Roots of Reform, National Citizens Coalition and Pro-Apartheid ... or ... Stephen Harper, the Northern Foundation and Pro-Apartheid

I usually start my postings with a video or cartoon, but since the video I've attached to this story is pretty graphic, I wanted to warn you first. And I didn't use a cartoon, because clearly there is nothing to laugh at here.

This is part three of a series of postings I've compiled on Stephen Harper's involvement with the Pro-Apartheid movement of the 1980's; through both his Northern Foundation and the Reform Party of Canada.

With the Conservatives targeting Kingston for Brian Abrams, a column by the extreme right-wing journalist, Peter Worthington (father-in-law of a former insider and speech write of George W. Bush, David Frum), that appeared in the Kingston Whig Standard (part of the Sun Media chain), gave me the link I needed to tie everything together.

You will notice the name Craig Williamson in the video. From his Wikipedia bio: "Craig Michael Williamson (born 1949, Johannesburg), a former South African police major, was exposed as a spy in 1980, and was involved in a series of state-sponsored overseas bombings, burglaries, kidnappings, assassinations and propaganda during the apartheid era.

"Williamson was one of the main collaborators with Peter Worthington in the pro-apartheid video The ANC method - violence which was distributed by Citizens for foreign aid reform throughout Canada in 1988."

I discovered the links between the Northern Foundation, Peter Worthington, The National Citizens Coalition and the Reform Party of Canada, through an unlikely source. Ryerson's Review of Journalism. Who knew? In 1988 they published a review, and through that provided the rest of the story.

Ryerson's Review of Journalism
Spring 1988
by Dave Stonehouse
The red terrorist menace in South Africa - written by Peter Worthington, produced by Peter Worthington and starring Peter Worthington

A three-second aerial shot shows the tops of shacks in a rural slum. The as yet unseen narrator tells you it is Soweto, a black township in South Africa, "the scene of so many necklacings and violence."

Violins pitch and drone eerily behind his commentary. Now you're on the ground, about 10 metres from a shack where a large black woman is standing in the doorway. She's looking right at you, waving her left arm, pointing into the house, talking excitedly. But you can't hear her, only the narrator. He says she is Beverly, the 22-year-old daughter of Bartholomew Hlapane, former executive member of the African National Congress. He goes on to explain how she opened that door on December 6, 1982, to find herself face to face with a gunman.

The narrator stops mid-'sentence, for effect, and the woman's voice comes up: "He pointed at me with the gun and just started shooting ...not caring who he hit." The camera pans to show holes in the wall, then cuts to a still: a file shot of Beverly's father, Bartholomew, lying dead on the floor with shotgun wounds to his chest. His wife was killed in the attack, his other daughter paralyzed.

The narrator is Peter Worthington, former editor of The Toronto Sun, politician manque, freelancer and editor of Influence magazine. The dramatic reenactment of the Hlapane murder begins The ANC Method-Violence, a half-hour Worthington editorial on videotape that paints the African National Congress as a vicious, communist-controlled terrorist group. The brutally graphic production has been virtually ignored by the media.

South African expatriates and the ANC have labeled it propaganda; Worthington prefers to call it "a personal view." Hugh Winsor, national political editor for The Globe and Mail, who covered South Africa for the now defunct Toronto Telegram, says: "It is not straight-up journalism. I would have seen it as more valid if he indicated where he got the footage and where he got the help."

"Historically, it's a new kind of war, a new kind of morality," says narrator Worthington. "The war zone is the world, the aggressors are the PLO, the IRA, the ANC, the Red Brigade and a host of other revolutionary terrorist organizations." Sirens howl in the background. On the screen flash pictures of chaotic street battles and their repercussions: the dead and wounded lying on the ground; a limp, bloody body dropped into a coffin.

Worthington continues: "The front lines remain undeclared and the victims can be anybody." The violins sing their ghastly sear. Worthington guides the viewer through a series of "terrorist" acts. The aftermath of a bombing at the Rome airport. In South Africa, a woman lying on the ground, severely burned and swollen but still alive; she has been "necklaced," collared with an oil-soaked tire that was then set afire. The hijacking of a jet in the Middle East. Though the ANC is not explicitly linked to terrorist groups, Worthington's words and the file clips connect, in the viewer's mind, the South African political movement to terrorism.

Worthington appears, dressed in jacket and tie, staring out from the television screen. His voice is deep and smooth, with the hint of a lisp catching the occasional "s", his delivery flawless. "I'm afraid I'm convinced that the Western media, Western politicians and academics, and all too many church figures are not so much interested in a peaceful solution to South Africa's problems, but want bloodshed and an overthrow of the system-at any price-even if it ends up being a Marxist regime."

