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Iran Dares to Criticize Alberta

December 13, 2012 permalink

An article in the Iranian press criticizes Canada for taking aboriginal children at a high rate using excessive force based on ambiguous laws and nebulous claims. The child protection system abuses the children sexually, psychologically, and physically or profits from their adoption.

In a second enclosed article the National Post counters with a rebuttal. After quoting a government official laughing at the accusations, it goes on to smear reporter Joshua Blakeney by associating him with the 9/11 truthers. The rebuttal gives no hint what really happens to children in Alberta foster care.

Perhaps the headline on the Alberta story should be: Alberta kills aboriginal/foster kids at high rate. Here is a list.

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Alberta takes aboriginal kids from parents at high rate

Indians
Child-protection services take children away from their aboriginal parents, at a comparatively high rate, in Canada’s western province of Alberta, Press TV reports.

“It is a business…thirty two officers took the children at gun point. Treated us like terrorists…they said you are not getting your children back,” said an aboriginal woman whose children were taken from her by Canada’s counter-terrorism forces.

Studies suggest that the Alberta government is seizing children at an alarming high rate. Whereas the government of Japan takes only 17 children per 10 thousand and the government of the Canadian province of Ontario 64 per 10 thousand, the Alberta government takes an astounding 111 children per 10 thousand.

Many native Canadians believe the country’s family law is often ambiguous with nebulous allegations of neglect for parenting serving as justifications for the state-sanctioned removal of children.

They say there is a profit motive behind what they call kidnapping of their children by the so-called child protection services.

“It definitely is a money making scheme because a lot of native children have been sold into adoption,” another native Canadian woman told Press TV.

Recently, the UN has strongly condemned Canada's record on children's rights, and accused Ottawa of systematic discrimination against aborigines and immigrants.

According to reports, Canada has forced thousands of aboriginal children into ghastly boarding schools where they have been abused sexually, psychologically, and physically.

Meanwhile, more than 600 aboriginal women and young girls are missing in the country amid reports of rape, mutilation, and murder against female aborigines.

Source: Press TV (Iran)


Iranian media report claims Alberta police abduct, traffic Aboriginal children for profit

veiled woman

Iran’s state-owned English-language news network is broadcasting inflammatory reports alleging that Alberta is dispatching counterterrorism squads to abduct First Nations children and sell them to adoption agencies.

In a report that aired Monday, Press TV claims the province is using child protective services as a front to traffic First Nations children for monetary gain.

Canada’s aboriginal advocates dismiss the story as pure fiction.

“I have never heard of that — never heard of that,” said Cindy Blackstock, an associate professor at the University of Alberta and executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.

With an uncharacteristic laugh, a spokeswoman with Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development similarly denied the Iranian charges.

In Monday’s report, headlined “Alberta takes aboriginal kids from parents at high rate,” Joshua Blakeney, Press TV’s Calgary correspondent, interviews two anonymous women, dressed in crude head coverings and interviewed in shadow.

“Some upset parents allege that there is a profit motive behind what they refer to as Canada’s so-called child protective services,” Mr. Blakeney says.

Press TV snapshot

Over images of the Vancouver Police motorcycle drill team, Mr. Blakeney asserts the abductions are the work of INSET, a multi-agency anti-terrorism squad that was launched in Alberta last June.

“This time it was the same thing … they took the children at gunpoint; treated us like terrorists … and ever since they said ‘you’re never getting your children back,’” said one of the women, who claimed her “aboriginal children” were taken by a squad of 32 heavily armed officers.

Amid B-roll of kindergarten classes, waving flags and an unrelated press conference by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the report shows crayon drawings, allegedly by abducted First Nations children, with written pleas of “Help me! Now!!”

“It definitely is a money-making scheme, because a lot of native children have been sold into adoption, but it is also used as an assimilation program [and] a genocidal program,” said the second woman.

Born in Surrey, U.K., Mr. Blakeney came to Canada as a graduate student at the University of Lethbridge and in 2010 secured a $7,714 Province of Alberta-backed scholarship to pursue “9/11 truther” theories that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were a government conspiracy to justify the War on Terror.

In addition to working as a correspondent for Press TV, Mr. Blakeney regularly contributes to Veterans Today, an online sounding board for conspiracy theorists.

“Israel’s fingerprints are all over 9/11,” reads a March 2011 post by Mr. Blakeney.

Mr. Blakeney did not respond to requests for an interview.

Although Canada is not a traditional target of Iranian propagandists, the country has increasingly been lambasted in Iranian state media after Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird severed diplomatic ties to the country in September, calling Iran “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.”

In October, Tehran hosted a delegation of fringe Canadian aboriginal leaders including Terrance Nelson, the former chief of Manitoba’s Roseau River First Nation.

In a Press TV appearance, Mr. Nelson and another former chief told Iranian interviewers that Canada was trying to “exterminate” aboriginals, citing the country’s 600 missing and murdered aboriginal women as an example.

Aboriginal children are overrepresented in Canadian child-welfare programs — but the problem is usually attributed to a litany of systemic aboriginal social issues, rather than a conspiracy orchestrated by Ottawa.

“The factors driving aboriginal children into care have been well-known for 15 years; it’s poverty, poor housing and substance abuse,” said Ms. Blackstock, blaming the problem on a deficit of social services available on First Nations reservations.

“The federal government provides significantly less funding on reserves than for all other Canadians … but I have never in my life heard of any military undertones to this,” she said.

Source: National Post

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