Obama has his "classroom moment" without Michael Moore's twit comments

It appears that U.S. President Barack Obama has had his epiphany and discovered at last what it means to hold this job.

It is not about letting “no crisis go to waste”, about transforming the United States into a mini-me European state, about propping up banks, or telling the car industry how to do its business, or even helping Big Pharma remain Big Pharma. The single most important job of the President is to keep America safe and Americans secure. Because, if you can’t do that, the rest doesn’t really matter very much.

I think that lesson has now sunk in.

Film maker Michael Moore made much mockery of a video of former President George W. Bush appearing stunned in a children’s classroom for about seven minutes after being told of the 9/11 attacks. He further made cracks about Bush always seeming to be on vacation.

Now his favourite President waits three days on his golfing vacation before commenting directly on the near catastrophe at Detroit airport and the complete catastrophe in the world-wide anti-terrorist net. Then Obama comes out sounding very much like Bush, talking about tracking down those responsible. And for the second day in a row he has now spoken publicly about fixing the security mess and actually sounding as if he were really angry about it – like it might matter to him.

I checked Michael Moore’s website this morning before writing this. He has a big open letter to the President telling him not to send more troops to Afghanistan and to fire his generals. He was some silly twitter comments about the Detroit incident, saying how the troop surge didn’t prevent the terrorist boarding the airplane. But he has nothing to say about Obama being on vacation and taking nearly 72 hours to show a public reaction to the terrorist threat.

Hey Michael, how about some even-handedness? Why don’t you comment on how Obama is handling this failure in American security the way you were so ready to do with GWB?

A Bronx Cheer for the big guy at the end of the aughts

It is customary at the end of a year to reflect on the events of that year and what we might have learned from them, for better or for worse. The same sort of exercise applies to the end of a decade. Often media writes these reflections up as the most “newsworthy” stories, etc. Since media claims to be the gatekeeper of news, this is kind of a poor man’s Academy Award show, where industry insiders pat themselves on the back for their picks.

I am a blogger, so screw MSM. I’ll sort my way through the decade.

With respect to the past year, I would say that climate science gets the top billing.

First, we had the Copenhagen conference, two years in the planning, which was supposed to set the stage for an embryonic world government to deal with planetary resources. By any measure it completely failed. It was probably the last gasp of something Maurice Strong put in motion 30 years ago.

Many of the same sad bunch will meet in Mexico City next year, but it won’t hold a candle to the promise that was to be Copenhagen.

Second, we had the leaked or hacked e-mails from the climate science top dogs who admitted to themselves, if not to us, that the science is anything but settled. Leaving aside the career jealousies and the attempts to control the peer review process that were evident in these 2,000 pages of e-mails, they puzzled over the hiatus in warming for the past decade, had no explanation for it, admitted it did not fit the theory, and began to doubt their own analysis and the data behind it. They clearly demonstrated that they had really no idea why the world of the past warmed or cooled, having dismissed ice core samples as being imprecise and having trouble making tree ring data fit the theory as well.

I am told relentlessly by fans of AGW that the medieval warm period is irrelevant, and in any case, we don’t know enough about it, and that all that matters is the dramatic rise in the past century of CO2. This is unprecedented they tell me.

How do we know, I say, when we don’t anything reliable about the past? Logic fails here for reasons I get into later.

What also fails to knock these folks off their game is that the temperature and the CO2 have not been consistent. For periods in the past century, including the last decade, the temperature has not been inexorably rising as the AGW says it should since the CO2 has been unalterably rising.

I would say that many more people believed the AGW hypothesis than disbelieved it at the beginning of this decade and, at the end of the decade, these numbers have reversed, with more disbelieving it than believing it. This will have political consequences.

During this decade, I would say religion was the most important driver in world affairs. And by that I mean religion in its broadest sense, including the religion of global warming.

We started the decade believing a new era of reason, science and rationalism would prevail. Not more than a year passed and we saw religious zealots of Islamic persuasion carry out audacious suicide attacks on the cities of New York and Washington.

