MPs Vote Unanimously To Declare Treatment of Rohingya a 'Genocide'

So you’re disputing that this is a genocide?

What a weird article. So should we also take a newspaper story about radical elements in Palestine as fleshing out the story, and justification for Israel's actions taken against them?

Or Maxim Bernier's latest claim about homophobia as fleshing out the story on multiculturalism, and justification for shutting the doors on immigration and refugees?

Or is the message that people being slaughtered is just fodder for some other point about politicians.

Our politicians, anyway.

The asian times article is quite nuanced and detailed, gives some history of the effects and aims of British colonialism, and nowhere in it is there a statement that "anything a Western power does is by definition wrong".     I can't tell if you are ascribing your overgeneralization to the article or NDPP, but as far as I can tell neither of them have that postion.

I'm not very informed on this area.   My first reaction to the unanimously adopted motion was suspicion, as those sorts of motions often predict the next target for Western intervention.

 

Mobo2000 wrote:

I'm not very informed on this area.   My first reaction to the unanimously adopted motion was suspicion, as those sorts of motions often predict the next target for Western intervention.

Which is a fair enough position, but the thing about this case is that Suu Kyi was the West's poster child. The fact she's now conducting a genocide is a little awkward for the countries that were pushing for her to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Myanmar would've been a more tempting target for regime change at basically any point under the Tatmadaw/SLORC government than it is today. So while I do occasionally roll my eyes at the parade of human rights atrocities we're supposed to care about for one week and then forget, I have no reason to think this one's been exaggerated or is a prelude to invasion. Not to mention the US has enough on its plate right now without another land war in southeast Asia.

Well it is a simple enough question.

If we were talking about an article - nuanced and detailed if you will - about the presence of terrorist elements in Palestine, would you consider it a good excuse, or mitigating factor for Israel's actions there?

After all, the operative word in the thread title is Genocide. So if this article on radicalism and what some allegedly don't understand relates to that genocide somehow, well then how, exactly?

For that matter, Timebandit's question was pretty clear as well. Do you think it is a genocide, or not?

(cross-posted with you NDPP)

 

 

NDPP wrote:

Fleshing out the story behind it.

Are you assuming that this is a set-up for Western military intervention against Myanmar?  Given that that country has been one of the biggest assets for Western power in all of Asia, and given that they've now got Aung San Suu Kyi as the "democratic" cover for their favorite regional military junta, what would you think the intent of such intervention might be?  Hard to imagine what the West would put in place in actual power instead of the junta...and they'd never allow Aung San Suu Kyi to hold any real power or stop the junta-in-all-but-name from doing any of what they currently do.

 

OK...so this is about double-standards-especially what the Israeli government is allowed to get away with verses what most other countries are permitted to do.   

And I agree that Palestinians are subjected to horrific, indefensible oppression.

Is what is being done to them really genocide, though?

Isn't genocide the specific effort to wipe a particular people entirely off the face of the Earth?

Horrible as what Netanyahu's thugs do to Palestinians, unconscionable as it is, what would be your argument for actually classifying it as genocide? 

Not looking for an argument here.  Just wondering what your definition of genocide is, and why you feel that it is necessary to get what's happening to the Palestinians designated as genocide.  

What are you talking about NDPP?

Yes, Canada's treatment of Indigenous people is genocide. Not just cultural, whatever that means, but real genocide. I have said so quite a few times in here.  I don't know enough about the definition to know if what is happening in Palestine meets it, but it certainly is atrocity and gross violations of human rights. So the difference, if there is any, is moot, IMO.

So I am not sure why you are claiming that people here aren't recognizing those atrocities, other than to side step some questions which are still on the table. That is, if you think the Rohingya people have also suffered genocide, why bring up claims that undermine recognition of that with irrelevant points about radicals and terrorists?

In fact, why use gross violations like this for nothing but fodder against politicians? What our parliament does or doesn't do is secondary to the real tragedy here.

So again, how is the "fleshing out" in that article relevant to the atrocities committed by Myanmar  against the Rohingya, and what those who recognize it as genocide supposedly don't understand?

I said that the atrocities and abuses there are just as bad, whether they meet the strict definition of genocide or not.

What I am certain of is if someone here posted an article calling the situation in Palestine a "cycle" of violence, claiming that Palestinians bear part of the responsibility for the atrocities against them, people here would rightly call it out as reactionary lies, and apologizing for butchers.

It is no different than what you are doing here, and that also goes for claims that things are "not as advertised" based on how our government votes on it. Or posting articles blaming victims of genocide for no reason other than to make western governments look bad.

But sure, post another distraction about how the rest of us have double standards.

 

NDPP wrote:

So Smith admits Canada is guilty of real genocide, is unwilling to say Israel is, but is certain that Myanmar is.  I am certain that Canada is,  Israel is,  and open to the possibility pending my further research and investigation that Myanmar is. 

But given that both Canada and Israel, unlike Myanmar, have been practicing documented  and well publicized genocidal actions and policies for very much longer, without MPs recognizing and condemning those,  I am highly suspicious about the circumstances, motivation and intentions surrounding Canada's unanimous genocide declaration against Myanmar now.  Is this really only about stopping the violence against Rohingya or will we find that geopolitics and imperialism are once again unseen actors moving behind the scene?

