Elizabeth May's Cop Out

How come Elizabeth May isn't standing up for Canadians who disapprove of the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and abuses of Palestinian rights against the insulting and false accusation of antisemitism?

 Its a despicable slur, the definition of a blood libel.

She is deeply distressed that 'some people think' the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is antisemitic. That's an opportunity to respect the democratic will of her members and use her public profile to educate people and push back against a despicable lying slander.  Instead she starts from the position of accepting the slur as fact and is clearly working behind the scenes to reverse the members votes in a way designed to keep them reversed.

BDS is a peaceful, legitimate attempt to hold a state that styles itself as a liberal democracy to the standards of behavior expected from a liberal democracy.

But she's more concerned with acting like a public drama queen and treating a democratic vote as somehow illegitimate because it gives her the sads.

The Green Party has always been a faux progressive joke, a way to blunt the power of the progressive vote and throw elections to the Liberals and with the panicked efforts to overturn a real progressive resolution by members who fell for the pose that just gets more blatant all the time.

Of course we hated him

Defenders of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are describing the virulent hatred for their leader and their party that drove them from power as irrational.  On the contrary it was and is utterly rational when somebody clearly hates you to hate them back.

I'm a trade unionist and proud of it so Stephen Harper hates me.  I'm an environmentalist so Stephen Harper hates me.  I have leveled strong criticisms against the behavior of the state of Israel so Stephen Harper hates me.  I'm a leftist who believes in a strong social safety net so Stephen Harper hates me.

And he couldn't even pretend to hide that hatred.  In small ways and large day after day for YEARS he and his government demonstrated scornful, contemptuous hatred in word and deed for me and millions of other Canadians.  He rammed through legislation, violating long standing parliamentary custom in the process, to try to deliver a death blow to the union movement, he used revenue Canada as a personal goon squad to attack civil society groups that criticized him or his government going so far as to label environmentalists as terrorists and foreign funded saboteurs,  on an almost daily basis he and his government made statements expressing utter contempt for any group or individual who stood in the way of the Stephen Harper agenda.

The core Conservative base is maybe 20% to 30% of Canadians, at one point or another Harper or one of the trained attack weasels of his cabinet expressed hatred and contempt through statements or legislative assaults against practically everyone else.  He and his government made it quite clear on multiple occasions that Canadians were divided into two groups; Conservative supporters and enemies, and no one can doubt that Stephen Harper hated his enemies.

So we hated him back, what could possibly be more rational?

Provocation and/or Police State?

There are only two options: Either the two undercover officers arrested at the G20 were engaging in illegal behaviour - they were provocateurs in other words - or this is an admission that you didn't have to break the law to be chained and jailed, just protest. Either one condemns the entire police operation:

TORONTO, ON (NEWS1130) - The watchdog that keeps an eye on the national police force has found that two people arrested during the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010 were plain-clothesed police officers.

Should Canada start considering EVERY American woman eligible for Refugee status?

Government mandated rape with medical instruments, laws mandating that women be forced to explain to their boss why they are using birth control pills, laws mandating that even if pregnancy will KILL the mother she be forced to carry a pregnancy to term - even if the fetus itself is dead.

At what point should any American woman seeking refuge in Canada start being considered a political refugee?

This week the Georgia State Legislature debated a bill in the House, that would make it necessary for some women to carry stillborn or dying fetuses until they 'naturally' go into labor. In arguing for this bill Representative Terry England described his empathy for pregnant cows and pigs in the same situation.


I have a question for Terry England, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and too many others: I have three daughters, two of them twins. If one of my twins had been stillborn would you have made me carry her to term, thereby endangering both the other twin and me? Or, would you have insisted that the state order a mandatory fetal extraction of the living twin fetus from my womb so that I could continue to carry the stillborn one to term and possibly die myself? My family is curious and since you believe my uterus is your public property, I am, too.

Mr. England, unlike the calves and pigs for which you expressed so much empathy, I am not a beast of burden. I am a woman and I have these human rights:

The right to life.

The right to privacy.

The right to freedom.

The right to bodily integrity.

The right to decide when and how I reproduce.

Mr. England, you and your friends do not get to trade these rights, while "dog and hog hunting," in return for a young man's chickens.

My human rights outweigh any you or the state corruptly and cynically seek to assign to a mass of dividing cells that will eventually turn into a 'natural' person. Personhood-for-zygote based bills and related legislation, like Georgia's and hundreds of others, bills and laws that criminalize pregnancy and abortion and penalize women for being women, violate my human rights.

Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean I cannot think clearly, ethically, morally, rationally about my body, human life or the consequences of my actions. Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean that I do not have rights when I am pregnant. I have responsibility but am powerless. You have power but are irresponsible with my rights.

By not trusting me, you force me to trust you. And YOU are not trustworthy.

I gestate humans, you do not. I know how it feels to be pregnant. You do not. I know what happens to a fetus in a womb. You do not. I have carried three fetuses to term. You have not. What I experience when I am pregnant is not empathy. It is permeability. The fetus is me. And the state is you, apparently. But, no matter what you say or do I have fundamental human rights. What makes you think that you, who cannot have this fully human experience, can tell me anything about gestation or how I experience it? Especially when you compare my existence and experience to that of brutish animals.

The rest of the civilized world thinks this country has lost its mind.

Taking on a Revolting Bully

A billionaire Mormon backer of Mitt Romney with an anti-gay axe to grind and a habit of using his vast wealth to harass, intimidate and silence critics gets openly challenged by Glenn Greenwald to put up or shut up:

Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho billionaire and the CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a controversial billion-dollar-a-year company which peddles dietary supplements and cleaning products; back in 2004, Forbes, echoing complaints to government agencies, described the company as “a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway.” VanderSloot has long used his wealth to advance numerous right-wing political causes. Currently, he is the national finance co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, and his company has become one of the largest donors ($1 million) to the ostensibly “independent” pro-Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future. Melaleuca’s get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company’s entering into a voluntary agreement to “not engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid”‘; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement with the Idaho attorney general’s office, which found that “certain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca” had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements.

But it is VanderSloot’s chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics — magazines, journalists, and bloggers — that makes him particularly pernicious and worthy of more attention. In the last month alone, VanderSloot, using threats of expensive defamation actions, has successfully forced Forbes, Mother Jones and at least one local gay blogger in Idaho to remove articles that critically focused on his political and business practices. He has been using this abusive tactic in Idaho for years: suppressing legitimate political speech by threatening or even commencing lawsuits against even the most obscure critics (he has even sued local bloggers for “copyright infringement” after they published a threatening letter sent by his lawyers). This tactic almost always succeeds in silencing its targets, because even journalists and their employers who have done nothing wrong are afraid of the potentially ruinous costs they will incur when sued by a litigious billionaire.

Given Vandersloot's MO, Greenwald and Salon have to be expecting to be in the sights of the billionaire's legal arsenal for this blistering broadside.  It's an open challenge and a slap to provoke a SLAPP.  Repost this widely folks.

The Man Behind the Mask

The author of graphic novel masterpiece V for Vendetta reflects on the strange new life of his creation as a symbol of protest and resistance.

It all comes back to Moore – a private man with knotty greying hair and a magnificent beard, who prefers to live without an internet connection and who has not had a working telly for months "on an obscure point of principle" about the digital signal in his hometown of Northampton. He has never yet properly commented on the Vendetta mask phenomenon, and speaking on the phone from his home, Moore seems variously baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased that his creation has become such a prominent emblem of modern activism.

"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction."

The Occupied Agenda

Ok MSM, you sneer that you can't get a coherant specific answer as to what the Occupy Wall Street crowds are protesting.  Here you go guys:

Paul Krugman is 100% right

The Right have gone mad with rage at Paul Krugman's 9/11 post.  It's far too honest.

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

The most specious complaint is the disrespect card, like Krugman I would argue its far more disrespectful to those who died that day and in the Neo-con wars of choice since to perpetuate the mythology that allowed them.

I have no time for the 9/11 'Truthers'.  I believe 9/11 happened because 19 pissed off Muslims with x-acto knives made it happen, where we agree is that the Neo-con regime in the White House did leap on the terrible events of that day to perpetuate their own ideological agenda at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives since that day.

9/11 was used to perpetuate lies and death and torture and vanished freedoms.  It baffles me that there can even be any argument about any of this.

War of Words

The Republican Party is trying to censor people who call the Republican plan to end Medicare a Republican plan to end Medicare.

Attention, people, this is important: The battle over whether it’s true that the Republican plan would “end Medicare” is about to play out in a critical way in New Hampshire.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which oversees House races for the GOP, has written a sharply-worded letter demanding that a New Hampshire TV station yank an ad making that claim. Whether the ad gets taken down could help set a precedent for whether other stations will air Dem TV ads making this argument, which is expected to be a central message for Dems in the 2012 elections.

The TV station has thankfully declined:

The liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee has won a round against the National Republican Congressional Committee -- with the liberal group turning back an effort to get an ad targeting Republican proposals on Medicare pulled from broadcast.

