Skate on, everyone

[Re: “Pandering to skaters,” Letters, March 5] While most of the skateboarders that R.P. Orlando may have seen are young men, that’s hardly the only group of people skateboarding these days. While predominantly male, there is still a significant amount of females engaging in the fun and beneficial activity.

We’re talking about a form of exercise that many kids actually enjoy partaking in. While I’m at it, why are dancing and yoga women’s activities? Surely you’ve seen men in a yoga class before. Furthermore, what exactly are “women’s sports?’

The government spends money on all sorts of recreational projects. Ice skating arenas, public soccer and baseball fields, basketball courts, swimming pools. All of these are centres that are open to anyone willing to learn the basics of the activity, much like the Taz Mahal. Most public community centres offer yoga classes, but they call the cops when skateboarders use their empty parking lot. Skateboarders can even be fined for commuting along the city bike paths, yet another government funded project for physical activity.

Why shouldn’t skateboarders receive the same consideration?

>>Phil Campeau

God on the bus

[Re: “Keep God off busses,” Letters, Feb. 19] Ed Hoyer’s letter objecting to the Atheist Bus advertising campaign reveals its delicious irony. In advertising the alleged non-existence of God, less than bright “Brights” are actually raising consciousness to God. Doh!

Ed Hoyer strikes me as possibly being someone who can’t stand to see the word God, even in the context of an atheist-sponsored advertising campaign somewhat lamely suggesting that God *probably* does not exist. It is ridiculous for Hoyer to suggest that believers might burn buses and trains in response to this comparatively innocuous anti-religious slogan. It’s not like believers have lost a Stanley Cup playoff game or anything.

I have peacefully protested against genuine “fundamentalist atheist” anti-religious intolerance and bigotry in front of the Unitarian Church of Montreal and I have seen Montreal Muslims peacefully protesting against those problematic depictions of Mohammed in Scandinavian cartoons. I have no problem at all with the Atheist Bus advertising campaign coming to Montreal. In fact, I look forward to it, as it will provoke discussion about God. Who would have thought that evangelical militant atheists would ever give God free publicity?

>>Robin Edga

Miner detail

[Re: “Je me souviens,” Film, Weekly Round-up, March 5] I read Malcolm Fraser’s recent review of André Forcier’s Je me souviens and was astonished. 

Mr. Fraser claims to have seen the film in its entirety, unlike some of his confreres who did not stay to the end, but I have to regard this assertion with skepticism. My misgiving stems from Mr. Fraser’s précis of the film: “It’s the story of a logging town during the Duplessis era, narrated by the son of socialist union activists.” 

For the record, Je me souviens is set in a mining town. Granted, to the untrained eye, logging operations above ground can at times resemble mining operations underground, but at the very least, one would hope that a fastidious reviewer would not have missed the intertitle in bold caps that follows the prologue of the film: “SULLIDOR MINING 1949.” 

In fact, the film was shot in part in the picturesque Quartier Bourlamaque of Val-d’Or and in the depths of the nearby Beaufort Mine.

Bon cinéma nonetheless.

>>Victor Sandrasagra

Talking no use

[Re: “Start talking,” Letters, March 5] Jalaluddin S. Hussain is puzzlingly unfamiliar with the divide-and-rule strategy long favoured by colonizers when he advocates a “dialogue” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority has no authority to speak for Palestinians since it lost the election to Hamas. It is a quisling and collaborationist government that is as powerless as it is corrupt—which is precisely why Israel supports it. (When, for decades, the PLO used to genuinely represent Palestinians, Israel also refused to negotiate with it.)

What is needed is not meaningless “talks” but an immediate end to settlement expansion and occupation. Let us all join the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. It defeated South Africa’s apartheid, it can also help end Israel’s racist policies.

>>Patrice Bombardier

[Re: “Apartheid history,” Front, News, February 26] It’s a sad irony that some of the same people that are fighting for indigenous peoples rights here in the Americas, are also fighting against the indigenous rights of Jews in the Middle East. 

>> Andrew Dawson

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