One of the fallouts from these attacks was the new stringent security rules that air travelers were subjected to before they could board airplanes. At the end of the decade, yet another in a long line of Islamic attempts at murder by aircraft in Detroit has led to even more onerous impositions on air travelers.

So, on behalf of all civilian aviation, let’s give Mohammed a big Bronx cheer.

One of the things that began to dawn on western societies during this decade was the impact of Islam, not just in Islamic countries, but in the heart of western civilization. We have not yet found a way to effectively deal with this foreign political-religio philosophy and I expect the next decade will see us increasingly absorbed by that issue.

One of the things that has become clearer near the end of the decade, however, is that, like the doubts that have begun to permeate over the certainty of climate science, the rose-coloured lenses that viewed Islam as “one of the world’s great religions” and a “religion of peace” have cracked and fallen away.

In Europe, the people are either voting with their feet, leaving for non-European western nations, or are organizing populist political parties that take aim at Islam as a menace. The political establishment in Europe is on shaky ground having spent its political capital during the decade appeasing and propping up Muslims while simultaneously suppressing nascent European nationalism. Its cupboard is nearly bare and I would expect to see the old guard swept away in future elections by those who do not wish to see the Islamification of Europe. After all, there are still many more Europeans who vote than Islamists and they know they will have to act politically soon while they still can.

The outcome will not be pretty.

Australia has shown some muscle in dealing with the issue, but Canada appears to be still very much asleep at the switch.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Americans have elected an anachronism to the highest office. Just as the rest of the world begins to march down a different path opposing Islam, President Obama runs around the planet praising the religion to the skies, misrepresenting it in the process, and promising to defend the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab, ignoring the right of Muslim women not to wear the hijab.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that his efforts are viewed by the Islamic world as weakness, and by even some of the jellyfish European politicians as foolish, and by the American public as misguided.

The day after the Fort Hood massacre, Obama cautioned the public not to jump to conclusions. Three days after the attempt to blow up the airplane in Detroit he has not said anything to the American public. Air travel in the United States is in complete turmoil, but not a word directly from the President. Perhaps if the news stories had been framed, not as another Muslim terrorist at it again, but as white people arresting a black man on board an airplane, he would be inclined to be more loquacious.

Unless he shifts ground within the next year, he will probably suffer the worst fate a President can endure; he will lose his moral authority to govern.

Lockerbie bombing revisted

In August of this year an international flap arose over the release on alleged compassionate grounds of convicted Lockerbie aircraft bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to his home country of Libya. Supposedly he was due to die within three months from cancer.

As of this past Wednesday he was still alive.

At the time, I did not buy into the compassion part of the story. There was some scuttlebutt that it was done because of some commercial deal in the offing between the U.K. and Libya, but I thought the truth lay more in that fact that al-Megrahi was appealing his conviction, that the case against him at trial was shaky, that he might well have succeeded on the appeal and it would embarrass the government.

When he arrived in Tripoli he was greeted as a conquering hero.

During his trial the defense portrayed him as a lowly airline employee.

New information has now been revealed that was not available at his trial.

Al-Megrahi was sitting on a Swiss bank account containing nearly three million U.S. dollars in today’s currency. Furthermore, he was involved in the purchase of development of chemical weapons for Libya and he attempted to purchase 1,000 letter bombs from Greek arms dealers, while he employed as a Libyan intelligence officer.

So far, the Scottish government has declined to make his medical records available for public scrutiny.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that he was the Lockerbie bomber, but it does suggest he was anything but a lowly airline worker, and in terms of international terror activities, certainly not an innocent man.

From Canada's perspective, 9/11 was an inside job

It is hard to know what to make of the latest Canadian “ruffled feathers” flap going on over the comments of Janet Napolitano, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary.

She got herself in trouble in a television interview raising the old chestnut about the 9/11 terrorists getting into the U.S. through Canada. This was said in the context of the U.S. treating the Canadian border exactly the same as the Mexican border.

