What he said

So now that the White House spin on the Big Red Terror Exploding Hair Gel and Gatorade Alert Thingie is imploding because more and more people can see through the old terror tactic (long but worthy!) whenever the Bushies need a political diversionary tactic, along comes independent investigative journalist Greg Palast with his view of last week's events. Needless to say, he does not fall into line with the media who did, breathlessly showing people pitching their expensive cosmetics and waving around their baggies.

I’m going to tell you something which is straight-up heresy: America is not under attack by terrorists. There is no WAR on terror because, except for one day five years ago, al Qaeda has pretty much left us alone.

That’s because Osama got what he wanted. There’s no mystery about what Al Qaeda was after. Like everyone from the Girl Scouts to Bono, Osama put his wish on his web site. He had a single demand: “Crusaders out of the land of the two Holy Places.” To translate: get US troops out of Saudi Arabia.

And George Bush gave it to him. On April 29, 2003, two days before landing on the aircraft carrier Lincoln, our self-described “War President” quietly put out a notice that he was withdrawing our troops from Saudi soil. In other words, our cowering cowboy gave in whimpering to Osama’s demand.

The press took no note. They were all wiggie over Bush’s waddling around the carrier deck in a disco-aged jump suit announcing, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” But it wasn’t America’s mission that was accomplished, it was Osama’s.

Well then ...

Now, thanks to this latest scare, we're all going to be terrorized on planes by chapped lips, bad breath, and screaming babies whose parents will have nothing with which to divert them.

The Keyboard Kommandoes Stand On Guard!

Canadians can breathe a sigh of relief now that the Blogging Tories are manning the barricades keyboards.

(via Canadian Cynic)

True Hate

This post has been updated:

You know, this blog is often accused by righties (and one capital-Liberal blogger who sits on the board of the Canada Israel Committee) for being a haven for ''anti-Israel'' wingnuts. I personally have been denounced by B'nai Brith and other lobby groups for my observations on the catastrophe playing out in the Middle East. I get attacked regularly in the National Post as well.

So, with all that in mind, when will we see all these people come out against this hate-filled screed, posted on the website of a supposedly respectable publication, one put out by Ezra Levant, a former communications apparatchik to (now) Public Safety Mnister Stockwell Day, and a man whose law firm was instrumental in getting Hezbollah declared a terrrorist organization in Canada. (More on this later this week.)

I cannot abide by apologists calling Islam a religion of peace. Not when every new day brings fresh tales of violence. Not when the devil that they call Allah rewards murder with polygamous sex. Not when their undeserved supremacy is fought for in countries big and small around the globe.

<SNIP>

If everything from smoking to lead paint to pitbulls can be banned because they are dangerous and deadly, why can't Islam? At what point is a death cult afforded the status of legitimate religion, and why? What makes Mohammed any better than Jim Jones?

Islam must be labelled for what it truly represents: wholesale slaughter and a corrupt ideology of sex and death. It must be stopped.

And, if that isn't bad enough, you should read the comments. I won't repeat them.

Here's Cerberus -- who tipped me to this -- who does repeat the comments.

I certainly would never claim all conservatives hold these same views, but WOW! there's a lot of this stuff out there and it is just normal discussion on a high profile periodical like The Western Standard.

Far be it for me to call these conservatives bigotted. I'll just let readers judge for themselves.

And next time some idiot on the left spews off some thoughtless inanity that gets spread far and wide by the conservative blogosphere, feel free to link back to Cerberus.

You know, if this were on some stupid blog, I could ALMOST let it go. But the Western Standard pretends to be a credible magazine, and whadda ya know? It loves Prime Minister Stephen Harper who loves it back.

Shame.

UPPITY DATE (25/6 at 1:42 a.m.): Looks like Chris Selley over at Western Standard distanced himself from Right Girl's rantings -- and the even more hateful postings of her commentariat.

A post suggesting that Islam be outlawed shouldn't be a chance to debate the merits of different religions, or to discuss what passages in some ancient book condone or condemn violence. It should be a chance to say that Canada doesn't ban religions and never will, and to point out how hopelessly repressive and needless and stupid it is even to suggest such a thing.

Let's see what kind of reaction he gets.

MORNING AFTER DATE: Hey! Where's my link???  (H/t to Werner Patels.)

DOUBLE DATE: The Last Realist has a funner take here.

UPPER DATE: Commenter Elliot below sent me the URL for his wife's blog. He didn't give me her name but it appears to be Melly. She's in Haifa on the vacation that went horribly wrong.