Then to a shot of Beyers Naude, a top official with the South African Council of Churches. He is speaking to a crowd, pledging "peace, but peace with justice," his head framed by the hammer and sickle on a banner behind him.

Craig Williamson, a burly white South African with a bushy brown beard and an English South African accent, appears in the video speaking out against the ANC. His knowledge of the topic is intimate: he is, according to the identification on the screen, a "former member of the ANC/ SACP [South African Communist Party]." Why he left is not revealed, but the impression is that he became disgruntled, as Bartholomew Hlapane had.

In fact, Williamson was a spy for South African government intelligence who infiltrated the ANC for two years, a fact not mentioned in Worthington's production. "He's an articulate man, and I thought that the information [Williamson had] was what was relevant, not the reasons why," Worthington says now. "It's the information that's important, not the source. [But] I wish, in retrospect, I had put that in.

"Worthington is adamant that the video was never intended to show both sides, just a different view. "I don't expect anybody to accept it as the oracle," he says, "but I think most of the stuff can be supported. There's no question that I'm not trying to do the ultimate pros and cons. When you start getting into that kind of thing, you get into a great, long documentary kind of thing, which I don't have either the knowledge or the resources to do adequately."

He says he made the video on the spur of the moment, out of frustration with Western media coverage of South Africa. While in the country last summer on a "six or seven" week assignment for Reader's Digest, he met up with four journalists who shared his view of Western news reporting.

According to Worthington, they agreed to pool their resources and produce the tape, using their employers' film, cameras and editing equipment (which is why he refuses to name his crew, except to say they are "private individuals" from England, Australia and South Africa).

"It's just a question of staying after hours," Worthington says. "It was done very quickly." He wrote the script one morning, then read it to camera that afternoon. And while he went about some interviews for his Reader's Digest piece (which in early March the magazine had neither received nor scheduled) a cameraman followed. The rest of the film was made up of file footage, some of it from the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation. Most of the editing was done in South Africa, with only the final cut, made in Canada.

Worthington had the finished product in his hands, having spent virtually nothing out of his pocket. "If it cost me anything, it cost me a cab ride," he says.

Distribution cost him even less. That was handled by Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, a right-wing organization based in Toronto. CFAR agreed to the task after Worthington's attempts to get his taped views aired on public television got nowhere, says Paul Fromm, CFAR's research director. And while the television producers were saying no, CFAR's members were nodding yes, snatching up 4,000 copies of the tape and its 12-page companion booklet in five months.

Members of Parliament were each sent a copy, and 400 more went to major media outlets across the country.

Meanwhile, Worthington was also circulating copies to his friends, and this was how it caught the attention of David Somerville, a former employee of Worthington's at The Toronto Sun. Somerville is president of the National Citizens' Coalition, another right-wing pressure group in Toronto. He offered the tape to his membership, which numbers 36,000, at $12 apiece ("at cost"). The NCC sold 600-more than double what it expected.

Somerville calls the video a "journalistic effort at setting the record straight on the ANC."Others argue differently. The ANC's Canadian representative, Yusuf Saloojee, says, "What Worthington is doing is working the South African government propaganda machinery. It's a distortion of reality, of what is really going on in the country. He totally stays away from state violence."

"The video is not concerned with the truth," says Peter Harries-Jones, a former journalist in South Africa. "It doesn't want you to believe all of it. All it wants to do is put a quote in your mind: 'I, Peter Worthington, believe the ANC is a Marxist organization run by savages.'" Harries-Jones, now professor of anthropology at York University, believes the video could not have been made without some assistance from the South African government-a notion Worthington denies. Since censorship and other press restrictions were imposed under the state-of-emergency regulations, he says, scenes such as the ones in The ANC Method-Violence would be difficult to get. "

In order to go into the [black] townships as Worthington has done, he had to have permission-particularly to get the scenes of violence."Toronto Life editor Marq de Villiers, an Afrikaner and a former correspondent in South Africa, comments: "The video is a combination of truth, half-truth and misrepresentation." He feels Worthington truly believes the arguments in the video. "I don't believe he's a liar. He's sincere. But that doesn't mean he's telling the truth."

Throughout the books by Trevor Harrison and Murray Dobbin there are repeated references to Northern Foundation members also belonging to the National Citizens Coalition. Paul Fromm was a regular speaker at Northern Foundation conferences. The Reform Party was heavily involved in the Pro-Apartheid movement.