Replacing a program of direct government payments to senior's doctors with a voucher program to get seniors to buy their  own - more expensive - private health insurance unambiguously ends the current Medicare program and replaces it with something that is neither THE Medicare program or even A Medicare program.  That's a government market support program for the private insurance industry. An industry that coincidentally has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Republican Party and Republican candidates.

If a political party ever gets to dictate what is allowed to be said based on whether it conflicts with their own deceptive rhetoric that means giving them control over defining consensus reality itself.

'Kettling' Declared Illegal in UK

Yes, the same controversial police tactic infamously used in Toronto during the G20.  This precedent should be swiftly argued in Canadian courts.

Police are to appeal against today's High Court decision declaring unlawful controversial "kettling" tactics used against demonstrators during G20 protests in central London two years ago.

The judgment led to a call from human rights lawyers for an "immediate change to police attitudes and tactics".

But the Metropolitan Police expressed concern over the impact of the ruling on its ability "to prevent disorder within protests".

The judgment was a victory for Hannah McClure, a student, and Josh Moos, a campaigner for Plane Stupid, who had challenged the legality of the "violent" restraint methods used against them at the Camp for Climate Action in Bishopsgate on April 1 2009.

It was the day newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson died after being struck by a police officer at a separate G20 protest at the nearby Royal Exchange.

UPDATE: Didn't take long for lawyers for victims of Toronto's kettling incidents to jump on this:

“This case is very important and will be used by us in the court,” said Murray Klippenstein, who has filed a $45 million class action lawsuit against the Toronto Police Services Board over the G20 in Toronto last June.

UPDATE 2:  As a result of the High Court ruling, 'thousands' of people illegally detained may sue for false imprisonment.  Maybe the only way to get the police to not do this kind of thing is to make it incredibally expensive when they do.

Regime 'Alteration'

America to Arab protestors: 'Your freedom would be incovenient to us and our allies.  We'll push our client despots to throw you a few more crumbs, you just need to learn to expect less than full democracy.'

WASHINGTON—After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling "regime alteration."

Saved from Faux News

Robert F. Kennedy congratulates Canada for avoiding the same mistake the US made when Reagan was allowed to gut the Fairness Doctrine:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators today announced they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1988. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper's proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, "Sun TV News" which Canadians call "Fox News North."

Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of demagoguery; false patriotism, bigotry, fear, selfishness and belligerent religiosity.

Harper's attempts to make lying legal on Canadian television is a stark admission that right wing political ideology can only dominate national debate through dishonest propaganda. Since corporate profit-taking is not an attractive vessel for populism, a political party or broadcast network that makes itself the tool of corporate and financial elites must lie to make its agenda popular with the public. In the Unites States, Fox News and talk radio, the sock puppets of billionaires and corporate robber barons have become the masters of propaganda and distortion on the public airwaves. Fox News's notoriously biased and dishonest coverage of the Wisconsin's protests is a prime example of the brand of news coverage Canada has smartly avoided.

Well perhaps a bit of an idealistic take on our home and native land.  "Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves."  is a slightly rosy view.  I'd recommend Kennedy check out the writings and rantings of Ezra Levant or Lorne Gunter's disappointed snarl at the CRTC decision  and he'd find we have our own homegrown ideologues, raving bigots, demagogues and fools with major media soap boxes.

The difference is that they don't have anywhere near the profile someone like Glenn Beck can get, with no restriction at all on blatant partisan dishonesty on the airwaves.  Canada's false news law never stopped Mike Duffy from performing the kind of yeoman service to the Conservative Party that earned him his Senate seat, but it has resulted in the closest thing to a Glenn Beck in Canada being a loud mouthed Hockey announcer with horrible taste in suits almost universally considered to be little more than a rodeo clown.

Of course a law is useless unless it's enforced, so Canadians need to remember to hold our broadcasters to their legal obligations.  Sun TV will be pushing against that boundary every day its on the air, lets make sure their legal department earns their money responding to CRTC complaints every time they do.

One World. One People. One Struggle.

Good rule of thumb:

Anybody who refers to popularly elected union leaders as 'Bosses' is trying to con you.

"Sarah Palin also weighed in on the matter in a Facebook post on Friday, telling union members that they should break away from leaders.

"You don't have to kowtow to the union bosses who are not looking out for you, but instead are using you," wrote Palin.

"Wisconsin union bosses want union members out in the streets demanding that tax payers foot the bill for unsustainable benefits packages."

