Kidnapped

A poster in my neighbourhood. KIDNAPPED, as opposed to MISSING. An old man (75), not a child. In the Middle East, not East Vancouver. As for the kidnappers, a militant, fundamentalist community-based group whose work is informed by religious law and is funded by those who seek to hold regional power, or at least wrestle it from those who take their "cues" from the West.

Would we be having this problem now had the CIA and MI6 not ousted Iran's democratically-elected poet Mosaddegh in 1953? Or was that ousting a condition laid out by the family that has the country named after them -- and a good part of the world's oil?

As for Israel, what was Mosaddegh's position on this newly-created U.N.-sanctioned state that took up roughly half of Palestine? Israel was way more socialist then than it is now. Same with Iran. Oh, what do I know? Well, I do know that the Jewish diaspora is thousands of years old, that it began roughly in the area where Israel is today, and not in some of NYC's non-Manhattan boroughs in the 1950s.

David Shalev has had a rotten October and his family and friends want him home. I hope that happens, just as I hope Palestinians can shake off the fundamentalists who insist on fighting in their name. For thousands of years Palestinians have been trod on, used, blamed. Why? Why is that? Maybe that's the basis of my poster. And yet who would my figurehead be?