Early versions of her suggested that she was simply ignorant of the Canadian border situation and her 9/11 attributes bore that out. However, she has since corrected the record to say she was wrong about that and was thinking of the wannabe LAX bomber who was nabbed at the border crossing between British Columbia and Washington State.

Now she has gone on to say that her problem with us is that we let in people that would be denied entry into the United States. In short, we need to be more selective. Her predecessor, Michael Chertoff, claimed that more than a dozen “extremists” were caught trying to cross from Canada.

Maybe instead of puffing ourselves up as not being a problem we should take a little more time to talk to our counterparts in the U.S. to find out exactly what they know that we apparently do not.

I cross the border two or three times a year, and I would not want to see some unduly militarized bureaucratic operation replacing the current one. However, we should be cooperating with the U.S. on weeding out the undesirables as much as we can and if we are not willing to do that then I suppose we will suffer the consequences.

I am inclined to give Ms. Napolitano the benefit of the doubt at this stage and assume that she has some good data to back up her policy utterances.

At last, an honest Muslim puts Islam on trial

We have been treated for some time now to politicians, religious apologists and mainstream media commentators trying to clamp down the lid on public concerns about Islamic extremism.

Whenever some bizarre story arises, like the alleged murder of Asqa Parvez by her father and brother, over Islamic dress codes, the religious apologists rush to claim this has nothing to do with Islam. The British government pretends that terrorism conducted in the name of Islam is the “not-Islam” religion (try wrapping your head around that one). European nationalists who are standing up for European civilization in the face of increasing Islamification are branded by columnists as “Islamophobes”, and even Muslim writers who are on the right side of this issue refer to Islamists as “thugs”, as if they are merely criminals, like members of your local motorcycle gang.

All of this obfuscation, finger-directing, and alternative evil theorizing is done because our western society is accustomed to paying deference to religion. Most people espouse a religion, even if their practice of it is spotty. Most people associate moral living with religion and cannot fathom that a religion could promulgate a morality completely in opposition to the moral standards accepted as the norms in liberal-democracies.

Therefore, it follows that the anti-western people, who look like Muslims, who talk like Muslims, who walk like Muslims and who say they are Muslims, cannot be Muslims because Muslims are the people who have a religion and they must ipso facto be good people. These faux Muslims are “highjackers”, “thugs”, and the “non-Muslims”, their creeds and actions are culturally determined, not religiously dictated. So goes the conventional script by most Muslim commentators and their non-Muslim supporters.

But here in Canada, we can at last face the real villain, Islam, where it properly belongs, in the prisoner’s dock of one of our criminal courts.

Currently on trial under our terrorism laws is one Said Namouh. Mr. Namouth "devoted his life to spreading the ideology of al-Qaeda and encouraging others to join the jihadist movement", said Rita Katz, a Crown expert at the terrorism trial. Go to this story in the National Post for the graphic details of his enterprises.

Specifically, Mr. Namouh faces charges of conspiracy, participating in the activities of a terrorist group, facilitating terrorist activity and extortion.

The prosecutions case is that Mr. Namouh was driven by an Islam which identifies as enemies Christians, Jews and even Muslims who will not participate in the creation of pan-Islamic rule.

What makes this trial more interesting than your run-of-the-mill terrorist trial is that Mr. Namouh does not deny that he did these things. His defense is that they were a legitimate exercise of freedom of religion. He is saying that Islam suborns the overthrow of western societies and he is entitled to engage in these activities because the western society in which lives, Canada, permits him to practice his religion, which is to say the overthrow of Canada as a liberal-democracy.

His lawyer stated, "I question whether the fact of providing [Internet] links, especially when one is motivated by religious belief, is a violation of the Criminal Code.” He said that even though the beliefs of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden are "repugnant to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, still, are they not religious beliefs? A lot turns on that."

Indeed, a lot does turn on that.

Let us hope the court correctly identifies them as legitimate religious beliefs that have no legitimacy in Canada. We will be much further ahead in dealing with the real problem and not the pretend problem.