Their motivation was protecting corporations who would lose massive profit if they had to start paying the black labour force of South Africa, a reasonable wage. Reform members were extremely pro-Anglo, to say the least.

As Murray Dobbin points out, Stephen Harper was always careful not to write extremist views into their policy book, but I could see his involvement with these players feeding his ego.

But Peter Worthington now campaigning for the Conservatives? Yikes! I hope Brian Abrams knows what he's doing.

Stephen Harper, The Northern Foundation and Peter Worthington

This is the second part of a topic I'm delving into, relating to Stephen Harper's involvement with a group he helped found: The Northern Foundation, and his Reform Party's pro-active stance against the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

Since the Conservative government has started targeting Kingston as a riding they really want, we have been introduced to some of the worst dregs the Reform Party had to offer, including Gerry Nicholls, who wrote a piece against Michael Ignatieff. Nicholls was VP of the National Citizens Coalition when Harper was president, and is one of the biggest rednecks in Canada.

However, it was a column by Peter Worthingon that caused the most concern, but thanks to that article I could link the National Citizens Coalition to the Nelson Mandela story, which means that Harper has scored the trifecta.

A bio of Mr. Worthington can be found at Wikipedia but I'm going to just give a few brief bits of it that are very important:

A conservative, Worthington led the brash new tabloid throughout the 1970s as it campaigned against the government of Pierre Trudeau. At one point he was jailed after being accused of violating the Official Secrets Act.

Worthington was criticized when it was revealed that he had informed to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation about the suspected political sympathies of a number of his friends including June Callwood.

Worthington is the stepfather of conservative writer Danielle Crittenden (She has been critical of the feminist movement and is considered to be a social conservative. Crittenden is the editor of The Women’s Quarterly magazine. She is married to former George W. Bush special assistant and speechwriter David Frum and resides in Washington DC.) and is thereby David Frum's father-in-law.

David Frum is a close insider with Harper's party and in fact it was on his suggestion that Stockwell Day, then Alliance Party leader, refused to send condolences to the Palestinian people on the death of President Yassir Arafat. "In a November 16 email to his Conservative colleagues Mr. Day stated: "Some of you have asked why I have not released a statement of condolence or sympathy. As you know, there are two sides to the Arafat story. You pick...." He then included in the email an article by David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush, indulging in unfounded speculation about the cause of Arafat’s death. Frum suggested that Arafat’s symptoms “sounded AIDS-like.”

Now we know where Harper got his "cut and run" speech that he delivered on his first official visit to Afghanistan. At the time I stated that 'Harper makes a great ventriloquist's dummy, but I think I saw G.W. lips move'. The speech was a condensed version of one given by Bush to the U.S. Naval Academy.

That's what we're going to be up against, though Abrams may regret exposing these people to Kingstonians, and aligning them with his party.

But back to Worthington. This relates to a story I found, written by John Saul, entitled: History Matters South African History. He goes into the story of Worthington and his involvement with the pro-Apartheid movement in the 1980's.

Mr. Saul can relate his story as a member of the anti-Apartheid movement taking place at the same time and through the two books I've been sharing; we can connect Stephen Harper, His Reform Party and his Northern Foundation.

Now for excerpts from:

Two Fronts of Anti-Apartheid Struggle: South Africa and Canada
History Matters
South African History
John Saul
May 13, 2009

I have been, for most of my adult life, a student of southern African, including South African, affairs, I was pleased but also intrigued to receive an invitation from Ingrid and the South African Association of Canadian Studies to come to SA to give several talks and seminars in this country (and also to “launch” my most recent book, Empire and Decolonization, as I will do at The Book Lounge on Thursday evening).

But let me also insert parenthetically, right at the outset, what amounts to a personal disclaimer of my own – before I proceed to the more important business of the collaboration between Canada and South Africa in support of apartheid as well as the much more savoury links between (many) Canadians and (most) South Africans in resistance to that system.

As you no doubt can surmise, my own roots are European too, albeit grounded in another country of English conquest, with my ancestors coming to Canada from Ireland in the 1850s ... the decisions of my ancestors to migrate to Canada rather than to South Africa are another of those might-have-beens of history – though in this case no doubt it is one that is of no interest to anybody but myself!

"... Where then, I asked myself back in Canada, should I enter into the topic evoked by my title: Two Fronts of Anti-Apartheid Struggle: South Africa and Canada?

