Who gurs? Uighurs!

As you will have noticed, I can't be bothered to post anything really serious about Guantanamo: the moral 'issues' are not hard enough to be intellectually interesting, and you can always go read Glenn Greenwald to get good and fired up. But I would like to offer up a brief prayer to the fickle gods of immigration that (instead of/in addition to Omar Khadr) Canada gets sent some of the Guantanamo Uighurs. They've been treated atrociously, to put it mildly; the probability of there being an Al-Qaeda mastermind among them is close to zero; it would deeply, deeply piss off the tyrannical and racist Chinese regime they made the mistake of standing up to, which is an intrinsically good thing to do; and the Uighurs make noodles.

A fascinating Silk Road culture, a burbling hotpot of East and Western culinary influences, the Uighurs may be the most significant noodle-making culture still unrepresented domestically. Canada has a proud tradition of noodle- and dumpling-oriented refugee policy: we welcomed the Hungarians in '56, the Vietnamese boat people decades later, and the Tibetans more recently (momos!). But so far as I can tell, still no significant Uighur presence (except for this poor guy). It is time that this un-Canadian injustice was rectified, and we got us some of them flung noodles that Alford and Duguid keep going on about.

Same as the old boss

I realize half the point of the front page is to toady to the powerful, with photos, but really: trying to pass off Hillary Clinton sounding sternly anti-Hamas as either 'smart power' or 'tough diplomacy' -- for that matter, trying to pass it off as news -- is pretty pathetic.

Meanwhile doomed U.N. attempts to stop the fighting make page A15, as do the completely disgusting efforts by the Israeli right to ban Arab political parties. So far the Globe has had 0 coverage of Olmert's claim to dictate American voting at the UN, which has been a pretty big scandal in the US. And today's editorial -- after nothing on Gaza or Israel for at least the previous four days -- is condemning, of all things, the UN Human Rights Council, which is indeed a wacky chronically anti-Israeli group -- but who cares? It's hard to imagine a more pusillanimous choice of focus: it enables the Globe to insinuate that the Harper government is being rational and even-handed and standing up for the little guy, when in terms of the realities on the ground they're aggressively cheerleading for the bullies. Ugh -- it's really hard to know which is being more cynical, cowardly and self-discrediting here, our government or our press.

You heard it here first: 'tough diplomacy' is going to be the 'compassionate conservatism' of the new regime. A have-it-both-ways oxymoron whose two sides, somewhat miraculously, both manage to be lies. Unless you can tell me how refusing to talk or engage with the powerless, under orders from another country's government, is either tough or diplomatic. 'Soft power' -- same thing.

Why is this morning's paper all about the Golden Globes?

For some aggregation and sorting of information on Gaza, to which I have nothing very original to add, see the Galloping Beaver and Dr. Dawg. They make the point en passant that the Ignatieff Liberals are now following the Conservatives as they follow the Americans into mindless cheerleading for the very worst aspects of Israeli policy. And though our mainstream media isn't quite as indoctrinated as the US one (for just how bad it is down there, see Glenn Greenwald passim), it's still pretty reluctant to use the phrase 'war crimes' however well the shoe may fit. The Globe's coverage of Canadian foreign policy in all this has been dire bordering on invisible, thus neatly matching the policy itself. Demonstrations by Arab-Canadians don't even make the print edition.

What I'm still waiting to read is some analysis of how and why the Canadian spectrum got twisted in this way. Everybody knows what the Americans' problem is: AIPAC, and a political system so beholden to big money that a handful of rich fanatics can fix the Overton window wherever they want, wherever the rights and wrongs and the national interest may stand. (Again, that's AIPAC: it's a mistake to speak in more general terms of the Jewish lobby or Jewish voters, not only because of the unpleasant conspiracy-theory sound but because the ordinary Jewish voter is a sane person who has very little to do with all this -- just as ordinary Israelis know perfectly well that it is not actually in their interest to have the Sharons and Netanyahus constantly egged on by the most powerful nation on earth.)

But Canada doesn't have an AIPAC equivalent, so far as I know. (If we do, it's really time for someone to do an article on it.) So what's going on here? Why are Harper and Ignatieff trying to outdo each other in mealymouthed support for the insupportable? There's no way it's a vote-winner in the long run. Admittedly Harper's base includes the creepy kind of evangelical who 'supports' Israel in the sense of hoping it will do something awful enough to bring about the End Times, but is he really that far off his rocker himself? Or is it just that if the US decides to jump off a tall building, we always feel compelled to follow sooner or later? But the closest parallel to America's crazy Israel policy is their crazy Cuba policy, also dictated by a handful of unpleasant rich extremists; and Canadians have always rather enjoyed thumbing their noses at that one.

Ah, a closer communion with Mister Google has corrected me: we do indeed have our very own AIPAC. (I knew about Gerry Schwartz, which is how I knew what to ask Mister G.; but I thought he was a one-off.) Interesting that I had to go to this somewhat marginal lefty venue to find out about it -- and I wouldn't necessarily vouch for the impeccable fairness and insight of all the reporting there. Still, res ipsa loquitur. Alas.

