OTTAWA (Reuters) - After decades of foot-dragging, Canada is finally about to take a close look at what one aboriginal leader calls "the single most disgraceful, harmful and racist act in our history."

From the 1870s to the 1970s, around 150,000 native Indian children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to distant residential schools, where many say they were abused mentally, physically and sexually.

Conditions in the schools -- run by various churches on behalf of the government -- were sometimes dire. Contemporary accounts suggest up to half the children in some institutions died of tuberculosis.

One prominent academic calls what happened a genocide, yet for many years few Canadians knew what had happened.

Now, for the first time, the mainstream population will be learning a lot more about what was done in its name.

As part of a C$1.9 billion ($1.9 billion) settlement between Ottawa and the 90,000 school survivors in May 2006 that ended years of law suits, a truth and reconciliation commission is set to start work on June 1.

The commission, which has a life span of five years, will travel across Canada and hold public hearings on the abuses.

"You have to get the truth out ... it seems impossible today but it's real, it happened," said federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl.

Native leaders hope the commission -- to be headed by aboriginal Judge Harry LaForme -- will help improve ties between the largely marginalized one million native population and the rest of the 32 million people in Canada.

"I don't say that this is going to be a magic wand and everybody is going to feel good when this is over. But we do know there is a healing component to that sort of process," LaForme told Reuters.

Government officials at the time said the schools were supposed to educate native children. The other aim was to assimilate aboriginal peoples and crush their cultures.

Duncan Campbell Scott, a senior government bureaucrat dealing with aboriginal matters, declared in 1920 that "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. He added: "Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic."

Children in the schools were called pigs and dogs. Teachers beat them if they used their own languages and told them they would go to hell unless they converted to Christianity.

Many parents never saw their sons and daughters again. Survivors often took to drugs and alcohol to dim the pain.

Although Canada spends around C$10 billion a year on the aboriginal population, many serious problems remain.

Native leaders say the destructive legacy of the schools helps explain the lamentable living conditions, poor health and high crime levels that many face today.

"I think Canadians will have a better appreciation of why we have become so stereotyped -- that we're lazy, or losers, or drunkards, or whatever. (This) resulted from a very destructive, oppressive colonization of aboriginal people," said Chief Robert Joseph.

Critics, noting the commission will not have subpoena powers, say it will not make much of a difference.

Roland Chrisjohn at the University of St. Thomas in New Brunswick says Ottawa must first admit that taking children from their parents and giving them to outsiders constituted an act of genocide.

"Residential schools were about destroying our political systems, destroying our religious systems, destroying our communities, our cultures, our livelihood ... they largely succeeded," Chrisjohn said.

The churches are suitably contrite. Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, says religious authorities tried to "socialize and Christianize" aboriginal peoples.

"We failed them, we failed ourselves, we failed God. We failed because of our racism and because of the belief that white ways were superior to aboriginal ways," he said.

(For more details about the schools, click on http://www.wherearethechildren.ca/en/home.html)

Ted Quewezance, executive director of the National Residential School Survivors' Society, is confident the commission will help efforts at reconciliation.

Quewezance told Reuters he was abused physically and sexually during seven years at a school.

When asked how he coped with the memories, he replied: "You just live with it, that's all."

The residential schools scandal has strong parallels with what happened at the same time in Australia, where at least 100,000 aboriginal children were removed from their parents for a variety of reasons. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to the "Stolen Generations" in February.

The United States also ran boarding schools for aboriginal Americans, but on a smaller scale.

Strahl concedes there is a danger that years of public testimony about abuse could cause resentment among the mainstream population.

"It's a two-edged sword ... the commissioners are going to be extremely important to make sure that it doesn't just become a bashing exercise, one way or the other," he said.

And no one can tell whether Canadians will pay much attention to the hearings. Native leaders have long complained about what they say is a widespread ignorance of and indifference to the aboriginal population.

"If they don't listen it will be a tragedy. I think once and for all we, as aboriginal people, will be certain that Canadians simply dismiss us as nothing important ... that would be the worst insult of all," said Joseph.

For now, the official tone is one of optimism, especially since Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet a key aboriginal demand on June 11 when he stands up in Parliament and formally apologizes to school survivors.

LaForme says that if all goes to plan "we will be able to say, in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, we have looked the beast in the eye. We have come to terms with our horrendous past and it will no longer keep us hostage."