To begin with, there are obvious parallels between the two countries, not least in the fact that both Canada and South Africa, as we know them, were targets and outcomes of Western European imperial conquest. True, the histories were somewhat different. In Canada, the indigenous societies, some agrarian-based and others premised on hunting, trapping and a more nomadic existence, were an easy target for something very close to quasi-genocide for much of our early history, and then an extreme form of marginalization more recently.

On the other hand, in South Africa, at least beyond the Cape, the large and more firmly settled and grounded indigenous African populations were less vulnerable to any such “final solution.” Instead, here, whites – when not killing blacks and driving them off the most economically promising land – became adept, as we know all too well, at availing themselves, to the advantage of the white-dominated economy, of the labour of such indigenes.

Not that there were no insights from these diverse processes of conquest and settlement to be shared. Quite the contrary. In fact, instructive parallels were readily grasped, on both continents, by the oppressors themselves, South African leaders, for example, turning eagerly to Canadian experience with “Indian reservations” for guidance in further crafting and firming up their “homeland” structures in the 1920s. (Remember in the first part of this story I mentioned Reform Party member Norman Wallace: "Wallace created considerable controversy in 1987 when he and others involved in a group called the Indian Business Development Association put up money for a South African tour for five Saskatchewan Indian leaders ... intended to give the Pretoria regime a public relations weapon - using aboriginal conditions in Canada to demonstrate the Canadian government's hypocrisy.")

As Ron Bourgeault, a leading writer on such themes, notes:

It is significant that South Africa came to Canada at different times since the Boer War asking and getting permission to study the Canadian system by which Indian people were controlled and managed separately from the politically dominant white population. South African took what it needed and applied it to its own situation: first to segregation, and after the Second World War to apartheid. The fundamental difference between Canada and South Africa was [as I have myself noted above: JSS] that Canada was interested in segregating and managing, as cheaply as possible, a population it did not want as an important source of labour. South Africa was interested in the same type of relationship, but for a people whose labour it needed and wanted cheaply.

"As Borgeault further observes, “South Africa turned to Canada in the first decade of the 20th century,” since “Canada was probably the only advanced capitalist state that had elaborate system of administration and territorial segregation of an internally colonized indigenous population, a possible exception being the United States.”

"Indeed, Canada’s Dominions Land Act of the 1870s (after which the South African Land Settlement Act of 1912 and 1913 was actually patterned, according to Bourgeault), and related acts including our very Indian Act, restricted Indians, as they were then termed (now “First Nations” people), from acquiring property or trading their goods off the reserves.

They also deprived Indians of the vote, and even established a kind of pass system for exit and re-entry to reserves. Small wonder that apartheid South Africa was interested.

"... No surprise, then, that as late as 1962 the South African ambassador to Canada, W. Dirkseven-Schalwyck, made an extensive tour of reserves in western Canada, meeting churches and visiting agency headquarters and educational and agricultural facilities. The ambassador studied the form of band government, the relationship of the central state apparatus of Indian Affairs to the bands, and social and economic problems encountered on the reserves. The ambassador’s interest was in how the Indians were maintained in their “homelands,” and how the central state related administratively to their maintenance.

"A second, related point bears noting here. For there were also some intriguing activities undertaken by an apartheid government that continued to play its own tune on the embarrassing parallels between the histories of the two countries. This was particularly notable during the deeply unpleasant Glenn Babb’s aggressive tour of duty as South Ambassador to Canada in the mid-1980s. (Further to Norman Wallace: "(Reform Party member) Wallace cultivated a friendship with South African ambassador Glen Baab and was instrumental in introducing him to other Saskatoon businessmen during a Baab tour to Saskatchewan in March 1987. (Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Author: Murray Dobbin Goodread Biographies/Formac Publishing 1992 ISBN: 0-88780-161-7, pg. 105)

"True, the bulk of native leadership in Canada – even as they pressed forward with their continuing claims and demands against the Canadian government – scorned this practice and made it clear, in Borgeault words, “that the Indian people of Canada [refused] not go down in history as allies of racist fascism.” But there was some kind of parallel nonetheless, and momentarily Babb made the most of it.

And, not surprisingly, he found support for such tricks and for the evil apartheid regime that sponsored them in Canada more widely: there was, in fact, a considerable network of backing for the combination of prejudice and profit that spawned a support for apartheid South Africa in Canada and hence a certain degree of organized pro-apartheid agitation existed, especially amongst the privileged classes.

"The crudely racist, flamboyantly anti-communist and vividly right-wing journalism of Peter Worthington was a particularly prominent feature of this for anyone living in Toronto during these years, but those of us in the Canadian anti-apartheid network at the time were well aware of its broader reach.

