EDITORIALS

Be prepared to explain the political leaning of each editorial.  Bring your answers to me for discussion.  Your choices are left win, centre, or right wing.

World Editorials: http://www.editorial.com/

A National ID

The very idea of a national identity card has always rankled Americans across the political spectrum. It conjures images of totalitarianism — Big Brother or even the German SS soldier asking to see a citizen's papers. But in most European countries, people carry national ID's as a matter of course.  And pressure is mounting in America for some kind of security card.

Private companies in the United States are already marketing the idea of providing a secure card for those willing to submit to extra background checks, similar to a concept proposed by the airlines. Tenants of high-rise buildings or workers at chemical plants, for example, also want security without endless body searches and bag checks. It's time for Congress to begin a serious discussion of how to create a workable national identification system without infringing on the constitutional rights of Americans.

If we're going to move to a national identification card, we can't afford to do it badly. Now is the time to figure out how to create a card that helps identify people but doesn't rob them of a huge swath of their civil liberties in the process.

The New York Times  Published: May 31, 2004

'Desperate' Refugee Crisis in Sudan

By James Lyons, Political Correspondent, PA News

The situation in Sudan is “desperately serious”, International Development Secretary Hilary Benn said today.

The humanitarian crisis in Darfur, where the Janjaweed militia have driven one million people from their homes, is being called the world’s worst.

Mr Benn said: “We need to put all our effort internationally into making sure that aid supplies get to the people who need them – both along the border with Chad, where a lot of refugees have gone, but also to the very large number of people who have been internally displaced.

“They have had to flee their homes within Darfur.

“One of the problems is we don’t currently have a full picture of exactly what is going on.”

Mr Benn was speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ahead of a visit to Sudan.

Ministers had raised the issue of Sudanese government involvement with the militias and met with repeated denials, he said.

“What really matters is that people are still suffering,” Mr Benn told Today.

“The UN Commissioner for Human Rights has said there have been huge human rights violations – there has been mass rape, killing, the burning of villages.

“The important thing is to get the monitors in because that is the best way that we can make sure the ceasefire holds, get the aid to the people in need and then, in time, try to find a resolution to this problem so that people can go back home.”

From: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2999382

Deport Zündel now

Article

Zündel has a country. It is Germany, which wants to see him return so he can face charges in a raft of crimes related to his spread of hate literature. But his allies claim sending him there amounts to persecution.

The federal government and Justice Minister Irwin Cotler must quickly get their act together and expedite this case.

Response to article above by David Irving

ONE of the problems of Editorials is that their authors are usually anonymous, so we don't know anything about the writer.
  We do however know a lot about Ernst Zündel, just as people know a lot about me: we are both Christians, and we both know the meaning of charity -- both how to bestow and how to receive. 
   I suspect that the problem for the Star is that although Ottawa's new Justice minister Irwin Cotler is a Jew -- and a very active Jew at that, a Zionist supporter of Israel, and former chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress -- he knows the meaning of the law, and the need to be seen to abide by it through every stage of a judicial process. This may infuriate the anonymous editorial writer and his friends, but that's the way it is.
   Zündel has not "thumbed his nose" at Canadian laws; he is innocent of any conviction, has a clean criminal record, and has actually caused wrong Canadian criminal law to be changed.
   The fact that he has been held incommunicado for a whole year in solitary confinement in a Canadian jail, battling wave after wave of lawyers and their friends, at so much cost to the Canadian taxpayer (and himself) is not his fault; it must be written down to the account of the CJC and their moneyed pals, who are determined to silence any voice that endangers their well-known interests.

From: http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/04/01/Zundel_280104.html  

Rwanda Crisis

In Rwanda, for 100 days people were being killed at the rate of about 8000 a day, and we did nothing. Fast forward to today. In Africa, about 10,000 children a day are dying from easily treatable diseases, and we are doing nothing to save them. That's not just 100 days, it's every day, year after year, killing at the Rwanda rate. And far easier to stop then Rwanda: it just means pennies to bribe drug companies to produce remedies. But we do nothing.

Which raises another question: what kind of socioeconomic system can be so savage and insane that to stop Rwanda-scale killings among children going on year after year it's necessary to bribe the most profitable industry that ever existed? That's carrying socioeconomic lunacy beyond the bounds that even the craziest maniac could imagine? But we do nothing.

From: Noam Chomsky

http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/archives/000361.html#more