• Hitchens Had It Right
• What President Obama Should Have Said About 9/11
• The 9/11 Spectacle

Confusion to our enemies.

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God damn you Walter! You fuckin’ asshole! Everything’s a fuckin’ travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Vietnam? What the FUCK, has anything got to do with Vietnam? What the fuck are you talking about?
- The Dude in “The Big Lebowski”

It’s not Vietnam.

Best argument I’ve heard all week for staying committed to Afghanistan?

This fuckhead and all of his aid-worker killing, hostage beheading, schoolchildren-murdering friends asked us nicely to leave.

Hat tip to the Torch, taking our Canadian politicians to task for not having the guts to so much as discuss Afghanistan with the home front while the soldiers on the front lines stay committed to the mission.

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“There’s by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration had something to do with 9-11. I’ve looked at some of it, and have often been asked. There’s a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn’t try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and you’ll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they’d have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they’d all be lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen.”

It’s always been incredible to me how an American president constantly portrayed (often correctly) as being unable to string a simple sentence together is also the criminal mastermind of the biggest insider conspiracy in modern history. Charlie Sheen, chill.

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I struggled to decide whether this was still happening or if it was just a dream. Then I figured Brian was still just raving drunk from a late night filled with alcohol and self-loathing, as usual. “What are you talking about? What time is it?”

“Planes are attacking New York City. They hit the World Trade Center.”

I tried to wrap my head around that one. How the heck would Russian fighters make it past NORAD to hit New York? OK, maybe not the Russians. Who, then? France? It just didn’t make any sense.

“Who do they think it is?” I asked, giving up.

“They don’t really know. Some guy said maybe it’s the PLO.”

The Palestinian Liberation Organization? They don’t have any jet planes. What the hell are we talking about, here?

I went down to the 24-hour Internet cafe in the basement of my building to learn the horrible truth. They had hit the World Trade Center. The Pentagon was on fire. All air traffic in the USA was grounded. Thousands were dead or missing. In those first hours, it really did look as though the world might catch on fire.

Eight years later, we still live in a very dangerous world. We understand better who our enemies are and the lengths they will go to in order to destruction to our lands. We understand also that within our own societies, these monsters are still able to recruit, plot and carry out more deadly attacks justified by a perverted ideology. Like cockroaches, Al Queda and its allies are resilient. They won’t be shut down next week, next month, or possibly even next century.

At least now we’re awake to confront them.

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An Islamic history and culture course at Toronto’s Ryerson University launches this week, July 24-27. This is the chosen vehicle for the Al-Fauz Institute for Islamic Thought’s endeavors to educate Muslim youth about Islamic values and provide context for the “issues experienced in the daily lives of Muslims in the pluralistic Canadian society”. But intrepid investigative journalist Terry Glavin has the scoop in the National Post on why the person delivering these lectures, Azzam Tamimi, seems particularly ill-suited to this organization’s stated mission:

Tamimi has loudly renounced democracy, explicitly praises suicide bombers, and he’s said he’d even be happy to blow himself up in Israel: “It’s the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity.” Tamimi distinguishes good Muslims from their adversaries this way: “We love death. They love life.”

Tamimi recently proclaimed: “I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” and it was at an anti-Israel rally in Dublin only three months ago that Tamimi declared: “With regard to their attitudes to liberation, I say ‘Long Live the Taliban’.”

And we’re just getting started. An excerpt from MEMRI’s report on Tamimi in regard to September 11 and the Taliban Regime:

In an interview with the Spanish daily La Vanguardia titled ‘I Admire the Taliban, They Are Courageous’ in late 2001, Al-Tamimi claimed that the September 11 attacks brought joy to the Arab world. He begins by assuring the interviewer that “everyone” in the Arab world cheered upon seeing the Twin Towers fall. “Excuse me,” says the interviewer, “did you understand my question?” Al-Tamimi: “In the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy. That’s what you asked me, isn’t it?”

Not interested in international relations? Here are Tamimi’s ideas on attaining domestic bliss, spoken at a Cambridge University event, as captured in the MEMRI report:

Dr. Al-Tamimi firstly said that beating was the last in a series of three steps that husbands could use to ‘discipline’ errant wives (a ripple of concern swept the audience at this point), so to concentrate on beating alone was to miss that. But Dr. Al-Tamimi also said that he was regularly surprised why this verse was such a concern to Westerners since he knew of many Arab women who regularly asked their husbands to beat them…

This is the guy that Al-Fauz want to help them to “prepare Muslim advisors and scholars to serve the needs of their communities and generations to come” — here in Canada?

Surely there are more suitable candidates out there somewhere. Perhaps someone who isn’t pulling for the Taliban while our troops are going toe-to-toe with these thugs on the battlefield? Could be a good start.