PS Is there anybody else willing to pronounce upon genocide: Canada's Israel's or Myanmar's?

For the record, I agree that what the U.S. AND Canada have done to the indigenous is genocide.   As to Israel, none of us is defending what country does to Palestinians....if there's a hesitancy to call THAT genocide, it's mainly because the goal of the Israeli strategy is dispersal, not physical eradication.   Will read the definition in #8 to further understand your position, though.

 

The treatment of the Rohyngia is a genocide. Period. The Canadian MPs were right in unanimously declaring it a genocide.

The history of Canada's treatment of indigenous people is a genocide.

The Israeli government's historical treatment of Palestinians is a genocide.

The fact that they all acknowledged the gwnocidal treatment of the Rohingya people does not diminish the atrocious treatment of Indigenous Canadians and Palestinians.

I think that we should be able to acknowledge the situation with the Rohingya people now without resorting to comparing one groups inhumanity with another group's inhumanity and trying to determine who has it worse.

The Rohingya are suffering terribly right now, and I am very concerned with what is going on, I think they deserve our help and support.

Misfit wrote:

Ken Burch wrote,

"And I agree that Palestinians are subjected to horrific, indefensible oppression.

Is what is being done to them really genocide, though?"

Yes, I believe that the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians does amount to genocide.

One third of the world's refugees are Palestinians. They are by far the largest single group of people who have ever been displaced in human history.

The Israeli government is bulldozing down entire Palestinian villages and destroying all of their olive trees in order to drive them off their own territory and make way for Israeli settlements.

I have seen footage of Israeli troops using Palestinians as target practice and then laughing about the killing.

They are shooting unarmed Palestinian children.

They arrested an unarmed eight year old boy for terrorism.

They have poisoned water wells in Gaza villages.

They Shoot at demonstrators and then justify their actions on international television by claiming that the the protestors were armed and dangerous which camera footage shows is not true.

Israeli troops have bulldozed Palestinian hospitals.

If the Israeli goal is to eradicate the Palestinians from their existence and drive them away by any means possible: killing them, destroying their livelihoods, destroying their villages and homes, shooting children, arresting children who resist, denying them basic human rights, then yes this is a genocide.

the fact that we don't hear of the daily killings does not mean that they are not happening.

The olive trees that the Israeli government bulldozes down, some which date back to the time of Christ, are deeply engrained into Palestinian history and culture.

The Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in Palestine. Yet the Israeli government took the scrolls and put them in an Israeli museum. The money made from the scrolls goes to Israel and not to the Palestinians.

Yes, the Israeli treatment of Palestinians  does constitute a genocide.

 

Ok.  I see what you are saying.  And please know I am not in any way soft on what the Israeli government does to Palestinians.  My only question was on the precise term for it.  

It does strike me as a bit unfair, though, for you to imply that people on this board would reject the idea that what's been done to the Indigenous in North America is genocide.  We're all in agreement here that it is.  It was just that it wasn't obvious, at the start, that that's the point you were trying to make when you started this thread.

 

Are you talking to me NDPP? So again if you want to go after Canadian politicians why post an article blaming the victims of genocide for the atrocities committed against them?
And no one is rejecting anything.

I feel like this is a repeat of history.

Wasn't it less than a decade ago that people tried their gosh-darned darndest to describe things they disagreed with as some pretzel-logic example of "terrorism", for the sole reason that people seemed concerned with terrorism and they wanted a cut of that concern?

"Are these tariffs not terrorism???"  "Is this new legal requirement not terrorism???"

Heck, sixty years ago they'd both be "Communism".  We all seem to understand the rules of that game.  Same game.

NDPP wrote:

My point was that when Canadian MPs call out a certain genocide while unscrupulously avoiding others, look closer. So you accept Myanmar and Canada's genocide but reject Israel's. Okay. Anybody else?

Oh, I know this one! All three are genocide.

Here's the problem: Perhaps it is better to acknowledge one genocide and try to at least discourage it than to say that unless one recognizes every other genocide, we might as well just say we're okay with all genocides. Surely on the global genocide scale, "fewer" is objectively better than "more". It's well and good to call out hypocrisy, but not when that becomes a weapon against ever doing anything to help anyone (see also, as I heard this week on CBC, "David Suzuki takes airplane flights, so we should keep mining the oil sands and build as many pipelines as we can").

laine lowe wrote:

For example, what happened to Darfur? Did that situation rectify itself?

Pretty much the same thing that happened in Ukraine: There was a half-ignored ceasefire that nevertheless brought daily casualty numbers below the threshold of most Westerners caring, and the media moved on to sexier conflicts.

NDPP wrote:

My point was that when Canadian MPs call out a certain genocide while unscrupulously avoiding others, look closer. So you accept Myanmar and Canada's genocide but reject Israel's. Okay. Anybody else?