"For example, a well-researched 1988 article in the western Canadian journal Briarpatch listed a host of right-wing and business-related groups hard at work defending apartheid: the Western Canadian Society of South Africa and the extremely well-connected Canadian-South African Society, for example. Indeed the husband of Canada’s then Governor-General, Jeanne Sauve, was actually a member of the latter until shamed into resigning in 1985.

"But note carefully the operative phrase I used above: prejudice AND profit. (both relate to the ideology of the Reform Party)

By the latter years of the twentieth century the links forged between the Canadian and the apartheid establishments were not primarily based on shared racism in fact, or even on shared Cold War mantras but on the bald logic of mutual profit-seeking – although it was only last year that our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, saw fit to rise in Parliament in Ottawa and offer “an apology to the indigenous people in Canada for the injustices done to them for generations by successive Canadian governments” in the twentieth century. (Does Mr. Saul know of the connections between Stephen Harper's Northern Foundation and all of these groups involved in the pro-Apartheid movement?)

Moreover, just two weeks ago, Phil Fontaine, the National Chief of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations had an audience with Pope Benedict in the Vatican; there the Pope also apologized for the Church’s participation in various acts of cultural despoliation inflicted upon Native communities in Canada.

Nonetheless, in our own anti-apartheid support work our primary, indeed seemingly endless, preoccupation was with contemporary Canadian corporate links with South Africa.

"... The corporate response was, at best, stony silence (although there were also some attempts to infiltrate private spies into our ranks (Remember from part one of this story, regarding Donovan Carter: his operation fell apart when two of his recruits from Winnipeg, Geoff Shaw and Ihor Wichacz, became increasingly worried about the tasks they were assigned and went public ... they were asked to infiltrate anti-apartheid groups.... "))

"... Nonetheless, although support that indulged both in various euphemisms for racism and in uncritical cheer-leading for capitalism – together with judicious red-baiting – did grind on, it also began to become apparent, during the 1980s, that changes were afoot in the western governmental-cum-corporate sphere with respect to South Africa, including in Canada, changes of no small magnitude. Of course, the roots of a rethinking lay primarily here inside South Africa itself and in the continuing escalation of internal resistance here of the mid-80s. But, as we now know, there were also the meetings of business heavyweights with the ANC that were re-writing the ground rules of “common-sense” in South Africa.

In the final part of this story, I will show the links between Worthington, the Reform Party and Harper's Northern Foundation, and finally the National Citizens Coalition. It's been quite a journey.

Stephen Harper, the Northern Foundation and Nelson Mandela

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

The above video is an important one to play as the soundtrack for this story of Stephen Harper and the group he was a founding member of: The Northern Foundation. One of it's initial goals was to fight against the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, the end of Apartheid and our government's economic sanctions imposed on the white South African government.

It would be two more years before Simple Plan's Mandela Day message would be realized, but it was well worth the wait. Mr. Mandela's name is now synonymous with racial struggles, though his 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, came at a hefty price.

Harper's Northern Foundation and the Roots of Reform

"‘The Northern Foundation was established in 1989, originally as a pro-South Africa group . . . lists among the founding members of the Foundation both William Gairdner and Stephen Harper ... " (1)

"... the Northern Foundation was the creation of a number of generally extreme right-wing conservatives, including Anne Hartmann (a director of REAL Women), Geoffrey Wasteneys (A long-standing member of the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada), George Potter (also a member of the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada), author Peter Brimelow, Link Byfield (son of Ted Byfield and himself publisher/president of Alberta Report), and Stephen Harper." (2)

So what exactly was meant by pro-South Africa group?

The following excerpts are from both Trevor Harrison's and Murray Dobbin's books as sourced at the bottom of the page, and provide the framework for the pro-Apartheid South Africa stand taken by the Reform Party and Harper's Northern Foundation. As Mr. Dobbin stated in his book, Stephen Harper and Preston Manning were always very careful not to write extremist views into their policies, but the people invited to both NF conferences and Reform conventions tell a different story.

"... the notion that some Reform members may have strong Anglo-Saxon nativist inclinations is supported by more than merely the background profiles of its leaders, members and supporters. It is supported also by the words of many of its ideological mentors who depict Canada as not only historically an Anglo-Saxon country but also part of a wider Anglo-Saxon culture that is in need of recognizing and re-establishing its heritage.

