Reasonably
accommodate nature

[Re: “Angel and Insect,” News, May 22] A report on reasonable accommodation that does not also discuss kindness to nature and the environment, in effect, talks about people as though they live in a vacuum.

This, I’m sure, was never considered, given the total human self-centredness of most politics and social analysis.

In our era of global warming, species extinction and ecosystem destruction, we cannot seriously talk about improving relations within society without considering ourselves part of the earth.

The fact that the commission’s criteria did not allow for a consideration of our destructive treatment of the earth (even in Quebec!) distorts the report.

It is now 28 years since the first Earth Day, and it’s time we realized that human relations don’t exist in a vacuum, apart from the earth, and that any “reasonable accommodation” has to include a new friendship with the earth.

>>Shloime Perel

Onward Christian roots

I commend Quebec Premier Jean Charest for reaffirming Quebec’s attachment to its Catholic heritage and for renouncing the Bouchard-Taylor commission’s recommendations aimed at secularizing the legislature.

The increasing tendency of Western countries to repudiate their Christian roots is not the expression of some morally superior tolerance for other cultures but rather the authorization of an absolute way of thinking and living that is radically opposed to the variety of cultures—cultures which, in the end, are dogmatically relativized.

Secularists are motivated by a totalitarian concept of the State.

According to this mentality, the State is a sort of Supreme Being that is above us and tells us how to live.

But this is not reality. It should be the State that conforms to the society it serves—not the other way around. This is the essence of democracy.

The opposite is dictatorship and totalitarianism.

>>Paul Kokoski, Hamilton, Ont.

Kill ’em all Iron Man

[RE: “Iron Man,” Film, May 22] Your capsule review of Iron Man reminds me of how far the liberal Western media has gone in its wariness of any sort of negative portrayal of Muslims.

Now I’m as big a critic of U.S. government transgressions as anyone, but reading certain publications, one would almost think that Iraqi insurgents are merely victims of American imperialism; that the Taliban are just old-fashioned tribal leaders best left to their poppy fields; that suicide bombers are innocent victims of Israeli aggression; that the chaps who flew planes into the World Trade Centre were practically forced by U.S. foreign policy.

The truth of the situation is that there are Islamic extremists who are up to nasty business. To portray this is not necessarily “light, casual racism,” and to suggest that it is, is the sort of politically correct myopia that doesn’t help anything.

I think a more legitimate criticism of the movie’s politics would be that Tony Stark’s resolution to destroy his weapons seems limited to those possessed by the “bad guys” and not his own government.

And that the double dealing arms trader is seen as a renegade crackpot instead of being intrinsic to the system, which is more likely the case in the real world.

>>John Williams

Recalling South Africa

[Re: “Frankel vs. Finkelstein,” Letters, May 22] If all he can do to refute Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is cite their increased numbers, no wonder “Bossman” chooses to conceal his real name.

A higher birth rate as determining factor must have escaped Bossman’s probing analysis—though I once heard a dim-witted Holocaust-denier also point to the existing Jewish population as “evidence” the extermination project was half-hearted.

It is hardly original for racists to refer to the better living standards of those subjected to colonization. Apartheid-era South Africa regularly boasted that the life expectancy of its black population was greater than in neighbouring countries.

As a settler minority ruling over an indigenous majority, Afrikaners also called the resistance movement “terrorists” while complaining they were surrounded by “hostile” neighbours wanting their “annihilation” and saw themselves as a “beacon of civilization” in a “backward” continent that “refused to accept their existence.”

These supremacists even offered the indigenous population disconnected homelands and tried to pass that off as genuine autonomy.

Sound familiar?

>>Shirley Groves

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