Thursday, April 21, 2011
Charge Him With Incitement to Murder, incited Ben Burd
Terry Jones “committed a crime – inciting murder,” declared Mr Burd. It reminded me of those old westerns in which the lynch leader shouts to the mob, ‘When we get him, we’ll give him a fair trial, then we’ll hang him.’ It’s a forgone conclusion. It appears that Mr Burd has no respect for the fundamental tenet of justice that presumes innocence until found guilty.
Terry Jones incited “murder” declared Mr Burd. There was no incitement in the pastor’s mock trial of the “hate-filled holy book”, as renown comedian Bill Maher described it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUB5TZD29M), nor during its subsequent burning. There was no incitement except in Mr Burd’s mind, which permits him to publish an accusation of criminality against an individual without a shred of evidence of such criminality.
Incitement to violence? Recall that another great comedian, George Carlin, in an interview said, “You see I’m talkin’ about entertainment and I really mean that. I think it’s funny and fun and I love watching it. When they said the Gulf war was going to be on tv I didn’t know it was going to be all graphs. I thought we were going to see some stuff. Graphs and maps and shit, noooo, get in there, show me some stuff. I can’t wait until the Middle East really explodes – ancient hatreds and modern weapons, my kinda show man, my kinda show.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABxIJ8ONGeQ
The act of burning a book, held to be sacred or otherwise, is insufficient to establish incitement to violence. If I declare that Mr Christ is not the son of god and a Christian beats me up, Mr Burd’s sense of justice would have me charged with incitement to violence.
For Mr Christ’s sake, incitement to violence cannot apply to a statement or image that prompts irrational reactions by others who hear or see it. If an author is to be blamed for the irrational actions of others who view his work, then free speech is dead because the subjective whims of anyone can trump free speech on every occasion. Mr Burd’s ‘reasoning’ would have Salman Rushdie charged with incitement to violence for having written The Satanic Verses.
Mr Burd’s ludicrous suggestion that the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction on this incident has absolutely no merit whatsoever. If it did have jurisdiction, it would go after the real inciters.
On March 20, Terry Jones made a video of a mock trial of a ‘sacred’ book, pronounced it guilty, then burned it. The MSM didn’t bother to make an appearance, so Terry Jones uploaded it to the net. There it lay, day after day after day after day, alongside countless other videos of other individuals burning Korans.
A well-coordinated propaganda conference four days later was described by National Post’s Terry Glavin: “On March 24, the Iranian foreign ministry, Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, and Karzai’s office issued simultaneous alarms about Jones’ Koran-burning. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said the incident was part of American “hegemonic plots.” Karzai called for Jones’ arrest and prosecution.”
Karzai’s statement was widely reported in Iran’s government-controlled press but got limited play even in the Afghan news media. Then the Netherlands-based BNO News got involved. After making its mark in 2007 when it sold Reuters a videotaped speech by Osama Bin Laden, BNO went on to become a popular Twitter feed and is now a low budget social-media hybrid, part press-release clearinghouse and part amateur-journalism vector. When BNO began circulating a report headlined “Afghanistan, Iran condemn Koran burning in U.S.,” the story went viral.”
Terry Glavin's full piece can be read here in his article for DISSENT. http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=467
Ehsanullah Ehsan, teacher and principal at the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar, Afghanistan wrote of her near death experience in the Toronto Star; http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/968978--i-can-tell-you-that-we-are-bleeding-in-our-hearts.
She wrote, “The opportunists who committed the murders in Mazar-i-Sharif do not represent the wider public of Afghanistan. The American pastor Terry Jones burned one copy of the Qur’an, but the perpetrators of violence who claim to be the defenders of the Qur’an have burned tens of copies and hundreds of Qur’anic verses here in Kandahar during their three days of violent demonstrations, looting and burning.”
Concerning the inciter Karzai, she had this to say, “As long as the Karzai administration and the Afghanistan upper and lower houses are a network of notorious warlords, tribal lords and drug lords, the people of Afghanistan will continue to express their grievances by any means available to them. They will attack, hijack and loot, and all the extremists, including the far-right Iranian regime and the far-right Afghan Sunnis and the Pakistan ISI, will continue to take advantage of us.”
