The cost of Charest’s cowardice: Good students are being sold out
by Ezra Levant
What’s going on in Quebec cannot be called protests. The right word is riots.
That’s what you call it when masked vandals smash cars, break windows in banks and shops, night after night. And that’s on top of the smoke bombs thrown in the subway stations earlier this month that paralyzed the city’s transit system.
How is this any different from the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver?
It is different, of course. It’s worse.
Vancouver’s riot was spontaneous. They weren’t backed up with official NGOs and union organizers and bank accounts and spokesmen and press releases.
The Montreal riots are a criminal industry. Read more…
It’s starting to look as though this school co-parenting thing is more complicated than it looks. Even the bit about eating your veggies. Premier Dad hectors your kids and serves them cardboard and they just won’t bend to his will.
He is managing to lose public money… as usual. Ever since the McGuinty administration insisted school cafeterias serve revolting healthy food instead of the other kind (revolting unhealthy food) revenue has plunged as much as 30%.
Kids are eating out or choking down homemade sandwiches rather than savour a lean-meat low-sodium Daltburger on multi-grain with a side of baked potato wedges, a puny pizza slice with turkey pepperoni or some similar morsel. Mind you, the Toronto Star did find some students willing to enter the cafeteria. To keep warm in winter. Provided they didn’t have to eat the food. Read more…
We can’t have duly elected governments meeting in the open without thugs trying to shut it down now. Why can’t they just meet in secret?
One of my favourite lines from all kinds of protests is that the protester’s demands are unclear. That’s not normally the case, normally they are chanting crap like what you will hear below.
In this video police try to hold the line while making arrests.
Here’s a video from our friends at Breitbart.com that comes with a strong language warning. It shows marchers outside of a police station taunting officers and claiming that they only want a peaceful protest and don’t want any police trouble. When they don’t get any trouble from police they create some by swarming commuter train stations, smashing stuff and the like. Watch to the end.
This video from Rebel Pundit shows a large group of protesters trying to intimidate a small group of cops who are not attempting to do anything but monitor.
The monthly journal Foreign Policy recently published an essay by Mona Eltahawy titled “Why Do They Hate Us?”
Eltahawy is an American of Egyptian origin, a graduate from the American University in Cairo with a master’s degree in journalism, who publishes views on politics and culture inside the Arab world.
In the large amount of reporting from and about the Middle East, Eltahawy’s writings convey the perspectives, and hurt, of Arab and Muslim women trapped in the web of a patriarchal culture with its endemic misogyny and violence. Her recent essay was written after her own traumatic experience last November in Cairo.
There she was assaulted, groped and beaten by goons linked to security forces in Tahrir Square where the so-called “Arab Spring” gathered pace and toppled Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. Read more…
President Barack Obama has changed his mind about same-sex marriage again, partly after discussing the issue with his daughters Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10.
Nice. Now we wait for the Congressional Medal of Honor to be awarded to the “awesome cute guy” from One Direction. Can you imagine how the media would have reacted if Obama had said he’d decided to preserve the definition of marriage after chatting to the kids, or if a Republican president had used a similar line to justify a policy? Read more…
In a short form it is much like the report by the special rapporteur on the “right to food” in that it is an attempt to end national sovereignty and bring about socialism. Of course this means handing over plenty of power to global bodies. Here is recommendation 52 from the UN report Resilient People, Resilient Planet issued earlier this year. The report is on sustainable development.
Governments should consider creating a global sustainable development council to improve the integration of the three dimensions of sustainable development, address emerging issues and review sustainability progress, with meetings held on a regular basis throughout the year.
While the claim is that Agenda 21 is all about the environment it is not. As is so often the case environmentalists use their cause to advance something much bigger, a reorganization of society.
Here is part of the summary of that report which shows the people behind it see this as something much greater than “sustainable development.”
• Delivering on the fundamentals of development: international
commitments to eradicate poverty, promote human
rights and human security and advance gender equality
• Advancing education for sustainable development, including
secondary and vocational education, and building
of skills to help ensure that all of society can contribute to
solutions that address today’s challenges and capitalize
on opportunities
Here’s a quick question, why is an international planning body of the United Nations concerning itself with a very local issue like education? If this is about the environment why are the priority areas gender equality and human rights?
Now Agenda 21 is supposed to be specifically about having local planning work on sustainable development. Does it bother you that the United Nations is trying to get involved in planning at the local level? They want specific land use policies in place, they want specific urban development plans in place.
All these plans and ideas that seem to appear from your local city hall but were never discussed but then magically appear as the must do item for sustainable development – well those likely come from Agenda 21. Right now there are 30 Canadian members of what is called ICLEI, a membership group of Agenda 21 communities. Your town may be one of them.
While it sounds harmless it might not be. Sure we all want whatever development we have to be sustainable but those that throw around this term sustainable development aren’t actually speaking the same language as those who take that term at face value. As I’ve shown above the term means so much more.
