Planning to fail

From CBC News:

Florida's governor is proposing a plan to prevent gun violence that includes banning the sale of firearms to anyone younger than 21 in the wake of a mass shooting that killed 17 people at a Florida high school last week.
Gov. Rick Scott announced the plan at a news conference Friday in Tallahassee. He began by reading aloud the names of the victims who were fatally shot Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
Scott's plan also calls for:

• A trained law enforcement officer in every school in Florida by the time the 2018 school year begins.
• One officer for every 1,000 students on campus.
• The sale of bump stocks be banned.
• Mandatory "active shooter training" at all schools. Students, teachers and staff must complete all training and "code red" drills by the end of the first week of each semester.
• Prohibiting a "violent or mentally ill person" from purchasing a firearm through a sworn request by a family or community member, called a "violent threat restraining order."
• $50 million in additional funding for mental-health initiatives.

So, having failed to plan to safeguard the right of those 17 high school students and teachers to live,  Rick Scott's new plan is to plan to fail to safeguard their lives, and instead plan for school shootings to be the new normal. Because, let's be honest, none of these proposals are going to do anything - it's all security theatre, and none of it really addresses the main contributing factor in gun violence: guns.

The numbers do not lie, on this issue. Countries that enacted gun control laws after their first mass shooting were able to prevent them from becoming a regular occurrence. The United States, however, failed to do so, and now have more guns than residents... literally in excess of one gun for every man, woman, and child living inside their borders, whether legally or not. Bringing that situation under control is going to require more than going through the "security theatre" motions. And, as long as Republicans are in control of the government, nothing more than lip service will ever be paid to this issue.

Did I ever mention how glad I am to be Canadian, at times like this? Seriously, I have zero desire to even visit the U.S. right now. Much as I love our American neighbours, they just have way too many extremely well-armed idiots and nutjobs down there.

This isn't a problem that I can do much about; as a Canadian, I can't even donate to the campaigns of candidates that might enact gun control laws. Americans have to do that. All I can do is urge everyone in America who cares about their safety, and the lives and safety of those around them, to register to vote, and then show up to vote, for Democrats. Even voting for well-meaning Republicans means voting for more mass shooting carnage, because anything that keeps Republicans in power, or even keeps them close to parity with Dems, means that the GOP will refuse to evolve on this issue, remaining enslaved to the most reactionary elements who make up their Primary voting pool.

And that assumes that there are well-meaning elected Republicans on this issue, something for which I'm not yet seeing any evidence. Voting for change means voting "D," both this year and in 2020. Nothing else convince Republicans that they even need to change, let alone make that change happen.

Thankfully, the American electorate seems to have realized this, and is voting Democratic in every special election that comes up; one can only hope that continues through the mid-terms, and into the next Presidential cycle. And, for a wonder, the NRA is suddenly looking vulnerable for the first time in years.

So, maybe there's hope for change, even if it is a new generation that has to make it happen. I certainly hope that sanity will reassert itself south of the border. One might want to visit, sometime before the end of the century.

Now can we say that Israel's hard-liners have lost their way?

Seriously, you can't make this shit up. From CBC News:

Muluebrhan Mesgna walked out of an Israeli immigration office near Tel Aviv clutching a white piece of paper that he worries is his death warrant.

"I feel that [Israel is] killing me — to deport me to Uganda or Rwanda is no less than killing me," said the 30-year-old Eritrean, who has lived in Israel since 2011.

Mesgna is one of hundreds of men from Eritrea and Sudan who have been handed notices giving them a stark choice. They can leave Israel voluntarily, along with a cheque for $4,400 and a plane ticket to an undisclosed country in Africa, or be locked up.

The deportations of 37,000 African migrants, who the government views as "illegal infiltrators," are expected to begin in March.

The state's plans have drawn harsh criticism from Holocaust survivors and sparked demonstrations, with immigration and human rights advocates saying the expulsions are not the Jewish way.

That's right... having spent years illegally settling Jewish citizens on Palestinian-occupied lands, turning a blind eye to violence those settlers perpetrate on their Palestinian neighbours while harshly punishing any hint of Palestinian reprisals, the hard-liners of Israel have officially moved on from the annexation of other peoples' lands for their own "living space," and are now establishing actual concentration camps for non-Jews. And while the hard-liners' plan doesn't yet involve actually killing the detainees, knowingly sending them back to face the same persecution and death that these people have already fled once isn't much better.

It's no wonder Holocaust survivors are horrified, and they really shouldn't be the only ones.

The pending deportation of thousands of people has struck a chord in Israel, as the Jewish state was created as a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution.

Asylum seekers and their Israeli supporters vow to keep protesting the government's plans, ahead of the start of the deportations in March. Dozens of Holocaust survivors sent a letter to Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, urging him to reconsider.

"The State of Israel, under your rule, has set itself a goal of reminding the world of the lessons of the Holocaust," the survivors wrote. "Therefore we ask you: Stop the process! Only you have the ability to make a historic decision and show the world that the Jewish state will not allow the suffering and torture of people under its protection."

Israelis and African migrants have voiced similar messages at a number of rallies held in support of the asylum seekers. A demonstration outside of the Rwandan Embassy in the city of Herzliya earlier this month attracted thousands of protestors.

"I think this is against our tradition and against our history as Jews, who for centuries tried to escape from different places," said renowned Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan, who added that several members of his family perished at the hands of the Nazis.

"Now we are doing this, against our culture."

The hard-liners of Israel have been losing their way for a long time, having clearly failed to learn or completely forgotten the lessons of history. Netanyahu and his ilk have spent years undermining the peace process, and with Trump's help finally killed it completely last year. Now we see their next move, and it's every bit as ugly as their critics had warned people, for years, to expect. Comparisons to the Holocaust are a lot more apt today than they were a week ago; Jewish people inside Israel are able to clearly see the ugliness of what's being done here, and are calling it what it is. The only question is, how far down this path with Netanyahu's supporters have to go, before the rest of the world starts to do the same?

Support for Israel cannot continue to be unquestioning and unconditional. The suffering that Jewish people have endured at the hands of others does not entitle them to do the same to non-Jewish people living inside Israel's borders. Jewish people inside Israel recognize this; it's time for the global community to start doing the same, before Israel's hard-liners stray any further into this brutal, racist territory. It's time for Western nations, in particular, to actually learn the lessons of history... while there's still time to avoid repeating the worst of them.