[pepper]

i'm laughing my ASS off over here. some brilliant mo-fo decided to start stealing bilboards and selling the scrap metal, ha ha! with the price of metal these days, not to mention the amount of eye pollution all over the goddamn place, it's a worthwhile pursuit. i want to say "ooh, stealing, so bad!" but all i can think is "Right ON!!"
fuking funny man. jam that culture good.

[oceandessa]

Vacationing or residents - these people are Canadians, and we need to do the best to get them out of there. And the logic can be applied to snowbirds vacationing in Florida (hurricane country), or working on kibbutzes (sp?) in Israel. Don't forget that the numbers you are hearing are upper bound estimates of Canadians in Lebanon, and not all of them will be evacuated by the government because a lot of the people that live there have refused to leave their homes.

As an immigrant to this country myself, I am having a hard time dealing with so many notions out there that these people are all Canadians by convenience, and that they are somehow mooching off the government. A lot of Lebanese Canadians came to Canada as refugees from the civial war, but went back after that. Canada is not a perfect place, and a lot of immigrants (including my own parents) came here with very high degrees for which there is demand only to work as cab drivers and cleaning women. This is extremely frustrating.

And let's face it - Lebanon has been very very calm and peaceful for at least 10 years now. This was completely unexpected. Pretty much like the tsunami.

There has been a lot of racist bullshit in the press lately about Lebanese Canadians who have left and why they left. Do we go around asking the same question about the 100 thousand + Canadians living in the states, and those who hold dual citizen ship with either the USA or the UK? Nope. But it seems that bashing the Arabs is very in vogue now. If you don't believe me, read the letters to the editor in either the CBC, Globe and Mail or the National Compost.

I am not denying that it is brutally difficult trying to get all of those people out of Lebanon, but I do feel that the government's position has not been particularly useful. And I find it incredibly hard to swallow that Steven Harper only cared about Canadians trapped there AFTER that family was killed. Other nations seemed to have had their act together earlier. I feel those Canadians living in Lebanon didn't matter until they became politically embarrassing to Stephen and his cronies.

I am also not going to deny that the media has portrayed the evacuees as ungrateful, but I wonder how I would react to terror or living under surprise war conditions, and not being able to leave. I would lash out too.

I am venting, and am in no way reacting to anything that was said on Bust. I feel the media in general has been extremely racist in how it's portraying this situation.

[oceandessa]

I just thought of something else: The death of ~ 30 (?) Canadians in the World Trade Center in 2001 has often been used as a reminder and excuse for Canada being in Afghanistan. If we were willing to enter a war for the lives of Canadian people, then we can afford to spend some money getting people out of harm's way. Because no Canadian life should be more valuable than the another's, regardless of anything. And certainly, no human life should be more valuable than the others. I can only imagine the horror that Lebanese, Palestinian and Israelis are facing right now. Especially those not lucky enough to have other, supposedly non-partisan nations caring for their safety.