I didn't say that.  Please stop trying to find reasons to indict people on this board.   If we define genocide as the intent to wipe out "part" of a people, I guess what the Israeli government does to Palestinians qualifies as genocide by that metric.  I'd already denouced Israeli "security policies" as oppression, so I'm not sure why you're acting like I'm letting Netanyahu and the IDF off the hook or in any way minimizing their deeds. Never have, in all the time I've posted here.

And virtually no one who posts here is responsible for what a Liberal government decides is or is not genocide.  They are the ones you should be enraged about, not the people who post here.   

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

 If we define genocide as the intent to wipe out "part" of a people, I guess what the Israeli government does to Palestinians qualifies as genocide by that metric.

You need to get a better and more accurate definition of genicide if you think it has to do with whether intent to kill everyone is the key.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.html

Fair critique.  Ok, fine, what the Israeli government does to Palestinians can be described, by the guidelines you list there, as a form of genocide.

My hesistance to use the word to describe those actions with that word was never about minimizing the injustices Palestinians are subjected to, nor about letting Israel off the hook.  It's not as though the only options are "It's genocide", or "Keep Voting Likud".   

I'm pretty sure that, with the exception of one or two right-wing trolls, everybody here is an outspoken opponent of the occupation, the settlement project, and the Siege of Gaza.  Why should people HAVE to call those policies "genocide" just to prove that?  What is so magical about the use of that particular word?  Why is it so important to make everybody on this board agree that that is the only valid term for what's going on?   It's not as though the hasbara machine would instantly collapse if only we all use that specific word?

The Israeli government is doing indefensible things to Palestinians.  it isn't necessary to go into the kind of rhetorical overkill where we imply that it's the most vile regime on the planet or something.  We don't need to liken Israel to Nazi Germany to condemn and oppose what its government does.
 

laine lowe wrote:

Speaking of genocide, have our governments (fed and provincial) finally acknowledged that the historical treatiment of indigenous people in this country is genocide? I hear the term "cultural genocide" thrown around as if to lessen the accusation of genocide.

Actually, NDPP was discussing that upthread...his point in this was that it was hypocritical for the MPs to declare that what's been done to the Rohyniga is genocide while denying that what's been done to Palestinians AND Indigenous Canadians falls into that category.

Palestinians are facing genocide; Israel deserves its international pariah status

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180314-palestinians-are-facing-genocide-israel-deserves-its-international-pariah-status/amp/

From the article, "To this must now be added the increasingly obvious fact that the Palestinians are facing Genocide at the hands of the Israeli colonists."

Thank you for reading, Ken. In that article, they also  point out that Israel supplies guns and armaments to the Myanmar military to kill the Rohingya people.

There is a video that I did not include which shows what living conditions are like inside the West Bank refugee camps. 

The video is very disturbing to watch.

Misfit wrote:

Having participated in the derailment of this thread, can we use this thread about the Rohingya people to actually discuss the Rohingya people?

Can we just all come to an agreement that yes the Canadian government is being hypocritical in wanting to get involved in the Rohingya crisis while having an appalling record with the Indigenous people and with turning a blind eye to the crimes against humanity that Israel is perpetrating on the Palestinians?

And yes, can we all agree that Canada's wish to get involved in the Rohingya crisis could be due to the fact that they are wanting a seat on the UN Security Council? Yes, this does seem more than coincidental.

But despite all of this, there is a reality that the Rohingya people are fleeing for their lives. They are being driven out of Myanmar, and they are been rejected everywhere they try to seek help. Many are living in refugee camps with inadequate food or water and many are dying of malnutrition.

Where is our humanity that we feel the need to chastise the Canadian government for all MP's universally agreeing that the Rohingya crisis amounts to a genocide.

Bob Rae was appointed by Justin Trudeau to be the Canadian Envoy for the Rohingya  Crisis.

Bob Rae's report to the Canadian government of his findings can be found here.

Bob Rae Report.

I hope that people actually look at the report and see what the aims are of the Canadian government.  There may be items in this report that you like and there may be items in the report that you disagree with. But right now, we have a formal report from Bob Rae, and we have unanimous agreement from all MPs that the Rohingya crisis amounts to a genocide.

I don't see how this can be seen as anything but a wonderful and positive first step in trying to help people who are desperately in need of help.

 

Agreed.  

In one of my posts earlier, it mentioned that Israel is supplying shipments of military armaments to the Myanmar government.

Quote:

Why should people HAVE to call those policies "genocide" just to prove that?  What is so magical about the use of that particular word?  Why is it so important to make everybody on this board agree that that is the only valid term for what's going on?   It's not as though the hasbara machine would instantly collapse if only we all use that specific word?

We saw the same thing ten or so years ago, when "terrorism" was the word of the day.

People -- mostly with legitimate concerns -- tried to do an end run by trying to convince the public that their concern also constituted terrorism.

So, if some radical blows up himself and a bunch of innocent people out shopping, that's terrorism, so OF COURSE a duly elected government freezing social assistance rates must also be terrorism, yes?

What's happening here, IMHO, is that people have been waking up to the power of language, and wanting to get them some.  The question isn't "what is terrorism or genocide?".  It's "what cannot be origamied into something resembling terrorism or genocide if we try hard enough?"