Oh-oh Oh-oh Oh-oh Oh-oh Oh-oh Oh-oh

More Leo Straussites, anyone? (google it)

Ignatieff decides to run as Liberal candidate
Nov. 25, 2005. 07:23 AM
Michael Ignatieff has decided to run as a Liberal candidate in the upcoming election,

the Toronto Star has confirmed.
Ignatieff, director of the Carr Institute for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University,

has not indicated where he will run.

Ignatieff, 58, was unavailable for comment last night.

Speculation about his possible entry into Canadian politics

- perhaps even with an eye to succeeding Prime Minister Paul Martin as Liberal leader —

began last March when he gave the keynote address to the

Liberal party's national convention.

Fluent in several languages,

with a PhD in history and several books to his name,

the Toronto-born Ignatieff is seen by some as a potential candidate who

"addresses the nostalgia in the party for (Pierre) Trudeau,"

one Liberal insider told the Star earlier this year.

(Is this supposed to be good news to anti-elitists?)

In August, it was announced Ignatieff would

return to the University of Toronto in January to become

the Chancellor Jackman visiting professor in human rights policy.

Michael Ignatieff
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Professor Michael Grant Ignatieff, Ph.D (born May 12, 1947 in Toronto) is a noted Canadian scholar and novelist.

Ignatieff is the son of Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff and Alison Grant, and the grandson of Count Paul Ignatieff, the last minister of education to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and his wife Princess Natasha Mestchersky. His Canadian antecedents include his maternal great grandfather, George Monro Grant, the dynamic 19th century principal of Queen's University. A cousin was the political philosopher George Grant (1918-1988), author of Lament for a Nation.

Ignatieff went to Upper Canada College, an elite secondary school, and then studied political science at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. There he met fellow student (and later Premier of Ontario) Bob Rae, who became a longtime close friend. From 1965 to 1968 , he worked as a journalist at the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. Ignatieff then went on to receive his Ph.D in History from Harvard University in 1976, after which he taught at the University of British Columbia from 1976 to 1978. He then held a Senior Research Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge from 1978 to 1984.

Descended from Russian aristocracy, Ignatieff is perhaps best known for his Russian Album which discussed the history of his family in the context of Russian history. He is a well-known scholar and has written frequently on human rights issues. He is fluent in several languages, including French, English and Russian.

Until 2005 he was Carr Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human

Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University and has seven honorary doctorates to his name. On August 26, 2005, it was announced that Ignatieff was leaving Harvard to become the Chancellor Jackman Visiting Professor in Human Rights Policy at the University of Toronto.

In January 2005, influential journalist and historian Peter C. Newman suggested that Ignatieff could be an ideal leadership candidate for the governing Liberal Party of Canada after Paul Martin retires as leader sometime in the future. Ignatieff was the keynote speaker for the Liberal Party's national biennial convention in Ottawa in early March 2005.

He distinguished himself among delegates by once again insisting that "Canada should be at the table" in discussions surrounding North American Missile Defense Shield programs and global security efforts. He also stated his support for the decriminalization of marijuana and urged the Liberal Party's top officials to redouble their efforts in promoting federalism and ensuring a "strong national government" for all of Canada. There have also been published rumours that Ignatieff intends to run for a seat in the Canadian House of Commons in the next federal election expected in 2006.[1]

Ignatieff is a world-renowned expert on Middle Eastern affairs and has advised many of the world's leaders. He has written extensively on the dangers of nationalism using the example of Yugoslavia though his consistent attacks on nationalism appeared to focus more on Croatian nationalism rather than the Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milosevic which many argue caused the breakup of the country. Critics of his unorthodox views of the break up of Yugoslavia cite his years in Belgrade when his father was a Canadian diplomat as a possible reason for his anti-Croatian bias.

He also writes fiction, his most recent publication being the well-received Charlie Johnson in the Flames. In 1997, Maclean's magazine named Ignatieff in its "Top 10 Canadian Who's Who." In 2003 Maclean's also named him Canada's "Sexiest Cerebral Man" because of "his made-for-TV looks and effortless eloquence."

Ignatieff was chosen to deliver the 2000 Massey Lectures. His lecture series, entitled "The Rights Revolution", looked at how, since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, rights have become "the dominant language of the public good around the globe." [2]

In recent years, Ignatieff has gained notoriety in his home country because of his resolute stances in favour of Canadian support for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the proposed Canada-U.S. North American Missile Defence Shield. [just what the world needs!]

Particularly controversial was an article by Ignatieff published in The New York Times Magazine on May 2, 2004 in which he argued in favour of certain types of torture: "Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental health or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress."

Ignatieff resigned from the editoral and advisory board of the journal Index on Censorship in 2005 to protest an article by Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics, that excoriated Ignatieff and other liberal intellectuals who had given Donald Rumsfeld "the intellectual tools with which to justify his government's expansionism." He further criticized Ignatieff and his co-thinkers for creating an atmosphere in which torture by the US government can be condoned.

Michael Ignatieff is currently married to Hungarian-born Zsuzsanna Zsohar and has two children from a previous marriage.