Finally, another voice of common sense in this matter is Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2290306/ “). “Unlike some provincial mullahs, Karzai also knows perfectly well that the U.S. government is constitutionally prohibited from policing religious speech among its citizens. Yet, when faced with the doings of the aforementioned moronic cleric from Gainesville, he went out of his way to intensify mob feeling.”
Westerners once again are being played as useful idiots, dupes. The entire “outrage” about the Danish cartoons was fabricated from beginning to end. The only true fact was that the newspaper published them. Everything after that was a set-up and the Western world swallowed it all and fell prostate to the platitudes of multiculturalism, sensitivity and tolerance. Gullibility prevailed. These are acts of extortion on Western ignorance and the price paid, is the gagging of free speech by human rights commissions no less.
Once again the islamists played the correct cards and useful idiots throughout the West, especially progressives aka regressives performed like little conformists to the message. Ben Burd was so fooled by his own extravagant ignorance that he stepped forward to make a public accusation of criminality against an innocent individual, but more than that, he betrayed Free Speech, just what the islamaniacs wanted. What a dupe! What a fool!
Cobourg Ecology Garden Earth Day Celebration
FOR EARTH DAY, APRIL 22, 2011, DAWN
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HOW DOES YOUR ECOLOGY GARDEN GROW?
Spring is nature’s Poetic Justice after the meltdown of the cold and brutal reign of the One-Colour Regime, popularly know as winter.
It’s on its melt that the natural diversity of the Cobourg Ecology Garden driven ‘through the green fuse’ will meet the warm seasons with the celebratory policy of multicolourfulism.
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
-- Shakespeare
Sixteen years ago Cobourg Ecology Garden was nothing more than a great idea with a little ground in which to root. It was nourished with love, beginning with Minnie Pennell, Chair of the Environmental Advisory Committee, in cooperation with enthusiastic partners, Mayor Joan Chalovich and Cobourg Town Council, Engineering Dept, Community Services Dept. Department of Finance, and Dept of Parks and Recreation. Funding was received from the Federal Govt. Friends of the Environment (Canada Trust), Cobourg area Environmental Association, the Cobourg and District Horticultural Society.
Whew, what a bunch of bureaucratese! But that’s modern life. In human terms, Minnie Pennell met with a lot of thoughtful people in the community who were convinced by her great green gospel to facilitate her vision; let there be green, and so it was done.
There were scouts and students, mothers and others of course. Yes, yes, tree huggers, green thumbs, econiks, some bearing children with pink precious lungs aching to breathe free.
Give me Breath, then give me Liberty!
The Cobourg Ecology Garden introduces itself at the entrance with a wooden sign bearing this organic message, “If ecology is the study of relationships between organisms and their environment, then an ecology garden is a garden that is sensitive to and inspired by these relationships.” That’s the scientific description, concise and elegant, highly unpoetic.
Spring is when shallow-soiled seeds the size of punctuation marks unfold themselves from question marks all curled into foetal poetential and burst above ground as full blown exclamation points shouting in colour.
Or.
Spring is when little nouns in the ground grow up to become a herd of verdant verbs, all soiled with the rich itch of life hibermating in seed pods, cocoons, female mammals and humans of mass creation. American poet e.e.cummings wrote, “spring omnipotent goddess Thou / dost stuff parks / Spring slattern of seasons.”
Cobourg Town Councillor and landscape architect, Miriam Mutton, who had been instrumental in the gardens initial design, wrote, “The main design aspect is to accommodate people and enable them to get closer and feel a part of the garden. [It] also uses exotics or non-native plants as a demonstration of how to combine plants in a healthy way for interest throughout the seasons.”
Ms Mutton is actually talking about the immigration of plant life (exotics) into the local mainstream community, an effort that often pays off in a brilliant display of multicolourfulism.
Minnie Pennell, chair of the organizing Committee, added that the garden is not only a place “to promote a natural environment, but also to demonstrate methods of organic farming.”
Organic, yes, organism to organasm in a single breakout season! Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay described it best, “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill / April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” So who were the unacknowledged legislators who appropoetically aligned spring, poetry and Earth Day, and sang the Battle Hymn of the Poetic?
The first Earth Day celebration at the Garden had a turnout of 40 people and that was at dawn. In a handful of years interest in the garden deepened, and Earth Day now attracts over 150 people. Did I mention that this ceremony of secular spirit happens at dawn?
