SpankyMcFarland
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Posts posted by SpankyMcFarland
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17 minutes ago, blackbird said:
It is wrong when almost all the Sikh immigrants from India are doing it within Canada. They are demanding it as a core belief of their religion. This is organized interference in another country's sovereignty. This is not a part of being a good Canadian citizen. This makes Canada a part of the problem as India sees it. Of course liberals see it as just a part of their democratic rights or freedoms, but freedom is not unlimited. There are responsibilities on everyone to maintain peace, order, and that includes respecting the sovereignty of other countries and their internal governance. Canada demands that other countries do not interfere with Canadian democracy, elections, and sovereignty. Canada's government and all citizens must likewise respect other countries sovereignty including India.
No. It should not be an offence in Canada, India or Timbuktu to advocate for new countries. If a country can’t tolerate that then it’s not a real democracy.
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There’s a series of distinctions to be drawn here. I’ll just take two obvious ones. Firstly, advocating for an independent Sikh homeland should not be a crime in and of itself. We don’t arrest those who think Quebec should be a country, do we? Only those Sikhs who actively pursue violence should be persons of interest to the police. Secondly, no foreign country has the right to take the law into its hands here in Canada.
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Yeats speaks of ‘character isolated by a deed’. Here is one such moment among many that shows the utter unfitness of Donald Trump for any position of trust:
QuoteAt his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.
QuoteIt had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/
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We should have been much tougher on Khalistan militants over the last forty years. The Air India bombing removed all doubt as to how dangerous they were. Sikhs who spoke out against them risked death here.
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Anybody here like frozen fingers? On their thigh?
It’s an oldie but…we should send him a message:
Stop your fooling around,
Time to straighten right out.
Better think of your future
Else you'll wind up in jail.Rudy,
A message to you you, Rudy,
A message to you. -
29 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:
Meaning what? The attacks are grotesque or the miscarriage of justice and maltreatment of prisoners is grotesque?
Do you have some examples?
Just keep in mind, that country has a lot more bad history than we do. A genocide of 10M people is still in living memory there.
Meaning that an accusation of terrorism in India merely means you have annoyed the government in some way. It does not necessarily imply that there is evidence of a standard admissible in a Canadian court supporting a charge that you carried out violent acts. The authorities just bring a claim to court, say it’s related to national security and throw you in jail for years. The whole point is to delay a trial because the evidence is often rubbish. Some more info on the Swamy case:
QuoteThe Washington Post noted at the time that India’s anti-terror law, amended in 2019, allows the government to designate an individual as a terrorist and detain people for up to six months without producing any evidence. Further, the accused can subsequently be imprisoned for up to seven years. “Critics have called the law draconian, and accuse Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of using it to mute dissent.”
Two days before his arrest, Swamy had said in a video message posted on YouTube that he feared he would be arrested because he fought against the government’s indiscriminate arrest of thousands of young aboriginal people and local settlers who question big business projects that strip them of their land.
“During the past three decades I have tried to identify myself with the Adivasi (aboriginal) people and their struggle for a life of dignity and self-respect,” Swamy said. “As a writer, I have tried to analyze the different issues they are faced with. In this process, I have clearly expressed dissent with several policies, laws enacted by the government in light of the Constitution.”
One thing India isn’t short of is good examples of bad behaviour by the authorities:
QuoteMohammed Irfan was 24 and newly married. Business was brisk at his modest battery shop. And within two months he was expecting the birth of his first child.
All seemed well, until a counterterrorism squad in August 2012 entered his store in Nanded, a city in India’s Maharashtra state, and arrested him for allegedly plotting to kill Indian politicians.
QuoteIrfan was finally released in June 2021 after an Indian court acknowledged he was wrongly jailed. By then, he had already spent nine years in prison.
The following statistic says all that needs to be said about this law:
QuoteOnly 2.2% of cases registered under the law from 2016 to 2019 ended in a court conviction. Nearly 11% of cases were closed by the police for lack of evidence.
2.2%! Even for India’s notoriously ramshackle system of justice that sounds a little low.
https://apnews.com/article/india-991831e0e69d516fe2eff4a7a928f2df
When a foreign country sends you evidence for extradition, a certain level of trust is required. India is clearly struggling to meet that level.
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As I’ve already pointed out, some of the terrorist cases in India are grotesque. If you’re advocating for the rights of Dalits, Tribals or other marginalized groups, expect to be called a Maoist revolutionary.