It's a transparent attempt to obfuscate that the real union bosses are the union members.

Union executives, Presidents, Council members, Business Agents right down to the level of Shop Stewards are elected by their fellow members, enact the policies their members tell them to and can be overthrown in these things called elections  if those members feel they aren't following the will of the membership.  I was a member of one where that happened.

Yes, like any democratic government including that of the United States itself, criminals or incompetents occasionally rise to positions of power.  The strength of the whole system is reflected in how quickly such figures are identified and removed.  I'd put union governance in general against the governance displayed by someone like Governor Walker coming to power.  Any day.

I agree with Robert Creamer, that the radical right over-reached themselves in Wisconsin last week.  They counted on a lightning fast blitzkrieg attack on their political enemies.  Such a fundamental existential attack on the right of collective bargaining becomes far less likely to succeed thanks to Democratic Senators being willing to take the vital step of denying Walker a quorum to ram through his changes.  With public pressure building and both sides exploring recalls against the opposition's state senators the pressure on Walker's caucus will start to have an effect.  A lot of Republicans in the Wisconsin House are getting calls right now from former supporters telling them in no uncertain terms they weren't elected to gut worker's rights.

Best case scenario: This ends in Wisconsin with a fig leaf of some benefit cuts but the most contentious proposals limiting bargaining rights and other union busting poison pills like dues check off withdrawn.  Governors all over the country look at the angry crowds filling the legislature in Madison and decide there's other fights they'd rather spend their time and energy on.

If Walker and the radical right in Wisconsin succeed though, the ongoing class war against workers in North America enters a new and very dangerous stage.  Unions weren't granted the rights they have out of the goodness of the hearts of government and industry, they fought for them in the streets until government and industry decided organized labour was the safer route than an increasingly radicalized population in a world sliding into revolution on every horizon.

The grand compromise of the modern social contract was a peace treaty.  Generally speaking, tearing up a peace treaty means war.

"If you're going to take away bargaining rights, you leave them with what?  You leave them with what they had in the '20s and '30s, you leave them with the streets."

Quote of the Day

Rising tensions in Madison and could presage the kind of labor unrest that hasn’t been seen in the US since the Great Depression, says Professor Bruno.
"If you're going to take away bargaining rights, you leave them with what?" he says. "You leave them with what they had in the '20s and '30s, you leave them with the streets."

Attention must be paid. Don't kid yourself that Conservative politicians in Canada aren't looking at Wisconsin with a mixture of calculation and longing. This is like the partisan attack our own loathsome right wingers tried with political financing; a deliberate act of war and an unambiguous existential threat to their political enemies and to civil society itself.

Julian Assange on the Today Show

Call to Arms

A 15 year old British kid protesting massive tuition increases putting education out of reach for all but the elite says you can forget any ideas about a post-ideological generation.


Know hope.

Bullyboy Bluster

Stephen Harper keeps saying "My way or the highway."

The response keeps being "Ok then, the highway it is."

By most accounts, Stephen Harper and his government were humiliated Tuesday at the United Nations, losing a coveted Security Council seat to Portugal. The defeat is still the buzz of official Ottawa and political spin doctors have been working overtime.

Cabinet ministers and even the Prime Minister's own communications director, Dimitri Soudas, are blaming Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff for torpedoing the deal. This, after he publicly declared Canada did not deserve the seat because of the Harper government's foreign policy.

The Liberals, meanwhile, are blaming Mr. Harper and his international policies for the loss. Mr. Ignatieff has accused the Conservatives of ignoring the United Nations.

Potentially having even more dire consequences than the Security Council seat loss is the recent dust up with the United Arab Emirates, where the government's tough guy, 'take it or leave it' bluster ended with Canada having to walk away from a multi-million dollar air base and featured Canadian government ministers being banned from entering a putative ally's airspace - all to protect the business interests of a private corporation.

Ottawa's eviction from a Mideast military base has exposed a rift within the Harper cabinet over how far Canada should go to satisfy its Arab hosts: an internal debate in which Stephen Harper cut Defence Minister Peter MacKay out of negotiations.

Canada is set to vacate Camp Mirage, a once-secret military installation, by Nov. 5 after failing to reach an agreement with the United Arab Emirates over what would amount to compensation for nine years of accommodation near Dubai.

The UAE has been seeking additional lucrative landing rights for two state-backed air carriers at Canadian airports, and Mr. MacKay was one of several ministers, including Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan, who had favoured doing more to help the Arab ally, a senior Conservative MP said.

