Returning from Iran, Terrance Nelson, former chief of Roseau River Ojibwe, speaks out on the human rights violations of Canada and the US
The Crusader
By Terrance Nelson
By Terrance Nelson
Censored News
October 24th 2012
First of all, thank you so much for your help. The impact of Iranian people and especially Press T.V. helping to show the world the human rights violations in Canada is huge. Despite what they say in the western press, they cannot deny their own sins. They continue to talk about Iran as the "bad guy" but they cannot isolate Iran. They have the Crusader mentality, the belief that there is only one chosen people. According to the Crusader mentality, they have the right to impose their values upon other people. In their minds, God has chosen them to convert all other people to their belief. The Crusader will fail again. Never forget, there are good people in North America also, we are not all Crusaders.
The Mennonite Central Committee is a Christian organization that is non political and was working in Iraq for many years including during the economic sanctions. When we accepted an invitation from the Saddam Hussein Government to visit Iraq in April 1998, it was the MCC that helped us. The MCC are Christians and although I am not a Christian, these people have my deepest respect. The United Nations released a study in December 1995 stating that 567,000 Iraqi children had died in the first five years of economic sanctions. When we were getting ready to go to Iraq with a television camera crew, some of the MCC people were so frustrated by the sanctions that they almost became political. They saw first hand the price that the children in Iraq were paying for the imposition of sanctions. No medicines in some circumstances, cancers being treated with half doses because there was restrictions. Seven of us went in and we documented the suffering..
Iraq was bombed with depleted uranium. I interviewed the Iraqi Minister of Health. He talked of the four fold increase in cancer. I thought, if only the people in the west saw the children in Iraq suffering without medicines that the economic sanctions would be condemned. We were labelled as "dupes" of Saddam by the Jewish media. The children were not children in the minds of the west. The Iraqi had been dehumanized, they were not considered the same as western children. To me, the killing of over half a million children had to mean the west hated Iraqi children. I could not understand how people could dismiss the suffering of children. We put together a seven minute video called A War On Children.
If the west can kill half a million Iraqi children without any regrets, how many Iranian people are they willing to kill. I ask Canadians, Americans, and the British point blank, how far are you willing to go in the war against Iran. Are you willing to kill a 100,000, 300,000, 500,000, a million, three million, ten million Iranians? Israel says that they will bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Does that bombing once again use depleted uranium and what happens to the radiation contamination released from the nuclear sites? Who gets poisoned this time? Where do the nuclear clouds drift to?
The road to war starts with dehumanization of people. They must become non human in order to allow us kill them without regret. The west must demonize the Iranian people in order to kill them. When you view the video, a War on Children, how is it possible to dismiss the children as non humans? Steven Harper is a Crusader. The Crusaders were people who were so egotistical that they believed that God chose only them, that the only values that matter was theirs. We killed them in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and we will kill them in Iran. We believe that we have the right to kill other people in their own lands? Do we really have the right to impose solutions and values on other people. I saw in Iraq the children who made no war on anyone, they committed no sin against other people but they paid the price for being Iraqi. In Iran, who will pay the price for the mentality of the Crusader?
In one of my presentations to Iranian University students I told them about Manitoba, the province in Canada where I live. In Manitoba, the government licenses tobacco and makes money on taxing all cigarette products even though they know that tobacco causes cancer, the province still licenses it. The government also licenses alcohol and taxes it heavily, the government also controls all gambling. In order to make more money, they have to attract customers into the beer parlour where they sell them alcohol and let them gamble. To get them in, they license nude dancing. Women will dance totally naked for all to see. Sometimes on women's nights, men will dance nude for the women. What if other people in world told us that we should not live like this, that our morals were wrong, how would we react to some other people's values being imposed upon us. So, what makes us superior to the Iranians, how do we impose our values on the Iranians. By what right to we believe that we can go into Iran and tell the Iranian women that we are there to rescue them, to give them freedom.
In Iran, they tell me that 70% of the students at University are women and the literacy rate has climbed dramatically since the Revolution in 1979. Is it the responsibility and the right of the west to go into Iran and impose our values upon the Iranian people. Is our version of freedom for women to be imposed upon the Iranian women. In Tehran, I saw police with no guns. There is no alcohol allowed in public places, drug dealers are harshly dealth with, rape is punished by death. Is it our values, no, but the question is what gives us the right to impose our view of human rights upon the Iranians? As Iranian women increasingly become the doctors, the scientists, the PHDs, they will shape the future. Is Iran perfect, of course not, is there room for improvement, of course, what society is perfect? I traveled to Iran, I saw first hand the beauty of the people and as such, I will not support another war, I will not condone the deaths of Iranians, I will not support the Crusader and I condemn the economic sanctions against Iran as Genocide. It is the same Genocide that was imposed upon the Iraqi.
No American pilot was ever charged with the use of depleted uranium bombs. It has never been even considered a crime to use depleted uranium in bombing populated cities. If Press T.V. shows the world our video, A War on Children, maybe depeleted uranium shell casings can be outlawed, banned from use in future wars. Our video is harsh but we chose to delete even harsher, more horrible images of the children's suffering. There were scenes that cannot be shown in public, the suffering of the children was too tragic to show in the video, we had to delete some of those images. What you see in our video is tame compared to what we saw in the wards of the most acute suffering children. I for one have abandoned any support for the Crusader, the ones who think they have a right to kill people in their own lands.
Once again thank you for your help in exposing the human rights violations in Canada, the violations against the indigenous people of Canada.
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