The Windsor Star from Windsor, Ontario, Canada • 8

A8 Friday, May 3, 2002 EDITORIAL The Windsor Star "The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind." John Stuart Mill. 1859 jf TWE GOOD NEWS 15 THEY PIDN'T The Windsor Star The Windsor Star Group Inc. A division of Southam Publications A CanWest Company 167 Ferry St. Windsor N9A 4M5 Second Class Mail Registration Number 0078 Jim McCormack, President and Publisher Wayne Moriarty, Editor John Coleman, Editorial Page Editor A member of: Audit Bureau of Circulation, Canadian Newspapor Association, NADbank Ontario Press Council Byelection Don't promote Brian Masse The byelection to replace Herb Gray as the MP for Windsor West is just under two weeks away. Many residents of the riding have probably not yet started to weigh the pros and cons of the candidates in the Monday, May 13 vote.

One candidate should be ruled out of the running immediately. Brian Masse's personal record in municipal government doesn't warrant his receiving a promotion to the federal level. Masse is a member of a city council that has overseen and is therefore ultimately responsible for most of the financial problems Windsor currently faces. The problems at city hall are widely known, but worth listing again. The City of Windsor's financial outlook has been severely damaged by hundreds of millions of dollars worth of exorbitant Mike Graston: Star cartoonist Civilians as weapons Masse is remembered not for questioning the ill-conceived Canderel project, but his urging that it include bicycle racks.

charges council indirectly agreed to in a series of bad leasing arrangements signed with a company called MFP. The leases involved the regional landfill, as well as the acquisition of things as varied as fire trucks and computers. Council voted to "If we're going to have the shield of David," he reportedly said to Healy, "why would we not have to accept the swastika?" This exchange took place in 1999. For Annan to name a person to a fact-finding commission charged with investigating an alleged Israeli massacre who equated the Star of David with the Nazi symbol shows either incompetence or malice. I don't think the secretary general is incompetent.

Sad to say, Sommaruga's equation is closer to reality the other way around. Israel can expect about as much open-mindedness from a UN fact-finding mission today as it might have from a committee set up by the Gestapo 60 years ago. Civilians as hostages What happened in Jenin is no great mystery which is not to say that it isn't tragic. There was no massacre. When the Israeli army pushed its way into the booby-trapped streets of the camp to root out terrorists, in the ensuing battle a number of civilians got killed (seven, according to Israel) along with some terrorists (48) and Israeli soldiers (23).

Operatives associated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Tanzim, and similar groups use civilians as their hostages. They deliberately mix with them, sometimes pressuring, sometimes recruiting non-combatants, including women and children, to act as their shields or decoys. Terrorists store arms and explosives in refugee camps. This, needless to say, is a war crime. It's expressly forbidden by international conventions as well as specific UN Assembly resolutions.

By doing it, though, the terrorists accomplish two things. One, they often prevent military action against them. Civilized nations, including Israel, are reluctant to con approve these leases. The city and Essex County now believe they are in line to pay out $210 million more than they expected as a result of the leasing agreement with MFP that involves the landfill alone. If the current arrangement proceeds, that means millions of tax dollars could be directed away from services and badly needed capital projects to cover the unanticipated costs over the next 40 years.

Or taxes could greatly increase. Should Masse be promoted for that? Windsor has quite clearly fumbled the redevelopment of the most important block in the downtown with its ill-conceived Canderel project. The building is about a third of the size originally envisaged, which means the incremental taxes it generates are much less than they were in the original justification for the expense. The full cost of the city's share of expropriation and construction costs are still not known council was until recently in the dark about the increased cost of the parking garage. Taxpayers are now footing the bill for a parking lot on some of the most valuable real estate in the city And taxpayers are on the hook for two floors of the building that are unleased.

A lot more important questions needed to be asked about this project. But Masse is remembered for his urging that the project include bicycle racks. Should Masse be promoted to the federal level for this? Masse is a member of a city council that remains unable to build a simple hockey rink. Should he be promoted for this? Basically, Masse has been a bench-warmer, a yes-man, a political careerist. And this week Elections Canada confirmed that Masse was unable even to fill out his nomination papers correctly The City of Windsor needs an intelligent, powerful voice with the ability to represent the interests of its residents.

Masse has already been faced with that assignment during his years as a city councillor, and he has failed the test. With his record at city hall, giving Masse an unearned promotion to the highest level of government would be a huge mistake. He is not someone who should be given increased responsibility. Last Sunday, Israel's cabinet refused to let a United Nations committee enter Jenin to investigate what transpired at the notorious refugee camp. This wasn't surprising.

The committee, as set up by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, was "factfinding" in name only In reality, it was designed to put the UN's seal of good housekeeping on some blatant anti-Israeli propaganda. For example, Annan named Dr. Cornelio Som-maruga, former president of the International GEORGE JONAS Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to the UN team. Sommaruga is a consummate international bureaucrat, who currently heads the Swiss-based Caux Initiatives of Change foundation. (This is the new name of the old Moral Rearmament Movement, founded during the Cold War to outflank communism on the soggy left.) Sommaruga normally mouths the same benign platitudes in several languages.

He makes an exception in the case of Israel, though. As the Washington Post reported, when Sommaruga still headed the International Red Cross, he remonstrated with Dr. Bernadine Healy, then president of the American Red Cross, who suggested that the ICRC should finally admit Israel's Magen David Adorn (MDA) to membership. The Muslim Red Crescent is a member, but the MDA has been excluded for 50 years. Israel's "Red Cross" would only be allowed to join if it dropped its symbol, the Star of David.

Apparently Sommaruga found this a perfectly reasonable condition. absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a rerun. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity. So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pick- duct combat missions among non-combatants. But even if terrorists can't prevent such actions altogether, as in Jenin, they can make them more costly to the enemy.

Israel lost 23 soldiers in Jenin because it used infantry rather than aerial bombardment to reduce civilian casualties. The second thing terrorists accomplish by hiding among civilians is even more beneficial to them. When civilian casualties occur as they almost invariably do under such circumstances when women, old men, or children get hurt or killed, the terrorists who led them to the slaughter can cry foul. They can cry havoc, they can cry massacre, they can shed crocodile tears until some obliging "fact-finding" mission is dispatched by their UN friends to put the international community's blue ribbon on their lies. The surprising thing isn't that the terrorists do this.

The surprising thing is that so many skeptical, hard-bitten, level-headed western journalists, who normally have the keenest eye for deception, fail to see through such an obvious rusede guerre. Israel is standing firm this week, not letting Kofi Annan put the UN's imprimatur on Arab propaganda through a mockery of "fact finding." The reservations Foreign Minister Shimon Peres presented to the UN include the condition that, as a sovereign nation, only Israel can decide who testifies before the committee. The standoff may continue, though chances are a UN committee will eventually go to Jenin after some cosmetic changes. Appointees blatantly hostile to Israel will be, if not replaced, balanced by other appointees not blatantly hostile to it. In today's climate it's the best Israel can expect.

George Jonas appears Fridays. Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit. So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.

Last week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well. This article by Kevin Myers first appeared In the Telegraph, one of Britain 's largest i irculation newspapers. In war as in peace, Canada taken for granted By Kevin Myers Until the deaths of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, Just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again. That is the price Canada pays for ford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J.

Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers. Greatest peacekeepers Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world Is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves and are unheard by anyone else that one per cent of the world's population has provided 10 per cent of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

GUEST COLUMN sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved. Voluntary contribution Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10 per cent of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the Armed Forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being.