There is so much more that needs to be said on this topic, I may follow up with an extended post. In the meantime, click the image below fo the article.

It brings attention to the history of Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and lists the various groups and individuals in Britain who have publicly condemned his and the party’s racism, including the many Labour MPs who have quit over this, and Labour members of the House of Lords.

Nut graf:

“I never experienced direct anti-Semitism in the Labour Party until Jeremy Corbyn became its leader,” Dame Louise Ellman, a Labour MP for 23 years, told me.
In the lead-up to the United Kingdom’s Dec. 12 general election, a shocking poll has been released. Forty-seven per cent — almost half — of the U.K.’s thousand-year-old Jewish community would seriously consider leaving the country if the current opposition, the Corbyn-led Labour Party, were to come to power. The same poll found that 87 per cent of British Jews believe Corbyn to be anti-Semitic.

One weakness of the article was generalizing about the day-to-day anti-Semitism that has spread among the rank-and-file membership, without giving some specific examples. This thread gives an excellent peek at that:
https://twitter.com/francesweetman/status/1202539039943020544

On Thursday, I can only wish for a Corbyn/ Labour demolition, but I’m afraid this movie is far from over.

Please read about the High Stakes, High Skills World of Cree Hockey here.

Nut sentence:

When a society worships death, honours suicide attackers and forces civilians to serve as human shields, they are going to have a high death count.

 

A couple of things I left out of the article for space considerations included referencing two excellent sources for information on the ‘dialogue’ that actually goes on in the Palestinian Territories.

These are www.palwatch.org, and www.memri.org, invaluable sources for understanding the horrific death-cult nature of Hamas in particular. Hamas is not shy about what they believe, we just need to listen to them. When you hear public figures talking about how Jews drink the blood of Palestinian children, when you see little children on kids shows talking to stuffed animals about killing Jews, it will forever change the way you view this conflict.

I think many Westerners are trying very hard not to look behind the curtain at the Palestinian society and leadership. I urge people to check out these sites to learn what Israel is facing, and keep that in mind when judging Israel’s actions- or better yet, take a moment to judge the Palestinians by the same standards.

Another short ‘graf I left out is the truly disgusting, anti-Semitic news reporting on the Stabbing Intifada:

Israel is now actually being portrayed as bloodthirsty for shooting these knife attackers. One CBS headline read, “2 Palestinians killed after stabbing attack in Jerusalem”. Not mentioned is that these two Palestinians were the attackers, nor that they had stabbed to death two Israelis before being shot.

CNN, AP, NY Times, all managed similarly dishonest headlines multiple times over the last several months. I believe that the demonization of Israel among university students, other civil rights movements, and the Left in general, is largely flourishing because these headlines are completely misleading the general public. No one reading the NY Times or watching CNN will come away with any idea that there might be something nasty going on behind that Green Curtain. When facts are presented COMPLETELY IN REVERSE as in the above headline, Israel has an insurmountable obstacle to overcome.

In particular, I referred to Foreign Minister Dion’s statement, which is itself quite mild, because I believe we need to stop meekly accepting the rhetoric that everyone is to blame (or just Israel, when they’re winning a battle). Jews are harassed on campuses across North America, and attacks on Jews are shrugged off, because of a portrayal of Israel as uniquely evil*. No, Dion’s statement did not do so, but it shied away from the responsibility to destroy that charade. If we are to change the Bizzaro-world up-is-down understanding on this subject, we need to demand better from public figures and news sources.

(*In part. Of course, this is a complex subject and involves the multi-faceted nature of anti-Semitism.)

Pol Pot, leader of the communist Khmer Rouge: Approximately one quarter of Cambodia’s population were killed, worked to death or starved during his four-year rule.

My new op-ed in our excellent local small town paper, The Low Down to Hull and Back News.

This was not meant as a defence specifically of the planned memorial to the victims of communism in Ottawa, but to explain why, more fundamentally, we should respect and understand this theme of 20th century history.