($1=$0.99 Canadian)

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Eddie Evans)

The current Judaism is an aberration. Rabbis introduced its most prominent concept, that of the fence around the law, when Jews went into the Exile. The gentile influence suddenly became great, the option of purifying oneself in the Temple was absent, and so the rabbis developed an immense body of legislation to protect against inadvertent prohibition of the Torah. It is possible that 99% of today’s Jewish regulations are those of the fence, of protecting the law, rather than of the law itself. A secular comparison would be this: a law prohibits murder, but the layers of fence prohibit buying weapons, handling weapons, looking at weapons, going to the movies where weapons are shown, and eventually passing near the movie theaters. By then, everyone forgot that the law sensibly sought to ban murder; people avoid passing by the movie theater but murder their compatriots with axes.

The Exile has ended. Jews witnessed a string of miracles: salvation from Holocaust, establishing a state, winning all wars, the Temple Mount falling in our hands, Jewish economic and social influence in the world peaking. Not all Jews returned to Zion, but that’s a familiar problem. Most Jews remained in Egypt during the Exodus, and most Jews remained in Babylon when Nehemiah showed us that the Exile has ended.

To adhere to the fence law is to renounce the divine plan made clear to us. Jews were taken back to Zion, and now have to revive the true Judaism of the Holy Land. We need to build the Temple and conduct purification ceremonies to absolve us of inadvertent violations. We need to cleanse the foreign influence out of the Holy Land so that Jews can walk our country freely without isolating ourselves from the community. Jewish ritual isolation, havdala, means we’re “the people who shall dwell alone.” We already dwell alone – or rather, we were giving an option of expelling the foreigners and having the country to ourselves. Havdala ends at Israeli borders.

The rabbinical legislation was hugely beneficial when Jews lived among gentiles, but is counterproductive now. We didn’t eat chicken with cheese lest the onlookers imagine it is beef with milk. In the state of our own, basic kosher laws of the Torah should be enforced so that no one imagines such a violation, and the fence (e.g., extending the meat-milk prohibition to chicken) would become superfluous. It becomes irrelevant whether bread and wine were produced and sold by Jews, as in the Jewish state their consumption cannot lead to intermingling and assimilation. The kosher food laws in the Jews state would be back to the meaningful.

The entire Israel is one eruv, a community with a degree of common ownership. All Jewish citizens of Israel jointly possess the country on the divine mandate, and therefore Jewish Israel is properly considered one eruv – especially now as we wall ourselves away from the Arabs with separation barrier. A Jewish Israel - an eruv - would have no restrictions on the movement of people and goods on Shabbat.

But most religious Jews prefer living with the Exile Judaism even in the Land of Israel. They wait for the Messiah to bring them the Third Temple from heaven instead of building it themselves from scratch, as King Solomon and Ezra did, and creatively solving the resulting theological ambiguities as the Maccabees did. Religious Jews isolate themselves in the neighborhoods instead of expanding Judaism over the entire country. In practical terms, there is no difference between the Jews of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Their religious practices are the same even though Judaism of the Holy Land and the Exile is vastly different.

Religious Jews shamefully concentrate on technicalities, however important, rather than the big issues. I find it scandalous with religious parties in the Knesset scream over the court’s refusal to fine a handful of establishments which sold leavened bread on Pesach in Jerusalem, but stay in the government which admits to negotiating the giveaway of Jerusalem to Arabs and has actually abandoned the Temple Mount to Muslims. In one reformer’s words, “Hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin [which the Torah does not require], but neglected the weightier matters of the law.” He saw it correctly that many religious Jews concentrate on the easy rites of superfluous observance instead of going through with the really hard issues of core Judaism. It is obscene for a religious Jew in Jerusalem to wrap his kitchen with foil on Pesach to avoid the microscopic crumbs of leavened bread, while his Knesset representatives do nothing about the daily shelling of Shderot.

Paganism is contagious. Once a nation allows some traces of paganism in, it erodes the religion with ever-increasing speed. The latest centuries saw a tremendous spike in truly pagan rites among Jews. From the reinstated pagan sacrifice of rooster (kaparot) to blowing kisses to mezuzah, to superstitious maintenance of “milk” and “meat” dish sets. Many rites have profound meaning, such as putting the right shoe on first (because Jews always start with right things, the loving-kindness) and lacing the left shoe first (to practice restraint in tying, withholding, punishing). However profound, however, a rite remains a rite. Hellenistic pagans undoubtedly ventured profound ethical, theological, and moral explanations of worshipping Zeus. The Torah painfully expunges the least traces of paganism from sacrifices and other rites which the Hebrew crowd was used to but which were given an entirely new meaning in Judaism. Just think of it, the altar was made of earth and later of unhewn stones so that Jews won’t adorn it in the familiar pagan fashion, but Torah scrolls are given silver crowns. We laughed at those who kiss statues and icons – only to see Jews kissing the Torah scrolls.

