently writing about media representation of the “war on terror” and its impact on gender, race, and empire-building. Sharmeen Khan interviewed Thobani in July 2007.

How did you get involved with the feminist movement and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women?

Defend the Border: The CBC’s new show can only help “the bad guys”
by Justin Podur, Z-Net, January 6, 2008.

The phrase “defend the border” wasn’t always a metaphor. And it isn’t just a metaphor in many parts of the world, even today: some states do have to worry about overland military invasions.

Canada is not such a state.

Urgent Action Alert from the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada

!!!! See below for THREE ACTIONS to take: sign petition; join 7 December day of action; call-in week to MPs !!!!

Demand that Liberals, Bloc, and Conservatives NOT bring in new law to allow for indefinite detention without charge, secret hearings without the detainee or their lawyer present, draconian house arrest, and
deportation to torture.

QUICK BACKGROUND

MONTREAL, Wednesday, November 27, 2007 -- Last night, No One Is
Illegal-Montreal and allies began pickets and speak-outs against the
Bouchard-Taylor Commission on "reasonable accommodation".
At least 75 protesters gathered in the lobby of the Montreal Congress
Center, before proceeding past security guards upstairs, near the
hearing room. The protest was well heard inside by the some 190
participants.

After more than 90 minutes of protesting outside the hearing, at least
20 police officers entered to remove demonstrators. The protesters