I've been meaning to comment on this for a couple of days now. It seems that columnist Thomas Walkom wants the Canadian public to go back to sleep.
Shockingly, from the Red Toronto Star:
Suspects seem strictly second-rate
If these guys are terrorists, they aren't very good ones. At least that seems to be the picture that is slowly emerging of the 17 men and boys charged this week under Canada's anti-terror laws.
. . . Serious terrorists, like Osama bin Laden, base their operations in remote areas where no one will bother them. These suspects, it is alleged, simply trespassed on someone's farm and, when the owner told them to leave, gave him lip.
Serious terrorists, like the 19 who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, try to avoid making waves. They try to blend in.
The young men charged this week apparently didn't bother with this kind of tradecraft. They apparently didn't realize, or perhaps didn't care, that large groups of brown-skinned urbanites dressed in camouflage are not a common sight in rural central Ontario.
. . . They let themselves get snared in an RCMP sting when one of the 17 allegedly placed an order for three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a substance that can be used to make bombs.
According to police, suspects happily took possession of the "fertilizer" when it was delivered, not realizing that the RCMP had substituted harmless white powder in its stead.
But then that seems to be the history of this group. For militant terrorists, if that's what they are, they are remarkably naïve.
. . . This is not quite the image that the government and police are portraying of the 17. They paint the suspects as part of an efficiently sinister conspiracy devoted, in Harper's words, to destroying "freedom, democracy and the rule of law."
Warning barking mad moonbat conspiracy theories to follow:
As such, the arrests last week come at convenient time for the Harper government. A rise in the public's fear quotient could increase popular support for his decision to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan another two years to wage war against Taliban and other insurgents.
Polls show that public support has been slipping for that war. The spectre of terrorism at home, however, might convince more Canadians that the Afghan war is necessary.
. . . The arrests also come at a time when Parliament is conducting a mandatory five-year review of Canada's new anti-terror laws. Before the arrests, there was a possibility that parliamentarians might recommend that the Harper government ease up on some of those laws. That now seems unlikely.
For this, we can thank one of the world's most incompetent — or perhaps one of the world's most far-fetched — terrorist conspiracies.
What Thomas Walkom doesn't seem to grasp is that you don't need to be a sinister and sophisticated James Bond villain to kill or terrorise people. You don't have to be a ‘24’-inspired, ruthlessly efficient, super-terrorist to inflict mass causalities.
Stupid and ‘naïve’ people can be lethal too.
How sophisticated and intelligent were 18-year-old Eric David Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Bennett Klebold?
How well did they fit in with their fellow students at Columbine high school with their black trench coats, their loner behaviour and their neo-Nazi fetishes?
How well did they hide the fact that they were going to make their fellow students pay?
They were a couple of stupid, punk-ass kids that -despite all their inexperience, wave-making and naivety- managed to slaughter 12 of their classmates and one teacher and wound 24 others.
Canadians cannot and should not wait for a archetypical al-Qaeda super-villain to emerge before we take the Islamist terror threat seriously.
How many of us -let alone loons like Thomas Walkom- would have taken these killers seriously before Columbine?
"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."-W.H. Auden
CanCon 