In-situ here:
http://www.lowdownonline.com/we-should-not-forget-the-victims-of-communism/

Text below:

In John Urban’s recent contribution to Valley Voices (Aug. 12), he derides Ottawa’s planned monument to victims of communism as irrelevant. “Communism is tres passé,” he says, before obliquely defending it, by critiquing capitalism.

That attitude is proof of how important it is to remember. In the three years of Communist China’s Great Leap Forward, tens of millions of Chinese starved, due solely to political reasons. Last week I was out with a Chinese-Canadian friend. Discussing his family coming to Canada he explained simply, “My father escaped the communists after they murdered my grandmother.” Do refugees escaping capitalist North America tell stories like this?

People don’t like to talk about this history. About Pol Pot’s killing fields, or Stalin’s purges, or the Ukrainian Holodomor. The 20th century was an era of tremendous human-caused terror, but no cause, including Nazism, killed a tenth as many as communism. We should not forget.

Mr. Urban asks scoffingly who the real victims of communism are. To answer, no, it is not people using a Chinese computer (which would have been built, in fact, by a private company, and since we’re on the topic, China has lifted tens of millions of people from poverty by abandoning communist dogma). But just asking that question, who the victims of communism are, illustrates the problem. These victims are not hidden. I wish I could say it takes great imagination to pretend they don’t exist, but apparently many want to forget: tens of millions killed by dictatorial followers of a seductive panacea for the world. Many fled those regimes to seek haven in Canada. Not the other way around. In particular, we owe remembrance because so many of our own intellectual leaders were apologists for those regimes.

By lumping all that is not related to communist nations as being “capitalist history”, we can blame capitalism for all the catastrophes in human experience. Slavery is not a by-product of capitalism. It existed in tribal societies, and feudal; in Christian empires and Islamic fiefdoms. The elimination of slavery from the world began with democratic, capitalist Great Britain. Slavery is not uniquely tied to capitalism, but democracy historically has been.

To sweep aside the horrors of communism by saying, well, bad things have happened outside communist countries too, is to abdicate our ability to make moral judgments about our world. I note that our current MP began his political career in affiliation with the Communist party. In the 1940s, my grandfather was imprisoned for passing technological secrets to the Soviets. Then, we didn’t know the extent of destruction communism was already causing. I can only wonder how, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the documentation of the atrocities committed by the Eastern regimes, anyone could now wish to stand under their banner.

David Sachs is a Chelsea resident and author of the bestselling thriller, ‘The Flood’.

Ottawa Outdoors Magazine

On the Lower Madawaska with friend Geoff

Always a great spring evening planning summer fun

http://apt613.ca/the-second-night-of-the-second-season/

Secret Masters of the World and Other Great Conspiracies That Explain Everything

Dumped by your girlfriend? Lose your job? It’s probably not your fault.

I used to think I controlled the course of my life. I know better now. It’s the Illuminati, stupid. You haven’t heard of the Illuminati? The secret masters of the world, controlling global events through recorded history using the Freemasons, the Jews, and the Trilateral Commission as pawns? Ring a bell?

Between the ever-expanding Da Vinci Code franchise and blockbuster film National Treasure, conspiracy theories are bubbling up into the national consciousness like never before. Does it spring from a human search for meaning behind chaotic world events? Or, in a secular society, has the culture of conspiracy begun to form a modern mythology? Before you read this article and pull back the veil of lies to see reality as it truly is, please put on your aluminum foil helmet. Because if they read your mind, if they know you know, you could be in danger. Now hold my hand, and into the rabbit hole we go.