Cobourg Ecology Garden is located at the foot of Hibernia Street on the lakefront immediately south of Legion Village, a local transit stop. A sizable parking lot is available across the street. Every day, in every season, people use the boardwalk that skirts the full length of the garden.
Councillor Mutton, explaining the initial site choice, wrote that “what distinguishes this Ecology Garden is access and location...it is in a high traffic place, easy to visit, it is relatively small and compact and has good sight lines for safety.”
It wasn`t long before the garden was given national exposure in the Globe & Mail by garden columnist, Marjorie Harris, who asserted that “Public spaces reflect our values and define what kind of society we are”` She visited the garden on a summer afternoon, describing it as “bathed in golden light and filled with glorious scents.” She added that “It seemed the most enchanting place on earth.”
The Cobourg Ecology Garden is well positioned to midwife the grounds surrounding the west pier of the harbour. The area has become an exciting location for daily landings and takeoffs by squadrons of Canada Geese one moment, Mallards another. There is a wildness to the place that compels us to commune with our inner wild nature.
Cobourg Ecology Garden is an outpost for a lakefront feature that will be as treasured by the local community, as Toronto is of the evolution of the Leslie Street Spit. It is a commitment to a relationship between nature and culture in very close proximity to each other.
Over the years the garden has become a living classroom for students from all area schools. A number of workshops are held next to the garden each year, running the gamut from composting techniques to growing herbs to growing ornamental grasses. The fertility of the place is well grounded, and a gazebo is provided as a departure lounge for those wishing to enjoy a flight of fancy to the Imagine Nation.
Earth Day, Spring and Poetry are a natural ménage a trios of celebration of the continuity of life through seasonal cycles. The unrelenting oppression of The Cold has driven life deep underground where it hibermates, where the grass routes are planned, where ‘through the green fuse’ multicolourfulism bursts forth. Thus begins the Politics of Spring.
In spring there is an insurrection of grass and love. In spring the snow disperses like a mob of resentful rioters. In spring the sun leads a successful guerrilla movement or coup d'etat. All winter our flesh was ignorant of the sedition of sunlight. In fields there are wounds in the snow where grass bleeds green, where grass is an awakening eye.
No one ever votes spring into power. Is spring a totalitarian imperialist? Is spring a liberation move meant to infiltrate foreign agents, such as robins, blue-jays, children, to sabotage snowmobile trails and ski hills and encourage Green Power? Spring is a tolerant state because it permits equal opportunity to all colours. (Winter is a 1‑colour regime.) Perhaps we all love spring because it allows civil rights to the tulips, to the lilacs, to the exuberant blossoms all petalwide gluttoning sunshine and busy bees lathered in flower-frolic zzzzzZZzziinng in backyards across the imagine nation.
The sun is prosecutor and executioner of snow. The sun casts an unanimous verdict and ignores all appeals. April showers are the mourner's tears after winter has been hung from the gallows of warmth. Summer is the sun's gift of appeasement for the questionable use of coercive force to eliminate snow.
If a poet wore the premier of something, what might that something be? Would it be a nation of obedient poetry lovers? Would the national militia consist of a mighty militia of tulips armed with colour and sunshine? Would the national anthem be a long joyful sigh after love?
Would the Union of Pollen Producers go on strike demanding higher rates of sunlight and more elaborate fringe benefits, such as lighter showers and heavier dew? Would this cause a crisis across the imagine nation? Would the Creative Intelligence Anarchy report that the Insect Pollen Transportation Organization had been infiltrated by dissident outside agitators such as breezes?
Would the Federal Bureau of Inspiration be called in to conduct a thorough inspiration?
Would the constitution enshrine the Prime Policy of Poetry Proselytization and Proliferation? What would be the foreign policy? Would we accept only immigrants carrying passport dreams? Then, what about the refugees from Grief and defectors from Despair? Would we establish dipoematic relations with Pain, negotiate for a ceasefire and settle for shorter durations?
Will we pick and chose our enemies at the drop of a poem and come charging, singing the Battle Hymn of the Poetic?
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Being a Poet is Wonderful
When I look at the sky
I never see cliches
When I look in your eyes
I never see stereotypes
Everywhere I look
I see originality
Being a poet is wonderful
Wish you were
here
I'll write you