The Spies Who Love Me

Via Canadian Cynic, a little paranoia about Ma-ma-ma Bell produced by those funny guys at Cynically Tested.

Fourth Estate. Fifth Column.

Tom Tommorow Tom Tomorrow says it all, in six action-packed panels.

(Yeah, well, after yesterday's troll invasion by those Little Green Meanies, I can dig it.)

H/t to Carolyn Kay of Make Them Accountable.

Spelling correction by Rob Hyndman.

But what about the Western Standard?

Snicker.

(via Robert McClelland)

UPDATE: I changed the header of this thing from the National Post to Western Standard because, dumb broad that I can be, I missed the ""NAPO" on the chart. Thanks to VinB.

Border patrol

The -- haf-kaf, cough, choke, wheeze, get me some water, let me clear my throat here -- much-loved Sandra Buckler, director of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, now appears to be running Canada-U.S. relations, as well as ''relations'' with the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Seems she put the kibosh on an interview Canada's ambassador to Washington Michael Wilson was set to do on National Public Radio's Diane Rehm show.

Here's what Henry Champ of CBC Newsworld reported today:

You see the show is probably the most respected national radio program at NPR, running two hours each mid-morning. Its audiences are enormous, Ms. Rehm is an intelligent host not given to shouting or intense confrontation but rather thoughtful conversation about issues of the day.

Presidents, their wives, every congressman and senator on the Hill and certainly every ambassador covets a one-hour conversation with Ms. Rehm and her well-spoken, carefully screened callers.

I love the show.

So does the Canadian Embassy and they jumped at the chance when Ambassador Michael Wilson was offered an opportunity to talk about the arrest of 17 people in the Toronto area accused of terror-related offences.

Keep in mind that American radio and television networks were filling the air with dire predictions of more terrorists coming from Canada, with descriptions of terrorist cells in Brandon, Man. and Kamloops, B.C. I'll bet they even mentioned Red Deer, Alta.

Stop! Enter Sandra Buckler.

Buckler is director of communications in the Prime Minister's Office in Ottawa with, as nearly as we can discern, no knowledge of Washington journalism.

No, the ambassador cannot appear, Buckler told Rehm's producers. Apparently, such an appearance would inflame the story about the arrests.

Apparently Ms. Buckler also does not trust Wilson, the new ambassador who has been making considerable strides with the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department. He was also previously finance minister and supervised NAFTA talks with previous administrations.

But Buckler is a former lobbyist with enormous chutzpah: even we don't tell the ambassador what to do.

We understand the embassy is trying to arrange a luncheon with Rehm and the ambassador to calm the waters.

Two things.

One: In the wake of the terror arrests, when politicians and pundits in the U.S. were making outrageous and outlandish claims about Canada, Harper, who happily appeared on Fox News while in opposition to join in the anti-Canadian chorus, did not go on the U.S. media to correct the record.

Two, Would Buckler have shut down the interview if Wilson were going on Fox News or on Rush Limbaugh's radio show ... or any private, commercial station for that matter?

Okay, one more thing: Considering the state of siege between Buckler and the PPG, do we really want this woman calling the shots on our relations with the U.S.?

Media acting badly?

The Star's Rosie DiManno steps back a bit -- just a bit -- from the media fray over the media fray over the June 2 arrests of 17 terrorism suspects in the GTA:

Because everybody's an expert on the media these days and nobody has an opinion that is allowed to go unexpressed — thanks ever so much for sharing — we in the business have been smacked around the past fortnight over the manner in which we report, shoot, analyze and comment on the news.

The hysterical reaction in some quarters has been matched — shrill for shrill — by defensive posturing and offensive pontificating.

Journalists behaving badly became a predictable ancillary preoccupation, mostly contrived on its merits but a handy means for pulling our eye off the ball of 17 Muslim males arrested on terrorism-related charges. That there was sufficient evidence to swear out warrants is lost in the rush not to judge.

You can damn well judge. That comes with the territory of being a sensate human being, even as it is the territory of the courts to convict or acquit.

The media-bashers — from within the profession and without — have been reminding us, incessantly, that the accused are merely, well, accused. Quite right too, although it would at least be consistent if such basic principles as innocent-until-proven-guilty were also applied to, say, uncharged-as-yet American Marines who purportedly committed atrocities against civilians in Iraq earlier this year. A humble little "alleged'' shouldn't be too much to ask.