QuoteAs the Register reported at the time of Father Swamy’s arrest in October 2020, the priest, who championed the rights of oppressed tribal indigenous peoples, was detained along with 15 other human-rights activists, academics and lawyers on terrorism charges related to the “Bhima Koregaon conspiracy.” The controversial arrests, carried out on the grounds that the social justice advocates allegedly were all associated with a banned Maoist organization, provoked world-wide condemnations, including a posthumous resolution honoring Father Swamy’s life and work in the U.S. Congress in July 2022.
“Everyone at the meeting was anguished about denial of justice for Father Stan, who dedicated his life for the poor and died branded as a terrorist,” Jesuit Father P.M. Antony, director of the Bagicha Center, told the Register after the Dec. 21 meeting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-59933451
For Muslims you can fill it in yourself - say anything about the crackdown in Kashmir while actually in Kashmir and you are liable to disappear (sounds like a song). There’s a reason VS Naipaul’s book about the country bore the title, India: A Million Mutinies Now. The place is held together by many things but brute force applied with scant respect for the rule of law is certainly one them. While it may not be China (yet), it sure as heck ain’t Norway either. -
You may not know this so it’s great I’ve a chance to tell you. Canada is a very dangerous place for Indian students.
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5 hours ago, betsy said:
There's so much at stake here. India has always been a friend. And trading partner.
So are these clowns saying we should ignore foreign assassinations here? Would they do that in the US?
India hasn’t always been a friend to Canada nor much of a trading partner.
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Canada has a promising future. We’re a young country with lots of space, water and mineral resources. Yes, there are some teething problems right now but let’s take a long view.
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On 9/19/2023 at 6:50 PM, I am Groot said:
So are Jewish teens. I don't think the school routinely have "Jew Month" or put up Jewish flags or spend a day every year having their kids do projects and learn about Jews and Jewish history and great Jewish figures in history. Why not? What about Muslim Month? Native month? How come schools don't put up all kinds of banners and flags and decorations to celebrate wearing glasses? There are tons of kids who wear glasses who are routinely bullied and discriminated against throughout their lives!
I’ve no objection to any of that either way. However, I suspect ‘Jewish Month’ might be a better way to put what you don’t want there.
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4 hours ago, reason10 said:
It looks like you know NOTHING about history.
The only CRIMES in Vietnam were the COMMUNISTS wanting to take over South Vietnam and that sovereign state looking to the world to save it. But I guess you far lefters have a problem helping out those slant eyes, since you like to discriminate against them in college admissions, you creep.
Unfortunately, the regime in Saigon was corrupt and sectarian. America backed a poor horse there and ended up having to do way too much of the fighting.
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4 hours ago, reason10 said:
Innocent Russian citizens being murdered by Stalin dwarfs ALL that. And yet our incompetent FDR gave that madman all of Eastern Europe.
The Eastern Front was the war. America played a key role supplying the Soviets but not in the actual fighting. The Western Front was a sideshow.
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I think the US set a bad precedent with its drone assassination program which is now coming back to our door. The basic point is that we all must respect the sovereignty of other countries and think long and hard before killing people on their soil. If not, absolute chaos will ensue. We can argue about whether Nijjar was a terrorist but if the Indians killed him they certainly are. I need hardly add that if Trudeau’s allegations are proven false he must resign.
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26 minutes ago, Moonlight Graham said:
No, there's a difference between if Salman Rushdie was critical of a regime using peaceful protest speech versus if he was involved in terrorist activity against Iran and the US would do nothing about it. One is dissenting speech and the other is an act of war. I can't see any country sitting around and doing nothing if a person in a foreign country was organizing terrorist violence against them.
There’s a lot of grey. All over the world, opponents of governments are being labelled terrorists even if they don’t do anything violent themselves or direct any violence. Just google what dissidents, opposition politicians, basically anybody Erdogan doesn’t like the look of in Turkey go through or advocates for the poor in the likes of India. Say Salman Rushdie was advocating for a new country for Indian atheists and Modi had him killed in Canada for it. Would that be justified?
The last line you have there is troubling. Insurgencies often spill over borders. If we allow extraterritorial assassinations of this sort we can say goodbye to Canada as we know it.,
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13 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:
You tell me how many terrorist leaders there are in Canada, and I'll tell you how many people I want the gov't of India to waste.
