This Labour day weekend, I make my first post in more than three months.
Given that, soon after my last post, I:
1. Lost my job
2. Lost my marriage
3. Had to move to a dumpy apartment house, after living for thirteen years in a single family home...
I just didn't feel like blogging too damn much. Besides, I had to:
1. Find a job
2. Find a girlfriend
3. Be a part-time father to my young one, herself hurt and confused by the collapse of her parents' marriage..
Well, I've now found a job. Not a very good one, but this being without work was driving me nuts. Besides, I absolutely despised my last job. Hopefully, this one will be better...
I haven't found a girlfriend as yet.
I'm doing pretty all right being a father, I guess, nursing my daughter through the heartache of losing a full-time parent...
Now for the blogging matter at hand:
This morning, I came across an article by Dan Gardiner, editorial writer of the Ottawa Citizen.
What to say about Gardiner?
Once, when the Lord Beaverblack regime owned the Citizen and other (formerly) Southam newspapers, he toed the `right-wing' editorial line...
Then, when Conrad Black sold off his interests to the decidedly more Liberal-friendly Canwest concern (and no, folks, the Aspers weren't secret Ziocons, get that out of your head right now...)
And he went off to Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto...
and who knows what else, Gardiner has never wasted an opportunity to take a swipe at conservatives, or `conservatives', because any resemblance between conservatives who actually exist, and conservatives as they are depicted in Gardiner's thrice-weekly columns, is pure coincidental...
Like in the column of yesterday, or the day before, or sometime recently.
The premise of the piece is that `conservatives' believe that the Russians deserve what they get at the hands of Islamist Chechens, for some reason... but any notion put forward by himself or other newspaper columnists at his august publication, or many other periodicals and newspapers that the West deserves what it gets from Islam, because of `what we do' in the Middle East, is unpatriotic, pro-Islamist and just plain evil.
To `prove' his point, he quotes a passing comment between two American conservatives... and nothing else.
Such is the level of argumentation that Gardiner usually engages in, in his grand indictment of `conservatism.'
It isn't quite at the level of Keith Olberman. But it's still crap.
I must say that I've never encountered any conservative who held on to the belief that the Russian regime has it coming at the hands of Islamist, in Chechnya, or elsewhere.
I must say, that, I don't think there's any reason to panic, in regard to the arrest of three or four people in Canada, who were apparently planning attacks on Canadian targets and Canadians, and who might have links to international terrorism (innocent until proven otherwise, let's see the government's case etc etc etc).
I don't think all Muslims are bent on waging war with the rest: if Islam is not assuredly a `religion of peace', it is not just a religion of war, either...
But I am royally sick of those, whether they include Gardiner or not, who never lose an opportunity to excuse the violence perpetrated by Muslims against not only apostates and atheist, but other Muslims too:
In response, in the comments section, I posted the following rant:
Like most of Gardiner's columns since his return from Osgoode Hall, it is eloquent but entirely lacking in logic.
First, the premise: Do all `conservatives' think the Russians had it coming due to their, I dunno, complete and utter destruction of Chechnya's capital city in the 1990s - bec. of what Kristol and Bennet *apparently* think? Is Gardiner really that lacking in logic, or is he just trying to make a weak point, which he knows he'll get away with, given the political pov of the Ottawa Citizen?
Next, all you have to do is peruse the comments here and in most other DG columns on this very subject, in order to see that many in the West seek to defend Islam, no matter what its adherents do in their name, and blame the West for events like 9/11 (and much else), again, regardless of the facts.
Like the commenter `Art Campbell' in this thread and at least one other...
Last, this whole argument could be elucidated by reference to the actual facts of US and Western involvement in the Middle East, in contrast to the behaviour of the Soviet Union, and its successor regimes, toward Muslims.