JFK: The Cadillac of Conspiracies

            On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed as his motorcade drove through Dallas, Texas. When police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald later that day, the archetypal conspiracy theory was born out of human disbelief that one loser could so easily change world history. Fueling conjecture were the many suspiciously snuffed leads in the investigation. Like Oswald himself, who was assassinated two days later while in police custody. That was odd. Soon phrases like ‘lone gunman’ and ‘grassy knoll’ became part of the American consciousness. Conspiracy theorists began arguing over the meaning of each frame in the famous Zapruder film, and discussing hypothetical identification and motives for every single crowd member seen in all known photos. Crazy? If there were a conspiracy, wouldn’t that be important enough to warrant this kind of scrutiny?

            Now, the first question for conspiracy theorists is always, Who gains from this? VP Lyndon Johnson became President. But what if Johnson had gotten together with Fidel Castro? He hated Kennedy. So did FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. And they all slept with Marilyn Monroe, so she’d have to be in on it. Wait, she was dead. Another dead lead! It’s enough to drive a brother to drink. On the other hand, Oswald was a communist loon with rifle training who had already tried to kill one Texas politician (according to his wife). Which makes him seem a likely solo assassin. Or the perfect patsy.

 What happens in Jonestown, stays in Jonestown

The first public indications something strange was going on in Jonestown may have been the hundreds of bodies and half-empty jugs of bug juice. When Jim Jones moved his entire People’s Temple church down to the jungles of Guyana, he promised his thousand-odd followers a paradise in “Jonestown”. Instead, they found something akin to a slave-labor camp run by acid-heads, with Barry White music on the camp loudspeakers. And that’s not good.

In November 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan flew down with a posse of journalists and concerned relatives. The group left Jonestown the following day with fifteen cult defectors, “telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty” as The Kinks once sang. At the airport, the group (Ryan’s people, not The Kinks) was attacked by a zombie-like Jonestown death squad. Ryan was killed, along with several members of the media and defectors. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Reverend Jones gathered the faithful for a final round of Kumbaya before meeting again ‘in another place’. The cyanide-spiked punch was passed.

 Initial reports were of four hundred bodies found by Guyanese police. When that increased to nine hundred seventeen, including over two hundred children, some wondered if survivors had actually been hunted down and killed by Guyanese or American agents to silence them. There were indications of CIA involvement, with rumors of mind control experiments, or that the group was slaughtered to prevent their planned defection to the Soviet Union. Most of the dead were black, while Jones and his lieutenants, many of whom escaped, were white. What was up with that? Then, there was the rash of Temple-connected murders and suicides back stateside. Was there more to Jonestown than a religious cult over the edge?

The U.S. government decided not to conduct autopsies on the dead, as the cause of death was “apparent”- mass suicide. The Guyanese coroner, though, claimed that at least seven hundred of the deaths were not suicides but murders by hypodermic injection. 

You Can’t Beat Buckingham Palace

            Sixteen years after her royal wedding, after the affairs, the tampon comment, and the bitter public divorce, Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed, along with their driver, were killed in a car accident in Paris. Accident? The police first announced that chasing paparazzi were the cause of death, then claimed that the driver had been drunk. Both ideas were contradicted by witnesses. Autopsy reports indicated inexplicably high levels of carbon monoxide in the driver’s blood, but the man’s samples soon disappeared. The driver, found with wads of cash, was known as a spy-for-hire, an angle French police never pursued. Within an hour of the accident, the scene had been ‘scrubbed’ by French street-cleaning crews, and all film held by the arrested photographers was confiscated.

            A mystery car at the scene was later traced to one James Andanson, who was:

a)     A top paparazzi photographer linked with the deadly Solar Temple cult (over seventy mysteriously ‘lapsed’ members so far in Quebec, Switzerland, and France).

b)    Considered a possible spy

c)     Found burned to death in his parked car in the French countryside. Also, days after his death, had his photo office raided by masked gunmen.

d)    All of the above.

If you answered (d), you are not only correct, but may have the paranoia to make it as a full-time conspiracy theorist. It has recently been revealed that a year beforehand, Diana wrote her butler claiming that Prince Charles had plans to kill her in a road accident. It’s not paranoid if they do kill you.