The Prime Minister ultimately cut these ministers out of negotiations, the official said, favouring the forceful arguments against big concessions advanced earlier this year by former transport minister John Baird.

The loss of the base has left some cabinet members frustrated and angry at how Mr. Harper handled it.

"[It's] all gone because of a fit of pique and a hard [core] position that is truculent and unreasonable against Canada's short- and long-term interests," the MP said.

'Out of touch, arrogant and dictatorial' are by now well established descriptions of this, the most secretive and PMO dictated government in Canadian history.  We knew that Harper's machivellian scheming always has a tendancy to slam up against his own bitter hatred of dissent and opposition, his bully boy need to 'stick it' it to anybody who challenges him. 

He'll never learn and we can expect further sudden reversals as those he deals with refuse to take having sand kicked in their faces lying down.

"What the parliament does, the street can undo"

Progressives, union activists and the anesthetized majority in North America can only look at the agressive and confident activism of the engaged French citizenry with envy and awe.  If we stood and fought with these kind of numbers and this kind of determination we'd be living in a different Canada today.

PARIS - Hundreds of thousands of French workers, students and functionaries walked out on strike Tuesday and paraded through the streets in what labor unions described as the beginning of a long-term showdown with President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Air and rail service throughout the country was disrupted by the protests - the fourth in a month.
They were aimed specifically at reversing a new law requiring people to work until age 62 rather than 60 before receiving their retirement pensions. But they also were a platform for broader-based political resentments that have been building among France's salary-earners, many of whom view Sarkozy's government as callous and too close to big business.

In the souring atmosphere, union leaders declared many of the strikes that on Tuesday nearly crippled the country would continue indefinitely or recur on an irregular schedule. The result could be gasoline shortages, curtailed rail and air travel, chaos at schools and perhaps even power cuts in France's main cities, they warned.

"We are going to continue," vowed Bernard Thibault, secretary general of the General Labor Federation. "The mobilization is not going to stop just because the senators have voted."

Discrimination and the State

Two stories today, of discrimination and the state's response to it. One of the principled use of force to protect civil society and the rights of an embattled minority and the other a complete capitulation by the state and in fact complicity in the state sponsored support of discrimination.

One of the most affecting moments from the riots by far right Serbian groups against marchers in Belgrade's Gay Pride Day, is this picture of a civilian, either a bystander or one of the marchers helping an injured police officer.

For progressive Canadians right now, it's hard to visualize the police as defenders of a dissenting civil society or any kind of progressive movement like that of gay rights rather than persecutors.

And that's a shame, isn't it?

I honestly don't think it reflects the wishes of the majority of Canadian police.  I know a Canadian police officer who was at the G20 protests in Toronto, and was disturbed by some of the things he saw and the behavior of some of the officers involved.  I still believe that the majority of police officers became police because of a sincere desire to serve and protect the public.  It would be willful blindness though, to ignore that some were power tripping thugs looking for a job that would give their thuggery license and some started out with good intentions and were coarsened by a job that understandably can carry a heavy psychic toll.

The problem is a government that treats accusations of police misconduct as something to be defended and justified and accusers attacked rather than treating such incidents with the oversight they call for.

The other story is Israel's cabinet agreeing to a 'loyalty oath' requiring citizens to swear fealty to the majority religion of the state or be considered traitors.

Even within the cabinet the decision has been criticized with language so harsh, here in Canada repeating it probably risks being accused of antisemitism:

Minister Shalom Simhon (Labor) also skipped the meeting, as he was abroad on a business trip.  Herzog told Haaretz late Saturday that the resounding support for such an amendment showed that "fascism was devouring the margins of society."
"We are on a most dangerous slippery slope," he warned.

Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni condemned on Sunday the cabinet's approval of a controversial proposal requiring non-Jews seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
"What we have seen today is politics at its worst. The sensitive issue of Israel's existence as a Jewish and democratic state has become subject to political horse-trading.

...

Writing in today's Haaretz, liberal commentator Gideon Levy said: "Remember this day. It's the day Israel changes its character ... From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country."

Even some members of the hard line Likud Party opposed the law as dangerous and counter-productive.

So one state struggling against its own bigoted fringe and the other capitulating utterly to the most hateful and exclusionary urges of its far right wing.  One that the whole world united against in the last decade and came out if it striving to regain a role in the community of nations, and the other that has been enabled, excused and defended against its own interests and given every reason to believe that even such an odious piece of racism by the state will continue to be enabled, excused and defended.

The state is either the defender of civil society and inalienable rights against any who would attack them or is itself complicit in those attacks.

There is no middle ground.