But that’s the thing: The Al-Fauz Institute knew who Tamimi was when they hired him for this gig. This gives us some pretty clear insight into the kind of values they hold and would like to instill in Canadian society.

I’m guessing the history course at Ryerson won’t actually teach anything all that contentious. The curriculum covers topics like Islamic history, language studies and “personal development”. They’re not going to teach how to make a bomb and blow yourself up in Tel Aviv (or Toronto, for that matter). But that doesn’t matter.

This is just a first point of contact. Many students in this course may be incorporated in Tamimi and the Al-Fauz Institute’s network for a long time after these first lectures. What other lessons do they have in store? Who’s their next guest lecturer: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Look for more of this from the “leaders of the future”:

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A tireless worker and activist for women’s rights in Afghanistan, CASC member Lauryn Oates is profiled in the Globe and Mail this week as one of the Top 10 To Watch in 2009. An excerpt:

“Canadians seem so focused on the bad, and certainly that is compelling. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to sell to point out all the good things. Just in our small project, we’ve seen incredible changes.”

She said the Afghans she encounters, all ordinary, mostly rural people, are terrified at the prospect of a return to Taliban control.

In the past year, Ms. Oates said, Canadian Women for Women has helped build a new school for girls near Jalalabad from $75,000 raised entirely by Canadian donations.

Contrary to naysayers, Ms. Oates said, ordinary Afghans want international aid and intervention.

“People have this incredible resilience,” she said. “If they’re willing to go on, we have to be behind them. The least we can do is stand by them. This is not about charity or pity. I would never tolerate this in my country.

“I’ve learned how to be a human being there. There is such unbelievable hospitality and kindness, contrasted against such cruelty.”

And in the Georgia Straight blog, soldiers and UBC students Tylere Couture and Sverre Frisch, who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, demolish the foundation of stupidities mouthed by Langara professor Peter Prontzos and offer their own pragmatic assessment. An excerpt from their argument:

These groups have to be confronted with blunt force, the kind of force which requires large quantities of professional, coordinated, and well armed soldiers, not blue helmets under a peacekeeping mandate whose funding is being spent on social projects in Canada. Thus, there is no more a political solution to Afghanistan alone than there is a military solution to Afghanistan alone; the two have to be combined to provide the best possible outcome in Afghanistan.

Canada is in a war against thugs who throw acid in young women heading to school (CNN). It’s a war against psychotic nihilists who use children as remote-controlled suicide bombs (AP). We’re fighting fascists who, when the Taliban owned much of Afghanistan, turned the country into a 5-diamond hotel for international terrorists, while all resources went to subjugating and radicalizing the population.

That part of the world will never have a chance at freedom and a “normal” existence in the community of nations unless we win this fight. I’m glad to see more and more Canadians are on board. If you’d like to be a part of this movement in solidarity with Afghans, here’s your formal invitation to join the cause.

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* The terrorists targeted Americans and Britons, but were also perfectly willing to slaughter anyone else who happened to be in their way.
* The attackers murdered Jews at a Jewish center that provided services to the local community and tourists
* The terrorists attacked a financial centre of Mumbai
* The killers attacked a hospital maternity ward
* The attack occurred in a country that has overwhelmingly embraced globalization and rejected tribal nationalism

So… why is there any confusion at all about what motivated the killers?

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Indians long ago made their choice about whether to align with the West or the other, mostly less palatable alternatives on offer.

So sad that the enemy will never respect that choice.

The world must stand with India.

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I question the value of giving anything Al Queda’s propagandists might have to say front-page, 11-o-clock news, Google front-page publicity for any announcement they might want to make. Their rants pretty much follow this magical formula:

1. Declare outrage for the latest Western atrocity, real or imagined… or one that happened 10 years ago. Or 60 years ago. Or 600 years ago. It’s all good, when you’re blowing up the infidels.
2. Be sure to mention that Al Queda is simply reacting to unreasoning Islamophobia… because the pretty-much daily world news reports of Muslims blowing up shoppers, kidnapping reporters, stabbing their own “dishonorable” family members, shooting UN soldiers and declaring jihad on Danish cartoonists are all just war-mongering imaginings of the Zionist-controlled media.
3. Mention a recent newsworthy event so that reporters can be sure you made your statement recently, presumably not too long before you go off to visit your 72 virgin goats.

Here’s hoping Obama can do better than the previous leader of the free world in putting out a more compelling message than the other side.

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Of course, not everyone is on the same page. Mobilization Against War and Occupation, based out of Vancouver, still spews the stale lies about the Taliban being a popular resistance movement valiantly fighting vampiric foreign devils in NATO uniforms. Osama bin Ladin’s old allies in the war on civilization may triumph in the end, but will they remember to thank MAWO on V-Day?

Ah, well. I’m sure CUPE is happy to have their support in their revolutionary struggle against the ruthless oppression of Vancouver City Hall.

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