The other day Lorne Gunter wrote about property rights and especially the erosion of those rights for land owners in Alberta. I think that is related to Agenda 21. The Alberta government is using restrictive land use laws and regulations to make sure they control what you do on your own land.
We’ll have more on this later. In the meantime, here is an American explanation of what the implications of Agenda 21 will be.
Our friends over at Breitbart.com broke the story on Thursday afternoon – Obama’s literary agent published a catalogue of its roster back in 1991 that stated the president was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
It was all just a mistake ABC News, one of the few mainstream American outlets to run the story, was quick to say. In fact they ran with a headline saying, “Obama’s Literary Agent Misidentified His Birthplace in 1991.” They quote Miriam Goderich as saying “This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me–an agency assistant at the time.”
Ah, but as they say on late night TV, wait, there’s more.
Then comes Steve Boman, another Chicagoan who once used the Dystel literary agency at the same time as Obama did back in the 90s. He says there was only one place the agent got biographical information from – the authors.
So far the mainstream American media are ignoring this and the Canadian media, the folks that would print a story about Sarah Palin’s third cousin twice removed if it would embarrass her, are silent as well. Some have moved to dismiss it as a mistake but it is one that survived several re-writes of Obama’s bio including the update that he was a senator.
The best the president can come out of this with is admitting that he is a liar or willing to let lies be told about his to make him seem more interesting. There is zero chance that this was a mistake that lasted for 16 years with an agency that he employed to represent him.
So if he wasn’t born in Kenya but just claimed to be then why was that? Was it to make himself more marketable in the publishing world? Was it to make himself more attractive to the ladies?
This should be front page news everywhere but it isn’t. That will only feed those that are birthers and convinced that the media is trying to cover up for Obama.
Meanwhile sites that do believe the birther theory like Infowars and World Net Daily say that this is just another piece of evidence. WND founder Joseph Farrah says he doesn’t understand media outlets, including Breitbart, distancing themselves from the birther story.
I do understand that, there is a large section of the public that dismisses anything to do with birtherism and its not just the MSM. Not being American I haven’t invested much time or thought into this and I would agree that as for defeating Obama the better issue is his horrible economic record.
That doesn’t excuse the MSM for a dereliction of duty in properly vetting the president. Now that this information is out there it is time for them to get on the job. As I said, the best case scenario for the president is that he is just a liar trying to impress people.
It is long past the time when Quebec Premier Jean Charest should have finished off this student protest plaguing his province.
All of us have the right to protest, it’s even right there in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – section 2 C freedom of peaceful assembly.
But what we have seen in Quebec, in a student strike that began on February 14th, is anything but peaceful.
On a good day these protesters simply shut down bridges and main roads in one of Canada’s biggest cities.
On a bad day they smashed store fronts, looted, burned and terrorized the city of Montreal.
This week they turned to terrorizing students that actually want to learn, those still attending classes.
Throughout all of this Premier Charest has negotiated with these thugs. Those negotiations should have ended as soon as violence started and force should have been met with force but instead violence was met with a better offer to the students from Charest.
That led us to make fun of him and the idea that he had lost his man bits.
But the reality is this mess in Quebec is not funny. People’s lives have been put at risk by the mob that is attempting to overthrow democratic rule in Quebec – that may sound like a stretch to call it that but that is what this is. The student mob is trying to over throw democracy.
The duly elected government of Quebec has decided to increase tuition rates at colleges and universities that they control. They presented a budget bill which had to be debated and passed through the legislature. The mob didn’t like this, they wanted it to stop.
But unable to accomplish their goals through democratic means they have resorted to running wild through the streets, to violence, to putting smoke bombs in subway stations filled with thousands of people and finally, yesterday, they call in a bomb threat to the legislature that was debating a bill to deal with the strike.
The students don’t like democracy because they think they know better, they think they know the will of the people.
In her bestselling book Demonic, Ann Coulter looked at the mob mentality that shows up in society from time to time and specifically what drives the mob.
They will not stop because they think they know what the people want. Pesky little things like elections and rule of law and parliament obviously don’t matter to these thugs.
So what to do?
In Coulter’s study of mobs over the last two to three centuries she found that the only effective way to deal with mobs is to smash them, not negotiate.
Jean Charest should not only pass his bill to deal with the strike he should withdraw the offer to extend the tuition increase over 7 years instead of 5. He should instruct police not to tolerate the rioting any longer and to enforce the many court injunctions to open schools back up.
Remember, most students aren’t taking part in these strikes but many have had their classes cancelled by thugs blocking doorways, professors who have walked out in support of the thugs and police that have failed to act.
Another step Charest should take is to find a way to fire those cops or professors who refuse to abide by and enforce the court orders.
Meet force with force and teach the thugs that they cannot bully democracy.
The cost of Charest’s cowardice: Good students are being sold out