The Da Vinci Code

Warning: May spoil the book. On second thought, skip the book and read this:

            The blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code follows the fictitious uncovering of a secret that would topple the Catholic church. The secret has been guarded through history by a shadowy organization led at one time by Leonardo da Vinci, who encoded the secret in his works, like the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. The secret? That the Church, trying to establish that Jesus was God, hid information about his marriage and children with Mary Magdalene, and the family’s flight to France after the crucifixion. According to Leo, The Holy Grail is not the chalice which held Christ’s blood. The Holy Grail is actually the bloodline of Jesus’ descendants.

            There is evidence that Leonardo was Grand Master of an ultra-secret society known as the Priory of Sion (Isaac Newton too). There is plenty of symbolism (some anti-Church) in da Vinci’s paintings, but much of the specific claims in the novel are guesses. The Gnostic Gospels do hint that Jesus was married, possibly to Mary M. These are the stories which didn’t make the ‘cut’ of the official New Testament. The final gospels weren’t chosen, and edited, until the 4th Century, 300 years after Christ, after the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great merged symbols of sun worship with Christianity to form the Roman Catholic Church. Hard evidence of the supposed First Family is hard to come by- putting it on an equal historical footing with much of the ‘authentic’ gospel stories from that other bestseller.

Area 51, Alien Abduction and MIBs:

            If thousands of Americans are kidnapped by aliens each year (and according to abductee-rights organizations, they are), it stands to reason the government must know about it and be covering it up. According to UFO-logists, the U.S. government has for decades used its highly-secure Area 51 in Nevada as an alien meeting ground and experimentation lab for new alien technology. The aliens often dispatch Men in Black (black suits, sunglasses, and large Cadillacs) to intimidate witnesses into silence.

            Alien abductions are apparently becoming more common, and that is not a pleasant thought for those with kids to worry about. Which is why one concerned alien watcher invented a type of tin-foil helmet to protect innocents from alien mind control – order it at www.stopabductions.com. As for Area 51, according to the government, it doesn’t exist. Or it didn’t, until the air force was sued by former employees over possible exposure to toxic waste in the ‘90’s. Then the base was acknowledged publicly… when President Clinton issued an executive order granting complete secrecy to the officially unnamed hang-out.

Freemasons: First you get the grout, then you get the power

            The Freemasons are a real semi-secretive international organization dedicated to good works and the brotherhood of man under the all-seeing eye of God. They are also a staple of many conspiracy theories. The hierarchical organization grew out of the old European craftsmen’s guilds in the 1600’s. Now, there are more than 600,000 Freemasons in England and Wales alone- an enormous potential power-structure. Conspiracy theorists maintain that Freemasons control world governments through a shadowy web of allegiances and power-brokers, and the democracy which we participate in is just stage play. Many of the founding fathers of the U.S. were Masons, like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. This is why the American dollars have Masonic symbols on them (like the pyramid and eye). The Masons also have, in their Supreme Council headquarters in London, a “Chamber of Death”, just like your college pad.

Bad things have been done by Freemasons. The Jack the Ripper murders were conducted according to Masonic rituals. Spectacular Freemason scandals shook the Italian government and English justice system in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. But bad things were done by non-Freemasons in those decades too. Freemasons definitely weren’t behind disco.

Protocols Of Zion: If the Jew fits…

            The second question conspiracy theorists often ask is: How could the Jews have been behind this? A document known as The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion answers that. The Protocols have been central to many of the best conspiracy theories for decades. It now serves as one of the anti-Semitic cornerstone of the American white-power anti-government movement.

            The document is purported to be the meeting notes from an 1897 conference of Jewish chieftains in Switzerland. In it, the Elders rant about their devilish plans to control the world through their secret international Jewish cabal. The ingenious super-villains somehow misplaced their meeting notes, and the document has given ‘proof’ to anti-Semitic movements ever since. The Jews are behind everything! It says so in their minutes!

