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Can’t find a terrorist suspect? Just make one
Most Canadians trust the police to protect them against threats such as terrorist violence—to be vigilant, to investigate, and to put a stop to dangerous plots. Most Canadians probably do not suspect, however, that the police, some of them at any rate, may be the ones cooking up such plots: identifying innocent dupes, befriending them, and egging them on to commit violent crimes.
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Debating Avatar
Avatar has been criticized for being unsophisticated, simplistic, New Age-y, anarcho-primitivist, a white man’s fantasy of redemption for the crimes of his race. Can this be overlooked considering the movie allows people to understand some of the elements of Indigenous struggles?
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The Power of Myth
“Winnipeg is an oubliette,” says Guy Maddin in his mythical memoir “My (Other) Winnipeg” in Border Crossings magazine. It is? The conception of a cold city populated by sleepwalkers, perpetually astonished at its own age may work for the city of Maddin’s mythologies. Yet, this author left Winnipeg for Montreal five years ago quite ready to forget the place – but forgetting Winnipeg has been impossible. It is impossible because, in the realm of art nowadays, Winnipeg is everywhere.
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Israel’s critics will not be silenced!
When public figures of the status of multiculturalism and immigration minister Jason Kenney and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff deem it prudent to attack Israeli Apartheid Week, a grassroots series of events organized every March on university campuses by a constellation of rag-tag student groups, we can say with fair certainty that the Palestine solidarity movement has arrived at the “fight” stage.
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Manufacturing Dissent
We are shown Moore’s self-serving career beginning with his days in Davison and Flint, Michigan, working for the Flint Voice, from where he moved to Mother Jones magazine, promising “to return Mother Jones to its hell-raising roots.” His tenure there was brief, and his firing is widely (but erroneously, we are told) understood as a genuine case of the Left eating its own.
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Tales from the Below-par Economy
We Don’t Play Golf Here!, directed by Saul Landau, is a series of vignettes exposing the impact of globalization on working-class people on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border. The opening story documents the struggle between the people of Tepoztlán and the golf-crazy elites and their developers, who planned to construct an eighteen-hole course, chalets and country club.
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In Defense of Divestment
Not long after CUPE Ontario passed its now-famous Resolution 50 in support of the divestment, boycott and sanctions (DBS) campaign against Israel, the union received a significant letter of solidarity from the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The letter admonished CUPE, “Those supporting the ideology of Zionism and the pro-Israeli lobby will muster their substantial resources against you.”