Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘toronto’

Fuck the moronic thugs who decided that setting police cars on fire and smashing store windows was an appropriate Saturday afternoon activity.

Fuck Stephen Harper and the Conservative government for thinking that hosting this summit in a major urban centre was an appropriate use of over a billion dollars of taxpayer money.

Okay, rant over.

The Toronto Star has a photo essay from this weekend. Sometimes, pictures really do say a thousand words.

The all-powerful “Jewish lobby” we keep hearing about (but that has thus far failed to get me a centrally-located indoor parking spot or a good discount on shoes, among other things) has struck again… at least, according to these folks:

Black youth activists in Toronto are blaming the “Jewish lobby” for the decision yesterday morning by border guards to deny entry into Canada to Malik Zulu Shabazz, a controversial black American lawyer and activist, who had been scheduled to address an afternoon protest rally at the Ontario legislature.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Shabazz, leader of the New Black Panthers, is a notorious figure in black activism in America. Based in Washington, he is a criminal defence lawyer, and helped to organize the Million Man March with Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

He is also reported to have claimed Jews stayed home en masse from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and to have said, on the topic of police aggression, that “The only solution any time there is a funeral in the black community is a funeral in the police community.”

Ms. Anizor defended her choice of speaker yesterday.

“What’s to blame is the power of the Jewish lobby to influence politicians, to influence media, to influence whatever it took. Because it took one letter, one press release from B’nai Brith [a Jewish human rights group], and the firestorm began,” she said. “You guys [media] are all here because of what B’nai Brith told you… They’ve injected themselves, trying to dictate who the black community can and cannot hear.”

I’m a strong proponent of freedom of speech, and uncomfortable with technicalities being used to shut it down in any form – whether or not I agree with it. But it is my sincere hope and belief that the vast majority of the black community in Toronto has better taste and judgment than Ms. Anizor gives them credit for.

Dion’s overtime win against Ignatieff foreshadowed the Habs’ overtime win against the Leafs.

Eat your heart out, Toronto!

Heading westward to the Big Apple Big Smoke tomorrow, for a few days. Try not to miss me too much.

An Air France flight apparently missed the runway in Toronto and caught fire. No details yet on injuries or casualties, but the apparant cause is a lightning storm that thwarted landing efforts.

I’ll take a 3-1/2 hour flight delay over that, any day.

(But remember, kids, it’s still safer than driving…)

Update: Reports are that there were only minor injuries among the passangers; miraculously, nobody was killed or injured more seriously.

This overshadows even Russell Crowe’s gesture:

The kids come from Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Turkey and China. They’ve experienced famine, war and death. They know hatred when they see it.

When students from the All Rights Committee (ARC) and the Student Parliament at the Islington Junior Middle School [in Toronto] heard about the firebombing of the United Talmud Torahs (UTT) library in Montreal earlier this month, they responded quickly and collected $440 and 250 books to help UTT rebuild.

[ . . . ]

When the UTT arson happened, “we wanted to show the Jewish people that we care and that we think it should stop,” Sarah Gaikwad, 13, says.

The article says that every class in the school contributed something, as much as they could. These are the kids who are being taught the right values, and they should be applauded for their help.

Toronto has been hit with a wave of antisemitic vandalism… at exactly the same time as the massive one-year anniversary protests of the war in Iraq.

Coincidence?

The power outage that has shut down New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Detroit, Cleveland, and virtually everywhere in between somehow managed to escape us in Quebec, for once. Maybe the gods of power figured we paid our dues with Ice Storm 98?

Like a lot of people I’m sure, my initial reaction was to ask whether it was terrorism. But now it seems pretty clear that it wasn’t. CTV News is reporting that the cause was a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, although they still seem to be trying to sort that out.

The impact is absolutely staggering. To me, it says a lot about how dependant we are on electricity. Literally nothing works without it – the lights are the least of the problem. Transportation, business, the stock market, ventilation, even drinking water . . . it’s like mankind existed happily for thousands of years without electricity, but as soon as it was discovered, we moved ahead in a lit-up world so quickly that we can’t survive without it anymore. I remember having these conversations during the Ice Storm, and hearing the panic again in 1999 as we approached the millennium with trepidation that everything would simply shut down. That didn’t happen, of course, but the fear that it would just underscores this point.

I hope everyone in the affected areas makes it home safely and gets their power back soon.

Nearly half a million people are expected to descend on Toronto for the big Rolling Stones concert tomorrow. And they’re lining up already.

Also on the bill are the Guess Who, AC/DC, Rush, Blue Rodeo, the Tea Party, the Flaming Lips, Montrealers Sass Jordan and Sam Roberts, and . . . Justin Timberlake? (Yeah, seems a bit out of place doesn’t he? Can you picture all the 50+ concert-goers dancing to his brand of pop?)

Anyway, all of these bands for only $21.50 seems like a pretty decent deal, which is probably why they’re flocking from all directions and filling up Toronto’s hotels and restaurants, which have been standing pretty empty since the SARS epidemic.

All good news for Toronto. And a pretty spectacular music event if I do say so myself, even if it did cost the government a fortune and Ticketmaster is going to reap most of the profits. I’m sure it’ll be lots of fun.

But Justin Timberlake???

It’s official: we can’t refer to Toronto as Sarsville anymore. The WHO has declared Toronto free of SARS:

“When 20 days, or twice the incubation period, have passed without detection of a new case, the chain of human-to-human transmission is considered broken,” it added.

This is certainly good news for Toronto’s lagging economy, which may now begin to pick up again. Let’s just hope that health officials and workers don’t let their guards down too quickly, so that a repeat outbreak doesn’t materialize.