Cartoon from the Calvin & Hobbes Treasury
The
arrest this week of a bunch of mostly-young Islamic Canadians in
Toronto, along with a mosque caretaker who was the nominal leader of
the group, has grabbed a lot of international press, and prompted some
readers to ask why I haven't talked about it.
I have. I talked about it a year ago, when I predicted it. I said:
There are conceivably as many as a billion people
on this planet who, out of desperation or ignorance, see the West as
the cause of their plight (with some justification) and who see attacks
on the West as counter-terrorist activity, as necessary
to end the terrorism that they perceive they are suffering from. You
saw them cheering in the streets of Palestine the day after 9/11. This
billion people is neither a ruthless, coordinated and evil group of
shrewd schemers, nor are they a billion insane, nihilistic and deranged
madmen. No one could organize
that broad and intense hatred. And if there's a billion people all
suffering from the same form of madness, we need to think about our
definition of insanity.
And, although he showed a deplorable lack of tact, George Galloway also
has it exactly right. When you have a billion people who hate you, many
of whom live in your midst, and many more of whom hear your Prime
Minister with his arm around George Bush making preposterous excuses
for attacking Iraq and killing thousands of civilians on top of the
hundreds of thousands already killed by Saddam when he was the West's
ally and by the cruel sanctions imposed by the West, on the basis that
it posed some kind of imminent threat to the West, some of those
billion people are going to do what their Western counterparts, the
American conservatives, did: take up arms against the perceived enemy.
Any way they can. Why is this so hard to understand?
As many of you know, I live in Canada, a country that refused to send
troops to Iraq despite fierce American threats (including some
terrorist threats from the US wingnut ambassador), but which did put
troops in Afghanistan, a country that
outside of its capital city remains anarchic, destitute, and
unimaginably brutal. Canada still has troops there. Canada also
supported the sanctions against Iraq and has largely supported Western
positions on most issues in the Third World including the Middle East.
Canada has a large number of immigrants from the Middle East, many of
whom are as vocal in their opposition to Canada's foreign policy as the
radicals from whom the London subway bombers came. I believe it is less
likely that Canada will be the victim of a major terrorist attack, by
anyone, for the simple reason that we are a smaller, less visible and
less strident nation in our public policies. I believe, however, that
it is absolutely inevitable that Canada will eventually be the victim
of an attack of some kind, for precisely the same reason it was
inevitable in the UK. After the London bombings the head of the Toronto
subway system laughed that it wouldn't happen here because the
terrorists would first have to be able to find Toronto. The idiot
should have been fired on the spot for that remark.
I also believe that there is absolutely nothing we can or should do
about it. The British have been trying to be vigilant about terrorism
for centuries, and are one of the most prepared nations on the planet,
but they were unable to prevent either the bombings of two weeks ago or
the 'warning' repeat occurrences that happened today. Canada is much
less prepared than Britain, and we will handle the situation very badly
when it occurs. The way we should
handle it is not, as a Canadian government minister said after the
London bombings, to step up preparedness and work ourselves into a
frenzy of higher vigilance, but, when it happens, by showing, as the
British did, that terrorism won't work -- by getting on with our lives, and picking up the pieces.
 The
gang arrested the other day were a motley crew of absurdly inept,
alienated schoolkids and unemployed college dropouts. CSIS, the
Canadian equivalent of the FBI/CIA, had been watching them for ages,
including their war games in a forest North of Toronto, and intercepted
and substituted their order for three tons of fertilizer to be used in
the planned attacks. There is even speculation that CSIS or the RCMP
offered the fertilizer, unsolicited, through an undercover operative as
part of a sting operation. Most of the 'terrorists' were born in
Canada, and they met at a storefront mosque in Mississauga (a suburb
West of Toronto) and their schoolyard in Scarborough (a suburb in the
East end of Toronto). Their scheme was modeled after another amateur
homegrown terrorist attack, the Oklahoma City bombing (it used the same
fertilizer as the base for its explosives).
I'm glad CSIS caught
it (although the evidence suggests it would have been hard to miss). I
shudder to think how much money has been spent for such a modest return
(over 400 security people were involved in the investigation), and how
much more will now be demanded to look for more amateur would-be
terrorists. I shake my head to think how many lives could be saved,
spared, or made bearable if some of the billions our moron prime
minister has diverted to security in the last two months, were instead
spent on health, education, social programs, international humanitarian
and infrastructure aid, and environmental regulation and innovation.
The arraignment was a media circus, with Fox News sending a special
contingent and hundreds of reporters trying to jam the courtroom.
Canadian police dutifully provided video fodder, posting snipers on
nearby rooftops.
So now we have stepped up security, threats of
new border restrictions, and the rest of the usual hysteria when these
plots are discovered. It is a virtual certainty that there are more
competent and better organized terrorist cells in Canada, some of them
Islamic but also Western militia gun-nuts and fanatic separatists and
militant nationalists from many countries now living here, like the Air India bombers,
believed to be Canadian Sikhs. It is a virtual certainty that some of
them will eventually commit acts of terror on Canadian soil, and some
people will probably die. The smart ones will choose targets in the US,
where they'll garner more media attention, wreck Canada-US trade and
tourism and stir up anti-Canadian hysteria among US conservatives. It
wouldn't take much.
Our warmongering minority prime minister
Harper's inflammatory rhetoric and Bushian ideological pronouncements,
and the growing disaster of the botched Afghanistan mission and the
government's pig-headed refusal to get us out of there, have aggravated
anti-Canadian sentiment in the Mideast and among sympathizers of their
plight. Now we have pictures of Harper and Bush embracing each other,
and so the risk that disgruntled social misfits will choose now to
garner some publicity through copycat bombings has risen sharply. But
even if Harper hadn't been elected, bombings and other attacks would
still, and will still, happen eventually.
And the
more publicity they get, the more the politicians and media whip us up
into a frenzy about terrorist threats and portray these small groups of
losers as larger-than-life, the more these clowns will be provoked to
step into the limelight and garner their few minutes, or months, of spectacular, fleeting, grisly fame.
So I'm not going to say anything more about it. Lots more Canadians are dying and suffering now from things that we can
do something about, that deserve the attention and investment that is
being squandered on overblown fears of terrorism. The media should
ignore 'terrorist threats', and starve their intended perpetrators of
the publicity they love and thrive on. Terror attacks will come when
they come, like a million other causes of death and misery -- natural
disasters, transportation disasters, disease epidemics large and small,
domestic violence, preventable ailments and accidents, things that
extinguish and destroy many more Canadians' lives everyday. We should
put them in perspective, spend our taxpayer dollars to minimize the
death and suffering that is reasonably predictable and affordably
preventable, and otherwise just get on with our lives. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
