From Canada comes the news that 17 people have been arrested and three tons of ammonium nitrate have been seized.
“It was their intent to use it for a terrorist attack,” McDonell said at a news conference in Toronto. “To put it in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people was completed with only one ton of ammonium nitrate.”
McDonell said the group “posed a real and serious threat. It had the capacity and intent to carry out these attacks.”
Authorities would not say what triggered their investigation, which called on more than 400 officers and investigators from several law-enforcement agencies and the intelligence community, or how long they had been watching the suspects. They said they could not disclose many details because the investigation was ongoing.
Canada is an experiment in multiculturalism. I think we should make room for different points of view in our soceities. However, cultures can become retarded when they do not allow open exchange of ideas, or when they teach hatred and violence as acceptable ways of achieving an end.
This applies to Christians who would bomb abortion clinics. It applies to Muslims who would blow up buildings. It applies to any group of people with common beliefs who are willing to use violence as a tool for achieving political goals, except as a last resort, and in self-defense.
For a society to stay strong and healthy, it must have some commonalities. Language is the primary one that comes to mind. Respect for human life is another. Canada is one of the nations most respectful of its minorities, but that apparently isn’t enough to keep it safe from the mentality espoused by adherents of radical Islam.
“These individuals were allegedly intent on committing acts of terrorism against their own country and their own people,” recently elected Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said. “As we have said on many occasions, Canada is not immune to the threat of terrorism. . . . Today, Canada’s security and intelligence measures worked.”
Um, I don’t know what was in the pipe Stephen Harper has been smoking, but it must be powerful. People who want to blow you up are not thinking in terms of “their country” and “their people.” They have an us against them mentality, fostered by one-sided tolerance and spawned by multiculturalism.
We can eat different food, and have different hobbies. We can afford to play different sports and practice different philosophies. What we cannot afford is to allow closed and intolerant communities to breed violent radicalism inside our biggest cities.