Saturday, October 28, 2006

Canada targeted or recycled threat?

Stephen Harper, Chickenhawk, enjoys playing an aggressive-warmonger-GI Georgie type guy. All year long he's been jumping up and down for attention from the USA, or from anyone for that matter, and now he's finally got it. Yay him.

According to the National Post, a spokesman from Al Qaeda's "strategy committee" has said that if Canada doesn't pull out of Afghanistan, we'll "face an operation similar to New York, Madrid and London". The threat was from a communiquè gleaned from jihadist websites and translated by the SITE Institute. Besides pointing out that Canada might face a terrorist attack, the document also suggests that "al qaeda is aware of divisions within Canada over the mission, pointing to public opinion polls and opposition within Parliament". But because we're in Afghanistan as an aggressor, we're a target. Eeek, faint.

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but this is old news -- the document containing the threat was from July. And while I'm not suggesting the threat itself might be... um, manufactured, I somehow find it hard to believe that AQ would have any interest in our differences of opinion regarding Afghanistan. What do they care? If they want to make their followers hate us enough to attack us, why bother telling them that only 30% of us are real assholes, but the rest are okay? And why are we hearing about this 2-month-old threat now that the coffins have started coming back from Afghanistan and tory support is falling? And on the very day there were anti-war protests in major cities all across Canada?

Would it be rude to suggest this "new" threat is just some old recycled information that ended up in today's news by design, possibly at the prompting of the Harper government? Harper wants to play chickenhawk like Georgie, so why wouldn't he manipulate the news like Georgie?

Just sayin'.