Ok, so we nailed the ants, but what about the termites

Not very far away from where I live is one of the busiest criminal courthouses in all of Ontario. As the spring gives way to summer this courthouse is the venue of a trial that is one of the most bizarre in modern Canadian history, the trial of several male youths and adults who are charged with a conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism in the name of Allah.

They are known to the media as the “Toronto 18”, and their names are under a publication ban. Most, if not all of them, don’t actually live in Toronto. They live in Mississauga, a large suburb to the west of the city, which is why they are being tried in this courthouse and not one in Toronto.

And they are no longer 18 in number. Charges against 7 of them have been stayed and those persons have been freed. Staying charges is not the same as dropping them. They can be reactivated if new evidence should be revealed.

They are called the Toronto 18 because their main targets were in Toronto, specifically the headquarters building of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Toronto offices of the Canadian anti-spy/terrorist agency, CSIS. They are located close to each other in a very busy part of downtown Toronto.

The allegation are that they planned to load a truck with a bomb and blow up these buildings with the intention of killing the maximum number of people (like the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing). Given the population of the buildings in question and the pedestrian and vehicle traffic in the area, the number of potential victims could exceed those in 9/11, depending on the time and day in the week and the size of the bomb.

They are also alleged to have had some vague plan to storm the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and behead Canada’s Prime Minister, the leader of the Conservative Party. So far no evidence has been adduced that they are members of the Liberal Party of Canada, but the trial is still in early days.

Yesterday, the prosecutions key witness, a paid informant who infiltrated the group, was on the witness stand for the first time. He testified about attending a terrorist training camp in northern Ontario and about some of the activities carried on there. For a full rendition of his testimony, as it appeared in the Toronto Star, go to this site.

One of the interesting things he brought out was that the group made a video of their training efforts to impress the leadership in Afghanistan (presumably the Taliban leadership) and some imams in Toronto that the group’s leader believed were sympathetic to their activities. It is not the video per se that is interesting, it is the notion that imams in Toronto would encourage this kind of thing.

When this trial is over, and assuming the charges stick and the defendants are found guilty, the public should demand to know what action is being taken against religious leaders who would be sympathetic to a home-grown group of Muslim terrorists. The Toronto 18 are only the ants running around on the tree bark. You have to go under the bark to dig out the termites if you want to save the tree.

Buy guns to bring about world peace

Want to know why world peace is not going to break out anytime soon? Look at this Foreign Policy magazine photo essay. Note the irony in the text under the last picture about anti-terrorism capabilities -- apparently nobody can make a connection between selling armaments and terrorism. Also, don't you think that is a sweet young thing sighting down the barrel of that machine gun in the photo above?

Keystone Kops and Canadian security services

The Keystone Kops were a famous Hollywood "short film" troop that made purely slapstick comedy on celluloid in the early days of silent film. Their successors can be found in a series of "Police Academy" films made in the 1980s and the current comedy channel spoof "Reno 911".

It is also a slang term applied to groups or entities that demonstrate ineptness in their handling of their enterprises.

When the news broke a couple of years ago that 18 Muslim men and teenagers had been arrested under Canada's post 9/11 terrorist laws for plotting to blow up public buildings and behead the Prime Minister, I had an uneasy feeling from the statements made at the police press conference that the 18 were not really terrorists, but some Islamic version of the Keystone Kops. Yesterday, the 7th member of this group was released without prosecution, after spending 17 months in custody. This guy had been virtually identified as the ringleader at the time of his arrest.

It is now beginning to look like our security and police services are the Keystone Kops in this affair.

This is the second black eye for our public guardians. The previous big profile detention for suspicious terrorist activity involved 19 Pakistani students who were taking flying lessons, some of which took them over the nearby nuclear plant. They were eventually deported for immigration irregularities that became evident after their arrest, but nothing more insidious turned up.

If prosecutors cannot secure convictions in this case then it is high time we had a public enquiry into our public safety and security; something the lawyers for the defendents are calling for as well. This police drama that starts off with a bang and ends with a whimper only discredits the authorities in the mind of the public and may lessen alertness in an age of peril. The public needs to be confident that the best people are on the job.