            The document has actually been proven to be a fake since 1921 (it’s a rip-off of a satire of Napoleon III). Still, racist carmaker Henry Ford distributed thousands of copies. It was a big hit in Nazi Germany too- Hitler personally vouched for it in his book.

Something is rotten in the state of New Mexico

On or around Independence Day, 1947, during a severe thunderstorm near Roswell, New  Mexico, something crashed to earth.  The changing government explanations for the strange debris found by a farmer provided conspiracy theorists with proof of a cover-up. First the air force announced they’d found a flying saucer, then a weather balloon, then finally, an ultra-top secret military balloon. Rumors circulated that the object was indeed an alien spacecraft, and that the ship’s parts (including dead aliens) were removed by the U.S government and studied under top-secrecy. Much of our modern technology (such as lasers and fiber optics) may have come from that spacecraft. But where was the proof?

In 1997, retired Colonel Philip Corso wrote a book about his involvement in the cover-up, including his secret work to spread the alien technology and an eyewitness account of alien corpses. The book blew the Roswell story wide open- Senator Strom Thurmond wrote the foreward- except that, once again, no corroborating evidence was given other than Corso’s word.

Bush and bin Laden: Separated at birth?

Within hours of the September 11 attacks, conspiracy theorists were spreading every explanation imaginable for the events. Many blamed the Israelis, accused of framing Islamic terrorists. This brought together the two great themes in conspiracy thought: Who stands to gain? and, How were the Jews involved? Then the eerie links between President Bush and Osama bin Laden began to emerge.

The destinies of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden played out in parallel on opposite sides of the globe. But was their eventual clash like Montana’s 49ers and Marino’s Dolphins inevitably emerging from their respective conferences? Or was there more direction to their relationship? Bush and bin Laden were scions of extraordinarily powerful families in the United States and Saudi Arabia, respectively. Bush Sr. had become close friends with the Saudi elite, first as director of the CIA, then as Vice President. One of W.’s close friends, James Bath, was an American money manager for the bin Ladens.  They helped fund W.’s early oil business.

While Bush was Texas governor, a Taliban delegation came to the state on business, to plan an oil pipeline. The company building the pipeline was advised by Hamid Karzai, who would later be installed by Bush to head post-Taliban Afghanistan. The Caspian Sea drilling contract was given to Halliburton Oil, run by Dick Cheney. Was it coincidence that this cast of characters would again come together in a historical nexus years later? Was it just coincidence that, on the same day Osama bin Laden’s group hijacked those planes, George Bush Sr. was at the annual Carlyle Group investors meeting with Osama’s half-brother, Shafiq bin Laden? Perhaps Bush had engineered the attacks as a pretext to go to war in the Middle East, with oil reserves in Iraq and a pipeline through Afghanistan as the ultimate prize. Or was there even more to the story?

The History of the World in a Nutshell:

            Have you ever suspected a plot connecting all these conspiracy theories and historical events? A common thread to all of history, really. Welcome to the upper levels of Conspiracy Theory. It goes like this:

            The world is controlled by a very few families, no more than 13 worldwide. These “Illuminati” are the Rothschilds of England, the Bronfmans of Canada, the Rockefellers and Bushes of the United States, and some European royalty. They control the world through a number of secret societies, especially the Freemason, working towards one world government led by Satan, ruling a michrochipped, gun-less population. The Illuminati achieve this goal by staging world-crises. Bin Laden is, of course, a Freemason. They killed Diana and Kennedy because they were threats.

            These few families have been rich and powerful going all the way back to the beginnings of civilization. The rulers of all the ancient civilizations, from the Hebrews to the Egyptians to the Greeks, actually descended from the granddaddy of ancient civilizations, the Sumerians. The Bible is even based on Sumerian legends, except the Sumerians actually lived with their gods. Because their gods were the survivors of Atlantis. Which was built with… the technology they brought from their alien planets. They mated with human women, creating reptilian hybrids who have secretly controlled the world ever since. Which is another reason rich people mate with each other- they need to keep up the alien-reptilian DNA. Which is also why aliens keep kidnapping humans to experiment with reproductive technology. And now you know it all.

