IMPERIAL WHORES

YVES ENGLER—Each year Canadian taxpayers subsidize hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations to Israel despite that country having a GDP per capita only slightly below Canada’s. (How many Canadian charities funnel money to Sweden or Japan?) Millions of dollars are also channeled to projects supporting West Bank settlements, explicitly racist institutions and Israel’s powerful military, which may all contravene Canadian charitable law.

JAMES NORTH—Why is Thomas Friedman afraid to write about the rising danger of war with Iran? Fear of being wrong? But he has plenty of practice in that area, although he may not want to add to his losing streak. Here’s just one angle Friedman might follow. Gareth Porter, the longtime independent investigative journalist, just the other day documented in Slatehow the Pentagon is trying to slip phony evidence into its justification for sending another 1500 U.S. troops to the Mideast, raising the risk of an accident that could provoke an awful conflict. (Friedman surely remembers that when he was stationed in Israel in 1988 an American warship accidentally shot down a civilian Iranian airliner, killing all 290 people on board.)

BRIAN BECKER—The hysteria generated about the Tiananmen Square “massacre” was based on a fictitious narrative about what actually happened when the Chinese government finally cleared the square of protestors on June 4, 1989. The demonization of China was highly effective. Nearly all sectors of U.S. society, including most of the “left,” accepted the imperialist presentation of what happened. At the time the Chinese government’s official account of the events was immediately dismissed out of hand as false propaganda. China reported that about 300 people had died in clashes on June 4 and that many of the dead were soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army. China insisted that there was no massacre of students in Tiananmen Square and in fact the soldiers cleared Tiananmen Square of demonstrators without any shooting.i

Last week, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at banning Chinese telecoms like Huawei from selling equipment to the US over an unacceptable risk to national security. Following the order, the US Department of Commerce announced the blacklisting of Huawei along with 70 of its affiliates. The step prevented US-based corporations from selling or transferring technology to Huawei without a license issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).