Actually, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea. So long as the shelters can be made safe, secure and free of bedbugs and rats, isn’t this preferable to homeless people freezing — or burning to death in their sleeping bags?
B.C. Civil Liberties Association executive director points out that the timing of this maneuver points to a plot to keep our city streets free of homeless when the Olympics are in town. Fair enough, and that probably is a significant motivator. But why kick a gift horse in the mouth? If the Olympics is what was required to get people into shelters — and if the resources are there to ensure these places don’t end up as dens of drug abuse and other illegal activity, it’s probably a good thing.
On that note, one puffed-up Canadian writer recently described the fundamentalist movement that chills so many hyperbolic pundits above the 49th parallel:
Me? The only thing that really scares me is them. That is, the only thing that really terrifies me is the possibility of these right-wing Christian conservative blow-hard homophobes one day actually taking over America. It may seem unlikely now, but seeing that their numbers continue to grow almost as fast as their minds continue to close, it is, sadly, a distinct possibility.
Huh?
Oh, I’m not disputing that the newsworthy cases (because they are so rare) of Christians who commit murder and other violence against innocents in the pursuit of political change are terrorists (although I’m not convinced that the lone nuts cited in the Huffington Post article above had any particular political aims). But are we really so blind as a society that we cannot distinguish qualitatively different phenomena?
We are given the example of a guy who walks into a church and starts shooting randomly in order to target, in his words, liberals and gays (which may seem like an odd place to carry out his goals, for those who assume that anyone who attends church is automatically a conservative, religious fundamentalist homophobe). Even if this is terrorism — and it’s not clear that this qualifies — it is simply not a threat on the scale of blowing up large buildings in metropolitan areas, or destroying airliners, or slamming said airliners into large buildings in metropolitan areas.
“But what about the Oklahoma City bombing?”, the tattered argument goes. Surely, this proves Christians in North America are a fifth column of dangerous religious fanaticism? Except that Timothy McVeigh wasn’t a religious fundamentalist. Gun nut, check. Enemy of the US government, check. Christian radical? Not so much:
McVeigh professed his belief in “a God”, although he said he had “sort of lost touch with” Catholicism and “I never really picked it up, however I do maintain core beliefs.” The Guardian reported that McVeigh wrote a letter claiming to be an agnostic. McVeigh at one time said that he believed the universe was guided by natural law, energized by some universal higher power that showed each person right from wrong if they paid attention to what was going on inside them. He had also said, “Science is my religion.”
Three quarters of America’s 300 million people are Christian. When you’ve got numbers that large, you’re going to see some scary ambassadors of the faith emerge. We mainly make fun of their views and behavior, rather than locking them up. But given the numbers, if Christian fundamentalists were really as violent as some pundits make out, we’d be seeing terrorist attacks from coast to coast every hour of the day.
Meanwhile, Al Queda-inspired groups have been using Islam as a recruiting tool in the USA for years, if not decades. In the USA, the population of self-declared Muslims is suggested to be 2.35 million, or 0.6 per cent of the population — a far smaller recruiting pool than accessible to a would-be Christian terrorist with a bomb and a grudge against the ZOG authorities. Yet we’ve already seen an ever-increasing list of foiled Al Queda-inspired plots planned on American soil. This, despite a climate of suspicion and vigilance in America that has presumably deterred a significant number of plotters who decided they’d probably get caught before the scheme went very far.
This is not another misguided argument that the Christian religion is inherently more peaceful than Islam, or that Muslims are inherently prone to violence. It isn’t and they aren’t. It’s not an alarmist screed about terrorism, either, since the chances of dying in a terrorist attack are close to zero. But so long as there are real terrorists plotting and scheming in our cities and suburbs, we might as well be realistic about which kind of radical fundamentalism is the real breeding ground for potentially devastating politically-motivated violence on our own soil.
No problem. Let’s just find a place where we can send our soldiers where two sides are separated by a well-defined line in the sand. It has to be a place where the two sides won’t shoot at our soldiers, and they won’t be in any danger of attack by rogues and freelance thugs. And it will have to be a place where we’re in no danger of accidentally causing civilian deaths inadvertently during operations. Ideally, it will be a place where our development projects won’t get burnt down by nihilistic dead-enders. Helping people in desperate need is not the objective. The goal for the “we should only be peacekeeping” crowd is to deploy our troops where they won’t suffer so much as a sunburn, and be showered in never-ending adulation.
I’ve got it. We’ll have our forces patrol the border between Germany and France. Given their history, those nations are bound to go toe-to-toe sometime. Right?
Peacekeeping? No such thing anymore. And it’s not like this is a recent development, either. Anyone remember Yugoslavia?
It seems as though Pashto-English translation at the Associated Press of Taliban bigwig Mullah Omar’s latest propaganda blast about Afghanistan leaves much to be desired. Here’s what’s showing up on the news sites:
Today we have strong determination, military training and effective weapons. Still more, we have preparedness for a long war and the regional situation is in our favor. Therefore, we will continue to wage jihad until we gain independence and force the invaders to pull out.
This version seems much more reliable:
Today we have brainwashed fanatics, experience in burning down schools and shooting acid from water pistols into girls’ faces, and a good number of mentally retarded kids we can use as unwitting suicide bombers. Still more, we have preparedness for a long war because violence and deprivation is really all we can offer. Therefore, we, not including the 93 per cent of Afghans who want the Taliban out of Afghanistan, will continue to wage jihad until we restore the Taliban thugocracy and allow this territory to be used to plan and launch attacks once more against everyone we don’t like — pretty much everyone except us.
I don’t even know a word of Pashto, but I figure that’s got to be the more accurate version.
My friend Terry Glavin offers some real insight into the situation on the ground that seriously belies the Taliban’s bravado and also questions growing defeatism in the face of the jihadis’ terror tactics:
This is nothing like conventional warfare, because we’ve already won that war. As a conventional fighting force, the Taliban were thoroughly and utterly crushed, years ago. It is worth remembering that in June, 2001, the Taliban massed 25,000 heavily armed fighters and another 10,000 Arabs, Chechens and other foreign mercenaries against the Northern Alliance. They couldn’t try anything like that now.
“Assymetrical warfare” doesn’t quite capture the current state of affairs. The Taliban are arrayed against the Afghan people (among whom perhaps four per cent are Taliban supporters), the Afghan National Army, the United Nations, an embryonic Afghan state, and soldiers from 41 ISAF countries. But all it takes is maybe $2,500 and four or five mentally-retarded 11-year-olds in order to carry out a wave of suicide bombings that can be counted on to set off an eruption of defeatist panic and hand-wringing hysteria in pretty well every English-language newspaper on earth.
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