"We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection." - Dalai Lama
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Today is June 6th, 2006. 6-6-06. 666. Ooooooohhhhh! Scary!
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As I'm writing this, the TV is covering the first court appearances of the accused terrorists that were arrested last weekend for plotting to blow up landmarks around Toronto and Ottawa. Most are being remanded until next week, and security around the courthouse is unprecedented in Canadian history. I've never seen as many guns and riot squad members as they're showing. The flipping irony, of course, is that the zillion media people are just interminglung with it all.

The father of one of the accused was just interviewed, and is doing the predictable claims that his son is being railroaded, nothing is fair, the press has already condemned him and this isn't how a democracy should run. No shit, Shakespeare! The guy was caught with how many tons of the stuff that Tim McVeigh used to blow up the building in Salt Lake City a few years back? CSIS and the RCMP aren't going to be making moves like this if they don't think they're on to something significant. These guys have been under surveillance for months, and the intelligence indicated they couldn't wait much longer.

Last night, they were asking a young Muslim radical why young kids that grew up here in Canada could harbour such hatred...this may sound snobbish, but 'm thinking Canada's middle class suburban neighbourhood (where all these guys come from) is a better place to call home than the shacks of northern Afghanistan. Here's what he said. He said the way they're treated at the borders, questioned by the police, and so on labels them as different. Aw. Shit. Sorry we hurt your sensitivities, buddy. Get over it. It's radical Muslims that are causing all this grief. I don't for one split second support your right to freedom of religion in any sense of the word if you're going to masquerade this kind of violence behind the name of your so-called religion. I don't care who Mohammed was, this ain't no religion. And the tragedy is that it undermines the real religious belief of sincere Muslims. Perhaps it's time there was a much higher profile support and assistance from the Muslim community in routing these guys out once and for all. In the meantime, sorry, but if you walk like a duck, and you quack like a duck, people are going to watch you like a hawk.

Am I in favour of profiling? Damn right I am. All it means it is you put your resources where they're likely to have the most effect. I'm all in favour of digging out all the Muslim radicals who think violence against society is a worthwhile goal to pursue. I'm not all in favour of singling out all Muslims, or all right-wing Liberals, or all tall, one-armed people.

Let's get real people. It's time we stopped doing the "correctness waltz". Sure, we have to ensure the checks and balances are always in place, and that fairness always prevails. But lets not bend over backwards making concessions to the loudest who scream prejudice and bias. I believe enough in the 'rightness' of our system to believe that it works very well almost all the time. It's not perfect. We keep working at that.

The danger is that the net gets cast too widely, as it did back in the days when Trudeau was Prime Minister and he invoked the War Measures Act for something that turned out to be nothing more than a handful of French separatist fanatics who had kidnapped two high profile people and murdered one of them. Let's not attack Muslims, let's not vandalize mosques...that makes us the same. But if these bleepers manipulate the system as they would like to, and we give them all the publicity they seek, then they win in the end. That would be tragic.

Maybe it's one of those things that only makes a difference when it hits close to home like this. I'm confident that we're 'classy' enough and mature enough to deal with this properly. In the meantime their complaints that they can't use a phone, can't talk to their families and can't pray together now that they almost blew up our country's heritage should fall on deaf ears. A small price to pay. I have no sympathy.

"I expect my client to get a fair trial, as fair as any other trial that happens in Canada" was what one of the lawyers said who was just being interviewed, and then quickly added that the Prime Minister should keep his mouth shut on this matter so he doesn't bias the case. Wait a minute! The Prime Minister speaks on national issues on behalf of Canada last time I checked.

We live in a wiggly world. But those who are guilty are not going to change the fact that it is OUR country, not theirs. It is OUR society, not theirs. It is OUR world, not theirs. I still maintain that everyone deserves tolerance, but not when it comes to victimizing someone else....that's where I draw the tolerance line. I don't see that as a contradiction at all.

PEACE.

Posted by Evydense on Tuesday, June 06, 2006 at 9:10 a.m. | Permalink