"Read for example Peter Brimelow's* words bemoaning the eclipse of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. 'At the end of the nineteenth century, belief in the superiority of the Anglo Saxon values ... (was) the most social norm in every English-speaking country ... For WASP supremacists everywhere, however, the twentieth century has been a most distressing experience.' (3)

And Again:

'The twentieth century has proved bitter. The values that are common to the English-speaking peoples are in a minority in the world, and on the defensive. Future historians might well be surprised that at this late date the English-speaking countries remain so self-absorbed, and despite their common ancestry, show so little conscious awareness of their common interests'.

"Voiced by some prominent Reform supporters, the notion of a 'common heritage' seems to encompass the white settler colonies of the former empire, including white South Africa. Consider, for example, Stan Water's** reluctance to criticize the slow pace of ending apartheid in South Africa: 'If history has any parallelism, you might find a very serious problem emerging in South Africa which may dwarf the objectionable features of the current administration ... I always ask Mr. (Foreign Affairs Minister) Joe Clark, if South Africa's going to change, what black Nation do you want it to imitate? Most of them are despotic...'

"Water's musings are not singular. Murray Dobbin has chronicled extensively the pro-white South Africa actions and sympathies of numerous people within the party, including Ted Byfield*** and Arthur Child. This support for white South Africa, a country whose political system was based on racial group affiliation, by many within the Reform party ... cannot be explained adequately unless one accepts the notion that many Reformers strongly identify with 'Anglo' culture. This identification is nowhere more strongly enunciated than in William D. Gairdner's**** Trouble With Canada" (3)

But Stan Water's views would not limited to South Africa:

"Water's views and his frankness in expressing them covered a wide range of issues. On the topic of despotic governments, he referred primarily to black African governments. And this commitment to democracy was qualified: 'South Africa should think twice before allowing majority rule because most black African countries live under tyranny ... If history has any parallelism, you might find a very serious problem emerging in South Africa which may dwarf the objectionable features of the current administration ... it may be impossible to transport our version of democracy to South Africa.' (4)

And of the Northern Foundation and Reform Party in general:

"It claims that common sense Canadians ... who appreciate Canada's British and Christian heritage and oppose forced bilingualism, destabilizing immigration policies and government promoted official multiculturalism. It adopts the National Citizens Coalition slogan "More freedom through less government.'

"...The foundation's magazine carries a half-page ad in every issue for the Phoenix, a pro-white South Africa magazine, and regularly solicits support from members on special causes, from property rights to English language rights. Attacks on homosexuals and homosexual rights are frequent ..."

"The South Africa Connection: There is good reason to believe that groups sympathetic to (white) South Africa have seen the party as an ally, especially in the days when trade sanctions, strongly supported by Canada, were proving damaging to the South African economy and it's prestige. That was in 1988-89. And it was during this period in particular that a number of pro-South African groups organized efforts to undermine Canadian policy and to spread pro-South African literature across the country. All of these groups had some degree of contact with the South African embassy in Ottawa ... Key individuals in those organizations have also played and continue to play important roles in the Reform party.

"It's not surprising that these individuals and the South Africa embassy would see Reform as a friendly party. Stan Water's frequent sympathetic references to (white) South Africa ... His attacks on Canada's giving aid to black African countries and his labelling of them as despotic, corrupt dictatorships cast Waters as a hero for the extreme right. William Gairdner, the man most often used as a key-note speaker by Preston Manning, is also an outspoken supporter of South Africa. In 'The Trouble With Canada', he repeatedly decries Canada's policy on South Africa and, like Waters, levels attacks on the "One party dictatorships of Black African countries...."

"Ted Byfield is also a prominent figure in the pro-south Africa community.... Byfield has also written for 'International Conservative Insight', a far-right foreign affairs magazine published by the Canadian Conservative Centre and featuring articles by South African ambassadors and many of Canada's far right-wing journalists - including Lubor Zink, Peter Brimelow, and Reform member Doug Collins of Vancouver.

"Water's military background and his business connections got the attention of pro-South African activists long before he became external affairs spokesman for the Reform Party .. and that attention paid off ... Arthur Child the president of Burns Meats ... has openly supported South Africa for twenty years ... he is also on the board of Canadian-South African Society (CSAS) ... founded in 1979 and was involved says Child, in 'trying to counteract the anti-South African sentiment in Ottawa ... we distributed information on South Africa - mostly to MPs.

"(CSAS) was founded to bring together Canadian and American subsidiary business interests in South Africa ...Their profit levels are high - often twice their returns in companies ventures in Canada - due to their ability to pay low wages and almost no benefits to black labour.' "Most of the thirty member board are from Ontario ... a few were from the west ... one of these was Norman Wallace of Saskatoon ... a founding member of the Reform party ... He set up Eagle Staff Import Export Ltd. to further business ties with South Africa.