The first Gulf War (or the second one, as the Iran-Iraq war was the original `Gulf War') in 1991 saw the U.S. - and many other countries, in the West and elsewhere - move against Iraq in favour of a very conservative Islamic regime, in Kuwait, against a secular regime in Iraq (remember, Iraqi war opponents, the Hussein govt `couldn't have anything to do with Al-Qaeda, bec the latter was "fundamentalist" the former "secular"'?).
Further, the Gulf-War alliance (approved by the UN Sec Council, let's not forget too), acted so that an even more reactionary, Islamic regime, in Saudi Arabia, would not become either a colony or a suzerainty of Iraq - that secular anti-Islamist regime, again let us recall.
Whether in 1991, the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world was motivated merely `for oil', as the slogan went, is irrelevant to how the GW alliance actually restored and maintained conservative/reactionary Islamic regimes in defence of secular, anti-Islamist Iraq.
Just exactly why the Gulf War of 1991 should become a recruiting method for Islamic fascism, is quite beyond me.
But what about DG’s point, about `U.S. troops being stationed on “holy” Saudi soil…’?
Yes. U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia – on bases on which U.S. troops were severely restricted from leaving, and where Bibles or other non-Islamic religious material, alcohol, skin magazines were banned (remember, this is on the American bases).
That’s surely some defilement of the “holy shrines” of Islam…
I’m sure that DG and Art Campbell, and many others, could offer other excuses as to why Islamists would seek to attack Western countries that they couldn’t spell before, like Canada… er, sorry, to delve into the sociological reasons why young Muslims – like a medical doctor who largely grew up in Canada, was at least partly educated here, and even appeared on `Canadian Idol’ – would seek to attack Canada and Canadians – without God forbid! seeking to justify such actions! What do you think of me my goodness!?!?
Like the overthrowing of a `democratic’ leader of Iran in 1953 (who was seeking to consolidate his own power regardless of democratic niceties, and who himself was as big an enemy of traditional Islam as Saddam Hussein of Iraq)
Or the attacks against the Hussein regime itself, in the period between 1991 and 2003 – that is against a secular Arab regime that was an enemy of Al-Qaeda (remember Dan and Art?); or the same overthrow of this anti-Islamist regime in ’03, which finally liberated the Shia of Iraq to exist without the domination of the Sunni population, to form `fundamentalist’ religious parties and the like…
You can see how that would inspire the Islamists to hate the U.S., to attack the
U.S. almost ten years ago… before the invasion of either Iraq and Afghanistan…
There are other casus belli that the Islamists can latch onto, in order to blame the West.
Like for example, how Western countries interceded in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, in Bosnia in 95 and in Kosovo in 1999, to rescue largely Muslim populations from largely Christian ones (but we didn’t terror-bomb Serbia quickly enough, you see…)
The same conflict in which the successor Soviet regime was adamantly in support of the Christians crushing, raping, murdering the Muslims…
The Soviets and their successors were so amiable to global Islam in so many other ways, too.
Like, from 1917 to 1991, how Russians maintained their colonies in Islamic countries of Central Asian, aggressively crushing the Islamic religious, imprisoning, persecuting, murdering the Islamic leadership.
Like in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, attempting to crush a conservative / reactionary Islamic insurgency against a secular, Communist regime…
Or from 1968 to 1991, when the Soviet Union was one of the main suppliers of arms and other materiel to the secular regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (during which period Hussein’s `allies’ had no diplomatic relations with Iraq, until 1984, and sold him one percent of his weaponry, according to a Swedish think tank), who was (let us recall again) anti-Islam…
Or let us not forget Chechnya, where the Russians were responsible for liberating the capital city from its buildings, roads, much of its people…
And this is why, of course, the Russians are held up as a symbol of anti-Islamic recruiting throughout the world… just like the Americans and the rest of the democratic west are not…
Errr…
From all this, you might be tempted to think that the Islamists are determined to attack the West, while avoiding the Russians, because we’re democratic, liberal, secular, tolerant… decadent to them of course… you know, attack just because of what we are, and not what we do…
But then, only those yucky, déclassé `conservatives’ would think such a thing, right Dan and Art?
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