The Queen

VS. 

A monkey

Back in October of 2002 I wrote one of my first op-eds for the Toronto Star after a typically embarrassing royal visit by Her Highness. To set the stage: John Manley, then one of Chretien’s star ministers, mused about dumping the monarchy, and poor John was piled on fast for the crime of speaking common sense honestly, and I believe did some back-pedalling. I picked up his baton, picking on the defense-of-monarchy from the Monarchist League of Canada’s website. The League soon took down those arguments.

Now, the version the Toronto Star ran with was not my preferred version. It was the no-monkey argument. So, instead of the published article, I will print here, for the first time ever, my preferred version. The Monkey Argument:

In the TV show The Simpsons, there is a running joke where the grandfather tries telling a story of something from the old days. As the kids become bored, they begin speaking to each other over the poor grandfather’s voice. I was reminded of that scene in listening to MP Elsie Wayne’s recent rant about the Prime Minister’s alleged disrespect for the Queen. I could almost picture the younger members of her party yawning and passing notes to each other.

To those of us in our twenties and thirties, the attention being given the Queen’s visit by pundits and politicians remind us of nothing so much as how different old people are. The arguments being made so passionately in support of the monarchy seem so antiquated they make reading the newspapers seem like walking through a museum. Can I claim to speak for all of my generation? Sure, why not? I have at least as great a claim as the Queen does to representing Canada. Greater in fact, as I actually COME from that generation. As an example of the modern importance and relevancy of the monarchy I can say this: I am senior editor for a Canadian magazine which reaches close to 500,000 readers, most of them men in their twenties and thirties. Our magazine promotes and examines Canadian icons and images of all types. One thing we’ve never discussed in our magazine, and our readers have never missed, is the monarchy.

It is a testament to the accomplishments of older generations of Canadians that ours was brought up with hope and belief in an egalitarian society. We were taught to believe in certain Canadian values. The monarchy makes a mockery of them. The lessons the monarchy teaches are that some people are born better than others: not smarter or stronger, simply ‘better’. The monarchy teaches us that the power to govern our own affairs doesn’t come from us- it comes by the grace of outsiders. The headlines screaming pride over whatever bland praise Her Majesty generously throws our way, like a rock star shouting out to a city before rockin’ it,  gives a pathetic lesson that we need the approval of our betters. As if she says anything different in her visits to Jamaica or New Zealand.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Let us look at the arguments made in support of the monarchy. As a test, we shall compare how some other choice for head-of-state, say, a blind monkey, would fare by those same standards. True, it may be said that monkeys are not native to Canada. But then, neither is the royal family. According to the website of the Monarchist League of Canada,

“The Queen of Canada is more democratic than a President of Canada ever could be because she represents all Canadians. An elected president would owe his selection to a political faction… The Queen and her heirs have been trained from birth for one vocation — that of discharging the duties of sovereign of Canada. Therefore, they are the only Canadians fit to assume this important position.”

We will ignore the ridiculous idea that those borne into power are ‘more democratic’ than those elected. We will let go the obvious objection that the Queen is, of course, not Canadian. I will simply note that on the basis of this first argument, our unelected, non-partisan monkey comes out even with the Queen. Let us move on along the Monarchist website.

“The Monarchy gives Canada a distinctive political system at a time of strong North American Continental trade, social and cultural influences.”

 Today’s Canadians have no trouble with ‘identifying’ ourselves. Furthermore, there could be nothing more distinctive than having a monkey head of state. Monkey 1, Queen 0.

“There is a sense of easy communication between monarchy and people, which politicians by nature are unable to develop.”