"Wallace created considerable controversy in 1987 when he and others involved in a group called the Indian Business Development Association put up money for a South African tour for five Saskatchewan Indian leaders ... intended to give the Pretoria regime a public relations weapon - using aboriginal conditions in Canada to demonstrate the Canadian government's hypocrisy. But as active as he was, Wallace was not the most prominent South African supporter to join the Reform Party early on. That title belongs to Donovan Carter, a former television broadcaster in Calgary ... Carter was identified as a paid agent of the South African embassy by the program "The Fifth Estate" in November 1989. He was a member of the Calgary group called the Western Society of South Africa. He was also host of a TV show called 'South Africa Report'....

"... Carter discussed his work with Patrick Evans, the embassy's First Secretary and they decided that the most effective way to undermine Canadian policy was to set up "a friends of South Africa" front groups across the country ... his operation fell apart when two of his recruits from Winnipeg, Geoff Shaw and Ihor Wichacz, became increasingly worried about the tasks they were assigned and went public. At first they were simply engaged in letter writing campaigns .. using their own and other people's names in letters to the editor ... then they were asked to infiltrate anti-apartheid groups. Worried, they spoke to ... CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), who told them to go ahead.

[Reform Party member] Carter did not restrict himself to promoting South Africa in his work with front groups. Through him Shaw and Wichacz regularly received material from a whole range of right-wing groups, particularly from the U.S. Wichacz told 'The Fifth Estate'; 'I started getting a lot of right-wing revisionist literature, stuff concerning Lyndon Larouche ... literature that the Holocaust never happened. Literature, let's say, from Posse Comitatas ... ... Carter worked closely with Stan Waters after joining the party soon after its founding. 'I've been sending him certain intelligence reports that we get from England. I happen to be associated with the best intelligence group in the world'.

"Carter confirms that it was Stan Waters who wrote the rather cryptic foreign policy, which appeared in the 1989 Blue Book, and also confirms that it was inspired by Canada's policy towards black African states and South Africa: 'It most definitely was. I have letters from him saying that's what he thought'.

"There is little doubt that many pro-South Africa activists have found their way into the Reform Party. Some have gained prominence. Maurice Tugwell, a friend of Stan Waters, is former head of the Center for Conflict Studies ... An expert in counter-insurgency, he is also on the board of the Canadian-South African Society and an active member of the Reform Party. Angus Gunn, a Reform member in Vancouver, is president of the Canadian Buthelezi .. which has sent $ 100,000.00 to Buthelezi ... the Zulu chieftain ... a rival of Nelson Mandela ...

"Doug Collins is a member of Canadian Friends of South Africa ... and has written numerous sympathetic articles ... Collins is also a member of CFAR ... an extremist right-wing group founded by Paul Fromm. While Manning felt obliged to stop the candidacy of the outspoken Doug Collins (he wanted to run for the reform Party in 1988), he seems less concerned about Donovan Carter, a man whose activities - including organized spying for a foreign power - have been mostly clandestine and therefore not an embarrassment to the party." (5)

But despite Stephen Harper's Northern Foundation and the Reform Party, Nelson Mandela prevailed.

Footnotes:

*Peter Brimelow was also around during the early. Dubbed a paleoconservative, his book: The Patriot Game: National Dreams & Political Realities, was an inspiration to Stephen Harper and his firend John Weissenberger: “Brimelow’s book, that was a big influence at the time,” Weissenberger says. ... We both read it with great interest and discussed a lot of the points in it. Brimelow identified a number of areas of conflict within Canada that the current system was papering over, the Quebec question being the largest one. We were so impressed that we actually went to one bookstore and we said, ‘OK, we want to buy ten copies of this book, what deal will you give us?’ So we bought ten copies and gave them to all our friends.” (6)

**Stan Waters was a founding member of the Reform Party of Canada and the first elected senator, though he never served. He was seen as one of the [Reform] party's most popular early spokesmen and policy communicators, speaking at numerous party rallies and events from 1987 to 1991. (Wikipedia)

***Ted Byfield was not only an early Reform Party member but also the founder of the secretive Civitas Society, that now plays an integral role in the Reform-Alliance-Conservative movement.

****William Gairdner was not only an early Reform Party and Northern Foundation member, but his book the Trouble With Canada ".. helped lay the groundwork for Reform Party policy." (7) He is also a founding member of the Civitas Society.