Superstition is a belief that trivial things affect the divine will. And so many religious Jews carefully choose salt and lipstick “kosher for Pesach,” say blessings after successfully visiting latrine or seeing a lightning – but the immense desecration of the Holy Land by foreigners and Jewish traitors is of no immediate concern to them.

For centuries, Jews poured a fifth glass of wine during the Pesach dinner, but left it untouched for the Prophet Eliyahu. The previous four glasses signify fulfillment of the divine promises given during the Exodus, but the fifth one refers to his promise to bring us into the Land of Israel. There was no other promise involved, whether of the Temple, Messiah, or a decent government – that’s our responsibility to do. In 1947, God has brought us into the land that he promised to Abraham, and did so with great fanfare, but I may be the only Jew who drinks the fifth glass.

Paganism is a theological system which places rites and symbols between the men and their Creator. The Jews who speed-mumble standardized prayers three times a day, every single day, who plead for return to Zion instead of buying an air ticket there, who implore for Messiah instead of voting for Kahane, or Marzel, or even Feiglin, who supplicate for the Temple instead of building it – they surely have some big obstacle in the way of their communication with God.

The main problem is that the Jewish question i.e. right to a Homeland in the Middle East was adressed first from the point of view of the situation of European Jewry when the nomenclature of national rights to a homeland starts with the Deported Jews to Babylone's claim. Up to the fall of Saddam, there remain Jews in Babylone, now today's Iraq.

Even transferring millions of Babylonian Jews had they been so many by the early 1900's would have represented a trauma for the Middle East… for it's hard for Jews to claim independance on national ground in locations where they never were sovereign where as in Jerusalem this historical sovereignty has existed. This is on the same grounds our Natives can claim their lands, they did not leave Canada.
Non-recognition of Natives' rights can be based only on genocidal policies… the Natives have been through both genocidal cultural policies as when their libraries have been burned by the Spanish as is the case in Mexico and their populations have been depleted quite a lot by the diseases carried by the Europeans… and then by the wars.
With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East was reconstructing itself and the Arabs gained from this reconstruction but it does not mean that they should understand that they must be the only ones gaining.
The Hezbollah is not about Shia being treathened by Jews it is about Shia who must gained as well as Arabs in terms of rights to exist so let them all understand the Jews have as much right to fight for their 5000 years presence in the Middle East.
No religion can offset historical rights whether Christians in North America or Muslims in Asia because then they are no more spiritualities aiming at the development of Man's consciousness but strictly propagators of genocidal policies against God's Creation.

The refusal of the acceptance of the biological world is proportional to the genocidal policies we have seen in the various parts of the world… since yes the first generation is an immigrant one but the next one is a sabra. The one concept the Jews that came at the end of WWII have in common with the Babylonian Jews is that they were deported… and they survived or they were hiding escaping deportation. How many populations or nations in the world have been constantly historically under the threat of deportation? It all started with the Deported Jerusalem Jews to Babylon in the case of Jews and went on for thousands of years.

IN North America, Acadians were deported by the British.. and they all stem from one homeland. An Acadian in Louisiana does not have its roots in Louisiana since Acadia was not in the US.

A national home fthe Jewish nation rests on the principle of reconstructive justice..a principle which is inherent to Man's growth in wisdom, breadth of knowledge and discernment.

