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'A torch of freedom'（正面文章）

1976 Montreal flame carrier says the protests en route to Beijing 'hurt me'


JAMES MENNIE, The Gazette

Published: 4 hours ago
"Imagine if Hitler （希特勒）could have seen me, a Holocaust survivor（一个大屠杀生还者）, carrying the Olympic torch."

Wolf Bronet（前蒙特利尔奥运火炬手） turned 84 last month. And because he and the Wolf Pack - the running group he founded four decades ago - honour their traditions, the event was observed in a traditional fashion.

"We took Sherbrooke ... to Clark Ave. Ran up the hill past The Boulevard to the cul de sac ... then we ran around the little island there. Then they sang me Happy Birthday, and we had a drink and danced the hora and woke up the whole neighbourhood.

"Otherwise, people would think that Wolf was dead."

But Bronet's appreciation of tradition extends beyond the commemoration of birthdays with his running mates.

Thirty-two years ago, he ran along Camillien Houde Parkway up the slope of Mount Royal, carrying the Olympic flame that would inaugurate the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal.

"We wanted to do the toughest part of the run," he recalled, his voice still catching at the memory of carrying the flame the night before the games began, "We picked it up at the bottom of Camillien Houde and we flew up with the torch to the top of the cross.

"I had 200 runners with me. It was a celebration of life, a celebration of achievement."

But this week, as protests in London and Paris along the route of the torch run for this year's Games in Beijing have snuffed out the flame and left Olympic officials pondering whether the event should be cancelled, Bronet sees little to celebrate.

"It hurts me," he said, referring to the disruptions and near-violence that have been a part of a campaign to protest against China's presence in Tibet.

"It hurts me because (the torch run) is a symbol of sportsmanship, of national unity - a torch of freedom that people have carried all over the world and is supposed to unite everybody.

"But this here, the hatred, it's unbelievable."

Bronet's credentials as a runner are well established. But he's also seen his share of repression and ethnic hatred. A Jew growing up in Poland on the eve of the Second World War, he was beaten by the Nazis while living in the Warsaw ghetto. He was able to escape but only to wind up in a Soviet work camp.

Yet despite that experience, or perhaps because of it, Bronet cannot comprehend how the images he's seen beamed out of London and Paris will change anything for the better.

"I'm a Holocaust survivor," he said. "I know what freedom means ... but there's no way that I can understand how violence will help.

"What's happening now is dividing people.

"To me, sport should unite people all over the world.

"With this violence, there's no way they'll achieve freedom in Tibet."（像这种暴力，西藏别想实现自由）

Nor does Bronet feel that giving the Olympics to China was a mistake by the International Olympic Committee.（他不认为国际奥委会将奥运会授予中国举办是个错误）

"olitics shouldn't be associated with the Olympics,"（请不要将政治和体育联系在一起） he said. "The Olympics are a beautiful thing. I remember when the games were (in Montreal), the stadiums were full and millions of people came here.

"I know that Canada is different from China. ... But when I see the violence in London and Paris, it reminds me that with good deeds we can achieve more than with violence.

"That's what Gandhi believed."

jmennie@thegazette.canwest.com

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IOC's gamble fails（反面文章）

It was wrong to award the Games to China in hopes of reforming the country（国际奥委会错误地将奥运会授予中国举办，以为这样就可以改良这个国家）


JANET BAGNALL, The Gazette

Published: 5 hours ago
You can't say the Olympic Games as a propaganda exercise is working out too well for China so far. The main point of the Olympics for China's totalitarian regime, one assumes, was to cover it with a patina of legitimacy, inside the country and out.

Being awarded the Games would show the Chinese people that the outside world approved of their government. And if the world beyond approved, why would the people mind a system that denies them freedom of assembly, speech, press, religion, reproductive rights and political choice（为什么人们在意政府拒绝给他们集会、演说、报刊、宗教和生育权以及政党选择自由）?

With their government's obsessive control over Chinese media and the Internet（政府强硬控制媒体和网络）, it seems unfortunately that little information is filtering through to the Chinese people. Even if they believe that their government's ruthless suppression of Tibetan protests was somehow warranted, the protests in London and Paris would be harder to explain away.

The Olympic torch relay is in shambles, requiring in Paris this week the ignominious solution of a police bus for the flame to reach its destination. Having to keep the Olympic flame surrounded at all times by dozens of Chinese security guards undercuts China's adoption of it as a symbol of international harmony.

In fact, acting in a spirit of shameless manipulation is more in the tradition of the flame than many of us realized, British newspapers are reporting. The ritual of a torch procession proclaiming the games, the Independent writes, was dreamt up by the man who organized the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

It was Dr. Carl Diem's idea that 3,422 young Aryans run the 3,422-kilometre route from Mount Olympus to Berlin. A torch relay was not part of the ancient Greek games: The messengers who announced the ancient Olympic games wore crowns of olives. Only relay races featured torches.