Sources:

1. Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Author: Murray Dobbin Goodread Biographies/Formac Publishing 1992 ISBN: 0-88780-161-7, pg. 100

2. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada. Author: Trevor Harrison Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, Pg. 121

3. Harrison 1995. Pg 170-171

4. Dobbin. 1992 Pg. 93

5. Dobbin. 1992. Pg. 100-107

6. Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada. by William Johnson, ISBN 0-7710 4350-3, 2005, Pg. 52

7. Dobbin, 1992, Pg. 165

We Can't Ignore the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. But Who is the Underdog?

The reasons given for our allegiance to Israel are:

1. Their strategic value

2. They deserve unqualified support because they are weak and surrounded by enemies

3. They are a democracy

4. The Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment.

5. Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries.

But how accurate are those assumptions?

1. Strategic Value

Israel is certainly geographically strategic in the Middle East, but can they be counted on? History has shown that Israel will always put their own needs first. They have often worked against American interests, while receiving generous financial and military support from the U.S.
And because of the U.S. support, it has made that nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks from those who have suffered because of Israeli aggression. And it's meant that they, and now us because of Harper's shift in foreign policy, must be accepting of Israeli war crimes, further alienating us from the Arab world.




2. Israel is Weak and Surrounded by Enemies

Israel is surrounded by enemies, most of their own making, but they are hardly weak. According to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Watt in their thesis on the subject.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel.

According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents. (1)

And Israel's conduct is only inflaming hatred and leaving them vulnerable to what Chalmers Johnson calls 'blowback'. Expected revenge.

Israel's greatest single political prob­lem is the daily threat of blowback from the Palestinian people and their Islamic allies because of Israeli policies of displacing Palestinians from their lands and repressing those that remain under their jurisdiction. (2)

And even after the Americans received their own "blowback" on 9/11, Bush still incited hatred from the Arab nations, with his silly and insensitive comments. From the Book on Bush by Eric Alterman and Mark Green:

Bush's simplistic nostrums about good and evil did not travel well. While many in Europe and elsewhere viewed the attacks on the towers to be unconscionable, they nevertheless understood the context in which they arose. Millions of Arabs were frustrated by their own lack of personal and political freedom, denied to them by autocratic and corrupt governments that maintained their despotic rule in part through their alliances with the United States. Israel was a particular source of grievance. Al-Jazeera broadcast daily the brutalities that the Likud government, armed with American weapons, visited upon the stateless Palestinians while settlers continued to occupy expropriated lands with the appearance of American forbearance, if not exactly its blessing.

That these broadcasts ignored the Israeli argument that its violence was a response to Palestinian terrorism served only to multiply their inflammatory effect. In Saudi Arabia, home to the majority of the September 11 hijackers, U.S. troops protected a corrupt, feudal monarchy that lived lavishly on oil exports and controlled access to the holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden drew sustenance from the wells of hatred these policies inspired. (3)

3. They are a Democracy

Is that really a good enough reason, especially considering that Israel violates many democratic principles:

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights. (1)

4. The Jewish People Have Suffered From Past Crimes

This is certainly true but does it give them the right to inflict so much pain on others?

[Another] justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress: If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does. (1)

And even George Bush had a brief moment of regret over the suffering of the Palestiniamns at the hands of the Israelis:

In another of these bizarre instances, Bush once found himself confronted by a series of photographs of wounded Palestinian children by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Bush reportedly cried out, "I want peace. I don't want to see any people killed on both sides. I think God loves me. I think God loves the Palestinians. I think God loves the Israelis. We cannot allow this to continue." He then grabbed the hands of his guests and asked them to join him in prayer, as both sides looked on in an apparent state of shock. But while God may have loved both the Israelis and the Palestinians as His children, Bush loved only the former. Or rather, only Israel was represented in Mr. Bush's eyes by a "good man"—Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whom Bush deemed to be a "man of peace." As a result, Sharon, like Mr. Putin, was given a free hand to defy Bush's wishes and deal with his enemies however he saw fit, irrespective of God's purported affections. Virtually all the progress made toward peace under the Clinton administration dissipated as a result. (Pg. 4)

5. Israel’s Conduct has Been Morally Superior

This is an absolute falsehood They have behaved horribly, knowing that they have a powerful friend in the United States.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF … is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’. (1)

It's time to change our foreign policy to reflect Canadian values and not give so much support to a foreign nation who is breaking all the rules of common decency.

Sources:

1. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, By: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, London Review of Books, March 23, 2006

2. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books, 2000, ISBN: 978-0-8050-7559-5, Pg. 11

3. The Book on Bush: How George W. (mis) Leads America, By Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN: 0-670-03273-5, Pg. 231

4. Alterman/Green, Pg. 192