Hmmm. Somehow I have a hard time buying the concept that Liz is ready to hang out in ‘easy communication’ with her subjects. But don’t monkeys make you laugh? Monkey 2, Queen 0.

“Many newcomers to Canada have come from countries with monarchies. They readily identify with our Canadian Monarchy”

Many newcomers to Canada come from countries with monkeys. We’ll call his one a wash.

“Perhaps Canadian historian Jacques Monet has said it best. “…a king is a king, not because he is rich and powerful… He is King because he is born. And in choosing to leave the selection of their head of state to this most common denominator in the world — the accident of birth — Canadians implicitly proclaim their faith in human equality.”

Okay, I will give you all a moment to stop laughing. It is true that the Queen is human, and a monkey is not. So she has that going for her. This still sounds more like an endorsement of Ruler-By-Lottery, which would not only be more egalitarian than our current system, but might also earn lotto revenue for our hockey teams. So we’ll concede this point. Monkey 2, Queen 1.

“The French-Canadian tradition, in common with the British and other European traditions, is also monarchical.”

Let’s remember what eventually became of those oh-so-popular French monarchs. In Quebec, the monarchy is viewed at best as an embarrassment, at worst as an insult. But everybody loves animals. Monkey 3, Queen 1.

Finally, I will turn to the argument put forward by the Ottawa Citizen, in their Oct. 8 pro-monarchy editorial:

“Queen Elizabeth’s very distance from current events and political factions, especially in Canada, gives her a disinterested gravitas in the event of a crisis that also helps make such crises unlikely.”

Okay, I grant the royalists the point that the Queen probably doesn’t keep up with Canadian affairs. But what could be more clueless than a blind monkey? Monkey 4, Queen 1. Game over.

There are those who will say it would be cruel to force an animal into a lifetime of such hard work, something for which they may be completely ill-suited and are given no choice in. How much worse to force such ignominy on a human being? Pity the royals. Set them free.

The CACHA supported hospital in the shadows of Kilimanjarao

This article was written about an inspirational Ottawa doctor and the dynamic NGO he had founded, for which I had volunteered in Tanzania. Seven years later, I’m honoured to be working with the Canada Africa Community Health Alliance (CACHA) again, which makes it a nice time to reprint this.

Here is a slice of the CACHA story:

Into Africa: An Ottawa Doctor’s Quest to Help, Ottawa Citizen (December, 2007)

The full article is at the link above, an excerpt is below:

KILEMA, Tanzania – The Tanzanian foothills below Mount Kilimanjaro are alive, green with banana and avocado trees, flowing with streams and waterfalls. Even the wet red clay seems as flesh. It’s a vision of life juxtaposed with the stench of death, the sickly sweet tropical smell of rotting leaves and fruit. Hidden in this jungle Eden is a dense maze of shacks connected by footpaths and a population plagued with a 20-per-cent HIV infection rate — on top of malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis and dysentery.

These hills are a front line in the battle against AIDS in Africa, and an Ottawa group is an active combatant, providing funds, equipment, volunteers and a lifeline to the outside world.

CACHA, the Canada Africa Community Health Alliance, has been supporting this community through Kilema Hospital, the health centre for this rural district. With CACHA’s help, food and clothing are reaching orphans in the surrounding villages and an Internet connection provides hospital staff, many of whom have never used a computer before, with a link to the West.

This summer, a Canadian shipping container arrived with used hospital beds, operating tables, an ultrasound, a portable

X-ray, anesthesia machines, books, clothing — village children can be seen in NHL jerseys — and much more. A modern HIV centre is being built at the hospital, just below the livestock pens and the nun’s residence with the satellite dish on the roof.

In its five years of existence, CACHA has sent well over $2 million in medical equipment to African hospitals and organizations. Their medical caravans, which partner Canadian volunteers with doctors in Gabon, Benin, and Tanzania, have seen tens of thousands of patients.