A Non-existent Threat

Two days ago I posted about how CSIS and the RCMP had been wasting a considerable amount of their very limited resources harassing probably around twenty innocent men. These men were selected for harassment primarily (it seems) as a result of racial profiling and/or very tenuous connections to current Middle Eastern political movements. (For example, one guy was a member of the mujahedeen when it was financed and supported by the US government in the early-1990s, and another one had sold communications equipment to the Pakistani government which remains a US ally. [If we're going to torture a guy for selling radios to Pakistan, let's not fail to doubt the loyalty of setting up businesses in totalitarian China and selling their products here!])

My point was that either we Canadians are damned lucky to have escaped the awesome organizational striking power of Islamo-fascist terrorism as our state security forces were pursuing twenty blind alleys, OR it's simply the case that the actual threat of Islamo-fascist terrorism is MINISCULE.

I'd say it's the latter. The USA have lately thwarted yet another attempt by a collection of mentally-challenged individuals being enabled by a Department of Homeland Security informant to commit a terrorist act. A few years back they uncovered a plot by three Muslim men to attack a military base by posing as pizza delivery men and then taking out weapons and ... oh well. They also found another individual with mental problems who intended to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with his welding torch. Oh yeah, two military recruiters were shot dead by a black Muslim convert angry at the rampaging of US troops in the Middle East. (That certainly takes the wind out of the "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" sails, doesn't it?)

The main thing is that this "threat" is the saddest diversion for a corporate political con job as one could imagine. This "threat" is the most ridiculous excuse for destroying hard-won rights as could be possibly imagined. But this threat still has practical implications for hundreds of millions of people. The Cold War, pitting the imperialist-capitalist West against the imperialist-totalitarian-Stalinist USSR and PRC was embarrassing enough, but this "War on Terror" rises nowhere near enough to that conflict as a serious danger and ideological struggle.