It goes without saying — but is said ad infinitum, with exacting conscientiousness — that Islam is not the culprit in what has transpired locally over these last two weeks. Some 650,000 Canadian Muslims have zero to do with a minuscule number of adults and youths who may have been radicalized to the point of plotting atrocities. It apparently should also go without saying, to hear some people not tell it — Police Chief Bill Blair, for instance — that fundamentalist, anarcho-Islam is very much a common denominator in contemporary terrorism.

Tip-toeing into that minefield requires, seems to me, a giant dollop of "balancing'' — read: offsetting — reportage, whereby every whinge is afforded disproportionate examination in the media, and broken mosque windows (need I even say that such vandalism is shameful; yes I need say it) are equated, as an exercise in criminal relativism, with purported plans to bomb and behead etc.

The mosque incident, at least, was legitimate news, an episode that demanded telling, although the perpetrators, whoever they may be, are as unrepresentative of this zealously decent society as the aforementioned 17 accused are representative of the Muslim community.

What's worse, in my opinion, is the disingenuous journalism that occurs when reporters are deployed to bring back the non-story, this to provide pseudo-ballast for the genuine story, follow? There is an implicit apology — a "please don't hate us" shying away — in such vigorously symmetrical manoeuvres. It's journalism as justification, the tit-for-that.

Buried in the column is this little gem:

I wasn't at the Brampton courthouse on that first-appearance occasion. A veteran photographer told me it was the worst he's ever seen of the media ganging up on targets, with terrified women cowering from the cameras.

Maybe so, but it's a fine distinction. This is what we do, as unseemly as that might be. This is what we've done, countless times, to grieving families of victims, much less accused.

True enough. There's a lot of unseemly behaviour. Back when I used to do daily news for CBC-TV in Montreal, they would always assign me the sad stories because I would cry and then the people whom I was interviewing would cry ... you get the teary picture.

Still, it's interesting that even a veteran shooter thinks that the media mob was worse than usual. Maybe it was that there were so many cameras there, from the U.S. for example. Maybe it's something about how these suspects -- and by extension, their families -- are being treated as something less than ...

Read Rosie. She doesn't have the answers. But she raises some provocative issues, as usual.

 

Suicide bomb the messenger

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED:

We know that most governments have a stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists. But should media have a policy of not reporting on terrorist attacks? Some people might think so after hearing about this, a study that links coverage of terrorism with increased incidences of terrorism. (I added the link.)

It's a macabre example of win-win in what economists call a "common-interest game," say Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University.

"Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," their study contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money "as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers."

The researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period. Using a statistical procedure called the Granger Causality Test, they attempted to determine whether more coverage directly led to more attacks.

The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage -- a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.

What's not clear is whether the correlation can also be found between with all media, including television and websites, or just newspapers. (And really, do terrorists read Swiss newspapers?) If it's just newspapers, is it because terrorists like having the actual pages to stick on their fridges?

There's nothing in the report on this study as to whether invading other countries might actually increase terrorism.

UPPITY DATE: Not surprisingly, some in the rightwingdingosphere are using this study to suggest that the MSM are causing terrorism.

Yeah, that's what they'd they like to believe, as opposed to agreeing with others who say that the war on terror is a failure for other reasons.

Washington is failing to make progress in the global war on terror and the next 9/11-style attack is not a question of if, but when. That is the scathing conclusion of a survey of 100 leading American foreign-policy analysts.

In its first "Terrorism Index," released yesterday, the influential journal Foreign Policy found surprising consensus among the bipartisan experts.

Some 86 per cent of them said the world has grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush's claims that the U.S. is winning the war on terror.

The main reasons for the decline in security, they said, were the war in Iraq, the detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. policy towards Iran and U.S. energy policy.

Perhaps in ''defending our freedoms,'' these Chairborne Rangers (wish I had come up with that) would prefer to take away the freedom of the press and the public's right to know. Besides, aren't they the ones constantly screaming about terrorists lurking everywhere?

By the way: 2,500 U.S. military dead in Iraq as of today.

Here comes the judge

Why has a justice of the peace been making major decisions -- including imposing a media ban -- in the case of the suspected terror plot?

I am no legal expert but it seems to me that the national and international media have been blithely writing about Brampton justice of the peace Keith D. Currie, if they mention him at all, without questioning why he is presiding? Nothing against his worship, but doesn't Brampton have Ontario Court and Superior Court judges who have been lawyers before being called to the bench and are steeped in criminal law? Or does the media ban effectively prevent discussion of that as well?

Thoughts? Opinions? Anybody?