Nolen to India

Stephanie Nolen, surely the Globe's best reporter these days, is leaving the Africa beat. The farewell article makes it clear why five years is enough, but it's too bad -- good reporting on Africa is a really scarce commodity. The stories she emphasises are mostly the obvious ones (AIDS in South Africa, Congo civil war), but the ones I remember best were a series on Mugabe this spring and summer, when it looked like the evil old bastard might actually go. God knows why they would have talked to her, but her articles gave you a vivid sense of listening in on debates among the Old Man's cronies -- far more detailed and telling than anything I read anywhere else. Likewise her attempts to explain the awful anti-foreigner riots in South Africa last spring. And, above all, a great article about how the current movement to prosecute former tyrants at the ICJ, and the prosecution of Charles Taylor in particular, was having the unintended consequence of pressing Mugabe and similar to cling to power for as long as possible. It was impeccably reported, fairly written, and unanswerable -- the most disturbing piece I've ever read in that great genre, 'Westerners with good intentions once again pave road to hell for Africans'.

Not in the weekend Globe

is the one piece I was looking forward to, as advertised in Friday's paper:

"Farewell Africa: Globe correspondent Stephanie Nolen departs her Johannesburg post with a bittersweet look at the continent's progress in her five years reporting there."

Presumably Nolen got bumped by the three pages on Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, on the occasion of no. 100 having been reached. I have mixed feelings about articles like this:

1. Yes: quite right to remind people that there is a huge human cost to this Afghanistan mission. Our soldiers are doing something noble and tremendously difficult, and when they make the supreme sacrifice of course they deserve three pages. Attention should be paid. [moment of silence, head bowed]

2. But... I'm not actually going to read it. Did you? A quick skim strongly suggests there's nothing new here, factually or so to speak emotionally. And articles about the troops never have useful policy implications, since the take-away message is always on the one hand that the soldiers believe strongly in what they are doing (which is indeed a point worth bringing out) and on the other hand that it doesn't actually seem to be working. I've yet to see an article that pushes beyond that stalemate to something I didn't already know.

3. If you have Christie Blatchford covering the military, The Point Will Get Made.

But do they have a special Airbus pull-out section, and news about the Leafs?

For the most part, not a bad paper today, it seemed to me -- clearly starting a critical blog has the same kind of effect as vowing to carry an umbrella at all times.

On the other hand, our Senior Mitteleuropa Correspondent [Code Name: Edelweiss] has some truly disturbing observations on the Globe coverage of international news. Or to be accurate the lack of it:

Why does Canadian journalism in general assume that "news" is actually crime reporting, and "foreign news" is bizarre crime reporting from other countries?

I've just done, for comparative purposes, a quick scan of foreign news in today's (or yesterday's) online Globe, NYT and Die Presse (centre-right Austrian daily, serving a market one-quarter the size of Canada). I've not gone into content - a qualitative comparison would be too depressing - but just to see what's covered and what isn't. The Globe's view of the world includes a confused piece about how everyone is being mean to one another in Gaza, the governor of Kandahar, the Ressam sentence and Somali pirates. Its US news consists of lead in toys, a Nixon memo on Vietnam, Polanski pleading clemency and a nifty arrangement of stars in the sky, as well as the Obama transition. In Europe, apparently the only thing that is happening is that Venice is sinking. Asia is all about Mumbai and Thailand (fair enough), and unfortunate Chinese schoolgirls. In Africa they mention Zimbabwe and Somali pirates, though if you click on the Africa sub-heading you actually go through to sports.

The NYT and Die Presse, on the other hand, in addition to the stories that even the Globe couldn't overlook, mention Rwanda and Congo, clashes in the UK parliament, the condemnation of Sudan's Al-Bashir by the UNSC, Kosovo riots, the Politkovskaya trial, Chavez's most recent manoeuvres, an ETA killing yesterday, real analysis of Gaza, Mindanao/Philippines, politics in Poland, Romania, and more. What really sums it all up for me though, is the cluster bomb treaty signed in Oslo - the Globe mentions it in a 2-sentence Reuters piece buried on page 20 of the print edition, while Die Presse devotes to it 10 paragraphs, a backgrounder and links to five related articles and the NYT covers it in 20 paragraphs and two backgrounders. And the Globe has ENTIRELY overlooked this week's NATO Council Meeting, which was shaping up to be the latest event in the new Cold War what with the US suddenly pushing for Georgian and Ukrainian NATO membership - extensively covered by both other papers (and Austria not even a NATO member...).

So there you have it: right-wing Austrians are presumed to take an educated interest in cluster bombs, the Sudanese government, Russian repression of journalists, and the internal politics of NATO, which Austria unlike Canada does not belong to. Canadians... er, not so much.

(Ed. note: Links are of course to today's 'World' section of the three on-line papers, so you can perform the whole depressing operation all over again.)