Excellent, although Mr. Modi may have a lengthy list in mind. I presume it’s not just India you’d like to help in this regard? Can other countries ‘take out’ people they claim to be terrorists here too? Seems only fair. And why let foreigners have all the fun? I’m sure there are many of us Canadians who just know we’ve found a terrorist or two in our community.
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What’s also conspicuous in the statements made by Indian officials is no condemnation of the event which really saps their credibility.
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5 hours ago, QuebecOverCanada said:
An article from 2013:
Narendra Modi, PM of India, was banned from traveling to the US during the Bush administration and was on a terrorist watchlist.
Talk about irony.
I notice those defending this killing, like Terry Glavin at the NP, don’t spend too much on Modi’s history of targeting minorities and dissidents in his own country. It’s an ugly record. The label ‘world’s biggest democracy’ deserves an asterisk.
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33 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:
The US has done 14,000 drone strikes in the countries on the chart I posted plus God knows how many in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
"Sneaking over and killing
Canadian citizens" [one terrorist leader] is better than drone strikes that kill innocent people, destroy infrastructure and terrorize the general population.If I knew the whereabouts of a terrorist leader that India was looking for I'd definitely tip them off.
One is surely not enough, though. Give us a ballpark figure of how many you’d like to see in Canada per annum. Perhaps we could schedule these events at the weekends to avoid any unnecessary disruption? -
But gay teens are real, right? There has to be some accommodation with that reality?
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9 minutes ago, Aristides said:
The Brits didn't assassinate Irish Americans who were providing support to the IRA during the troubles.
No, they had to be careful about jeopardizing the Special Relationship there which annoyed the hell out of them. India has no such qualms about upsetting us. We are like Lebanon to the Israelis. They think they can do what they want here.
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I don’t know if this guy was really a terrorist as we would define it. Advocating for a Sikh country is not terrorism here, just as supporting an independent Scotland or Quebec isn’t either. As I posted earlier, India makes ‘absurd’ (to use its own adjective) criminal accusations of terrorism against people it doesn’t like that take years to come to court. Conveniently, the evidence is kept secret because of national security concerns and, in the interim, the accused languishes in jail. I’m not saying he wasn’t a terrorist either but I wouldn’t believe one thing the Indian government alleges without corroboration.
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1 hour ago, WestCanMan said:
1) How bad is it in India if they already had a Sikh elected PM twice?
India is worse than it was in terms of religious intolerance. Sikhs are somewhat anomalous in this regard as they tend to be fairly prosperous, living in India’s bread basket, Punjab. Other groups have suffered more under Modi, e.g. Christians, Muslims and lower or no caste Hindus. Many Modi supporters in the West avert their gaze when anti-Christian acts are discussed.
1 hour ago, WestCanMan said:2) Khalistan translates into "The land of the Khalsa", and Khalsa is like our word for 'pure'. If someone wants to create a country to be ruled by one religion, and they want to call it 'the land of the pure', that's alarming.
So is Israel alarming? It defines itself as a Jewish state. Most European countries started quite recently as ethnostates, highly homogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religion. It’s a natural human tendency.
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27 minutes ago, QuebecOverCanada said:
It's when one party wants to control the other and forces the domination that it creates issues. In this case, Hindus in India want to dominate the Sikhs, and guess what, the union is as bad or may be worse as if there was a separation.
It’s worse than that. Upper caste supporters of the BJP want to dominate everybody else: Muslims, Christians, lower caste Hindus and those of no caste (Dalits and Tribals). India is a Dickensian nightmare for them with no access to the legal rights the country claims to offer all citizens.
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Is Trudeau supporting an organization which has a history of links to terrorism?
in Federal Politics in Canada
Posted · Edited by SpankyMcFarland
Sure about that? Some crazy dudes out there.
An independent Punjab would be much richer than India as a whole. It’s the bread basket of the country.
Modern India was carved out of British India, itself an entirely artificial and recent construct imposed by foreign invaders. It has c.120 languages and 1.4 billion people, kinda like Europe many times over. All that diversity doesn’t necessarily belong together.
It’s insanity to take it lightly anywhere but all countries come and go. They are artificial constructs created for the welfare and convenience of their inhabitants. Only tyrants and their ilk think there’s something eternal and inherently sacred about borders.