Welcome to GR, etc. And a Happy Thanksgiving Day to those in Canada observing it. We in Canada certainly have much to be thankful for. We live in a nation of abundance: the natural world still survives here in a way few other places where human populations dominate can boast; there are still, in 2011, vast tracts of arable land, clean and accessible water, relatively stable and benign weather, and the absence of the political enmity, both internal and external, so common in other parts. We can too be thankful for a modern and developed economy that allows a measure of prosperity be shared by a greater percentage of the citizenry than is found in much of the world.

Of course, we are not immune in this Canada to the blights of the modern world, or the vagaries of the nature. We experience floods, forest fires, drought, hurricanes, and earthquakes here as do others elsewhere. Despair is endemic here too, throughout the nation's cities and towns, where the streets are populated by the materially destitute and spiritually forlorn. We are ruled over by an ethically bankrupt elite, who owe their political allegiance not to the people, but to distant others, far removed from the country's polity, and sometimes the country itself. We are taxed in our labours, and when purchasing the necessities of life, our wages and monies taken then to be devoted to the acquisition of weapons for the waging of war against civilians in distant lands, and turned against defenseless protesters at home. Yes, we have much to be thankful for in Canada, and much work yet to do.

On today's program, Israeli journalist extraordinaire, Amira Hass. Hass has reported for Ha'aretz for more than twenty years, specializing in the long-standing question of Palestinian and Israeli coexistence. She lived in Gaza for four years, the only Israeli journalist to have ever done so, and regularly raises the hackles of the powerful within her home country. Amira Hass appeared here at UVic on September 27th on the first stop of her trans-Canada lecture tour, 'Israel: Fear of the Future.' Her stop here was sponsored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, and KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives.

Amira Hass in the first segment.

And; the Occupy movement is spreading across the United States, and now into Canada. It is an effort to address the economic inequity, and government corruption that has very nearly brought the world's economic system down. At this moment, demonstrators in the renamed 'Freedom Square' in Washington, D.C. are defying the conditions of the limited permit they received over the weekend, saying their permit is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which distinctly allows the right of the people to assemble and address peaceably their grievances to government.

Victoria Street Newz publisher, and CFUV broadcaster Janine Bandcroft has contacts in Freedom Square, and she'll join us to update the situation there, and bring us her usual reports of the goings on going on in and around our city in the second segment.

But first; Amira Hass and Israel: Fear of the Future recorded here at UVic September 27th, 2011.

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