Reconstructive justice is proportional to the will of every group to commit to measures that may not be popular in the sense that some will lose rights and others gain, but in the long run, reason will prevail.
The Jews were asked worldwide to settle with a nonexistent official Jewish Jerusalem for thousands of years as if the Jews had been extinct in nation.
In the last century, we have seen Europe slowly growing into a North American styled federalism… a federalism that accepts others in their identity and characteristics and gives them equal rights. Europe has upgraded to the level of North American international Law.
But the main discussion in international law which has not fully upgraded to the North American constitutional level is the Middle East Peace Process because Arab leaders refuse to talk about reconstructive justice as a process that does not apply strictly to themselves, quite a corruption of what reconstructive justice is all about.
However, whether Arabs like it or not, the Middle East situation in this day and Age of global communications carries the same load of existential questions as the Natives of Canada have faced versus the Newcomers and the Newcomers versus the Natives… Whether this was officially exposed or not at the time of the Balfour declaration, the British did face that situation constitutionally historically… Thus the British could not be in any way described as unaware of it… at the time of the Balfour Declaration.
No peace process can deter the spirit of reconstructive justice underlying the British constitutional experience behind the Balfour Declaration and the Arabs stand to understand that they are as much Newcomers on Jewish land that the British were on Native lands.
No Saudi money can change the similarities of the British Canadian constitutional challenge with the Middle East situation and what there is to learn from it.
As such the Babylonian Jews hold claiming rights as the Deported Jerusalem Jews to Jerusalem as much as the Mohawks hold land rights in Quebec.

Karole du Pont

Israeli conservatives act like ostriches: Olmert soothes their conscience by promising to relegate the Jerusalem issue to the last stage in peace talks with Palestinians. It’s not even important that Olmert lies and, as Palestinians never fail to announce, negotiate Jerusalem now.

Leaving the core issues for the last stage in negotiations is fundamentally wrong. Would you discuss a delivery time for the furniture set if you don’t agree with the seller on price? In our situation, the seller doesn’t even want to sell.

Leaving the core issues for the later assures that Israel would give way on them, as the entire pressure now dispersed over several subjects will be concentrated on the issue of Jerusalem. The story would go thus: “Okay, we have agreed with Palestinians on just everything else, the peace is so close. Should we refuse peace because of the Arab-populated Jerusalem areas which we the Jews cannot live in, anyway?” Once all other issues are settling, partitioning of Jerusalem will be passed automatically. Neurotic Jews can rebel and refuse such peace, sublimating into the issue of Jerusalem all the distrust they feel to their government, but if counting on that, then what the peace process is for?

Israeli policy of piecemeal concessions is devastating. Jews give away their bargaining chips one by one, lose bargaining power, and have the international pressure on the “leftover” issues increase. Back in 1972, Israel rebuffed Sadat’s peace offer (whether realistic or not) of comprehensive peace with Arabs in return for Sinai; the Palestinians were ignored. Four decades later, Israel will find herself without the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank – but still not at peace with Arabs. Almost every Muslim leader have already declared that even ceding the West Bank and Jerusalem to Palestinians would not lead to immediate peace with Arab countries. And even where Israel has peace, there is no normalization: common Egyptians and Jordanians hate Israel now just as before we signed the peace treaties. Iraq and Kuwait, two countries under the US foot, flatly refused peace with Israel. Iran cannot be expected to sign peace with the Zionist entity even if Palestinians get a state. Saudi Arabia is the last country Israel wants to be at peace with, as the flow of Saudi oil money into Israel, already considerable, will skyrocket as Saudis buy out the Holy Land. Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon cares not a bit about the Palestinians and would not embrace Zionists even if Arafat is re-buried on the Temple Mount, as he might be if the Palestinians get Jerusalem. Peace with Syria would spell a military fiasco for Israel, as Syria will upgrade its arsenals under the protection of peace agreement like Egypt does – to strike later with vengeance.

Negotiations over Jerusalem with Fatah are puzzling. British hunted down Jewish terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi instead of negotiating with them. Fatah members continue attacking Jews, Fatah pays salaries to Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades with the money dutifully transferred by Israel, and in especially odd occurrence, a bodyguard of Ahmed Qurei, a top Palestinian negotiator, was killed in a firefight with IDF.

The peace process is fraud. Israel is not at war with Palestinians – or if we are, then bomb them out of existence rather than supplying them water and electricity. Palestinian threat to Israel is laughable: just ban the Arab migrant workers, and suicide terrorism, already happening just once a year, would almost cease. At any rate, Arab terrorism claimed many times less Jewish lives than ordinary car accidents. Ending Kassam and Katyusha rocket fire is also a no-brainer – not with the absurdly expensive Iron Dome system, but with the common police measure of invading Gaza once a year or so, killing a couple of thousand Palestinian guerrillas, damaging their infrastructure to the Bronze Age level, and enjoying calm for another few months. Banning the UNRWA and other aid sources from Gaza and the West Bank would be a much greater service to peace than ceding the Arabs Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa together: Palestinians should care about employment rather than live on foreign aid and use the ample idle time for radical activities. Paupers in search of food won’t have time for terrorism.