Faced with world outrage over Tibet, International Olympic Committee head Jacques Rogge forced himself to acknowledge the obvious amid the chaos in London: "The International Olympic Committee has expressed its serious concern and calls for a rapid peaceful resolution in Tibet," he said, according to Associated Press, although not before lamenting that the "torch relay has been targeted." By Paris, Rogge seemed to be feeling more aggrieved by the attacks on the relay than China's treatment of Tibetan rioters, saying, "Violence for whatever reason is not compatible with the values of the torch relay or the Olympic Games."

If the Chinese dictatorship seems to be winning the propaganda war among its own citizens beyond China's borders, it's a different matter. Here's where the Games could prove their worth, although admittedly not as a sporting event.

As the world's athletes and media prepare to descend on a country whose leaders fear and loathe the idea of openness and accountability, those leaders are finding themselves under the microscope. China's close ties to Sudan（中国接近苏丹）, whose government has allowed, if not encouraged, killings, rape and ethnic cleansing in Darfur, have come in for sustained worldwide attention.

Within China, Western media and human-rights groups（西方媒体和人权组织） are collecting harrowing stories of the arrest, imprisonment and likely torture of human-rights activists, union organizers, lawyers, dissidents and reformers of all stripes.

Writing in the Guardian, Edward McMillan-Scott, founder of the European Union's democracy and human rights foundation, reminded readers this week that there are an estimated 7 million Chinese people in prison camps and that in 2005, Manfred Nowak, the UN's torture rapporteur, found that the use of torture in China was "widespread."

The IOC made a calculated decision to award the world's biggest totalitarian country the most prestigious sporting event in the world.（国际奥委会做出这么一个有计划的决定就是授予了世界最大的极权主义国家举办全世界享誉最高的体育盛事）

It can pretend all it wants that its intentions were to use the Games to help bring China into the larger international community. But by placing commercial interests over moral issues, the IOC has brought the Olympics to a sadly low level - laid out clearly for us all to see.


Maybe some good will from this year's Games after all.

jbagnall@thegazette.canwest.com

protein

Thanks, can we post those info on the main thread?
I will copy yours to there.

yinredmoon

这是在Jack Todd, Norman Webster之后Gazette第三个跳出来公然与中国人民为敌的编辑。Janet Bagnall is an editorial writer and columnist with The Gazette. Her column appears Fridays, commenting on issues of social justice and human rights.

She is a graduate of the University of Toronto (B.A., B.Ed., M.A.) and the University of Western Ontario (M.A. in journalism). Born in Charlottetown, P.E.I., she lived in Quebec (Valleyfield), India, Chile and Ontario, finally returning to Quebec in 1978 to join The Gazette as a news reporter. She joined the editorial board in 1997, after working as a lifestyle-section editor (pre-parenthood) and feature writer.

She was a finalist in 1998 for a National Newspaper Award in editorial writing.

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Post by protein
Thanks, can we post those info on the main thread?
I will copy yours to there.

of course.

nidie

Free Quebec.

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'A torch of freedom'（正面文章）

1976 Montreal flame carrier says the protests en route to Beijing 'hurt me'
Wolf Bronet（前蒙特利尔奥运火炬手） turned 84 last month. And because he and the Wolf Pack - the running group he founded four decades ago - honour their traditions, the event was observed in a traditional fashion
"With this violence, there's no way they'll achieve freedom in Tibet."（像这种暴力，西藏别想实现自由）

Nor does Bronet feel that giving the Olympics to China was a mistake by the International Olympic Committee.（他也不认为国际奥委会将奥运会授予中国举办是个错误）

"olitics shouldn't be associated with the Olympics,"（请不要将政治和体育联系在一起） he said。


JAMES MENNIE, The Gazette
jmennie@thegazette.canwest.com
请大家赶紧写信去感谢这位伸张正义的记者和百受尊敬的火炬手吧。

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Post by 可怜被洗脑者
FREE CHINA from CCP

请不要将你的个人恩怨强加于他人身上，我只知道知恩图报，欠债还钱，子不嫌母丑，请以大局为重，服从大多数人的意见，这是放之世界皆标准的原则。
每个国家政党每个领袖每个人都有失误的地方，因为某些中央或地方领导犯错而受害的民众，我理解你们，但是请你们以大局为重，奥运会是全体中国人的梦想，请不要借此闹事，那是人民所唾弃的，请你自重，你的问题请不要在这个时候跟我的话题相提并论，请你另找战场。

0308

统一口号: Free Quebec ! Free Ireland ! 流氓对流氓, 这个世界不讲道理了.

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Post by 0308
统一口号: Free Quebec ! Free Ireland ! 流氓对流氓, 这个世界不讲道理了.

这个不是我们该做的，也没必要，这会被他们抓空子，绝对不要，因为我们本质上是不支持独立的。