Canada is under attack

[DeadPresident]

What happened on Monday?

 

[Pink Ranger]

What happened on Monday?

A Muslim convert (a domestically-born, white French Canadian male) who had previously tried to leave Canada to join ISIS, staked out a Government of Canada office in his car. He spotted a couple of uniformed soldiers (unarmed, performing office duties for the federal office located there) and ran them down. One is dead, the other lives. The killer was shot and killed by police during a confrontation.

The fact that Wednesday's shooting has the same kind of target, and the general profile of the killer is almost the same, gives this whole situation a sobering context indeed.

 

[The Shape]

Wednesday's shooting could have been so much worse than it was.

 

[Feenix]

[YT]DKZbdAQHLTc[/YT]

Everyone needs to watch this video. The Sergeant-At-Arms, Kevin Vickers, who gunned down the gunman was given a standing ovation in Parliament this morning.

I cried. The man is a ****ing hero.

 

[JJJ's Ulcer]

A man was shot by a nut. It's unfortunate but it happens. A lot.

I think the country will survive.

This thread title is an overreaction.

Sorry, Crack. I usually agree with you, but I think you're downplaying this a bit much, both in the importance related to the current cultural context of ISIS trying to incite domestic terrorist attacks, and the sensitive nature of where the attack occurred. I agree the title is an overreaction (but I can understand regwec's emotional response), but this is much more serious than just a random nut shooting someone. This isn't Canada's 9/11, but I would put it in the same column as the 1998 US Capitol shooting (perhaps moreso considering it's yet another sign that domestic lone wolves will respond to ISIS incitement) or even the Boston bombing last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_shooting_incident_(1998)

 

[Star]

[YT]DKZbdAQHLTc[/YT]

Everyone needs to watch this video. The Sergeant-At-Arms, Kevin Vickers, who gunned down the gunman was given a standing ovation in Parliament this morning.

I cried. The man is a ****ing hero.

this totally made me cry at work this morning too.

 

[Howlett]

According to ISIL, EVERYONE is under attack.

 

[regwec]

ISIL ought to wind their necks in, unless they want a thick ear.

 

[Howlett]

ISIL ought to wind their necks in, unless they want a thick ear.

Or any ears at all.

 

[Thundercrack85]

Veering off topic somewhat: what is the point in being a Roman Catholic if you don't take the whole papacy thing very seriously? Doesn't that by definition make you a protestant, albeit of the high church variety? Apologies to any Catholics who find the question insensitive.

Well, most Catholics probably don't even know who the current pope is. Well, maybe they do, Francis has been much more outgoing than Benedict.

Catholic really has become more of a cultural association than religious.

 

[Schlosser85]

I think a lot of Catholics are prouder to call Francis their Pope than they were with Benedict.

My roommate has a great big framed picture of Francis on the wall right next to Mary and Jesus.

 

[Star]

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

If any country DOESN'T deserve a terrorist attack, it's Canada.

Have you read this recent article by Glenn Greenwald? It was written about the attack on soldiers in Montreal but coincidentally posted on the same day as the attack on Parliament:

Canada, at war for 13 years, shocked that a 'terrorist' killed its soldiers

I'm a little wary about how the word "terrorist" is being thrown around so readily right now when we still basically know nothing about the shooter's motivations. This is partly because terrorism has become one of the most abused and arguably meaningless words in the political lexicon, as Greenwald has often observed:

The most common functional definition of “terrorism” in Western discourse is quite clear. At this point, it means little more than: “violence directed at Westerners by Muslims” (when not used to mean “violence by Muslims,” it usually just means: violence the state dislikes). The term “terrorism” has become nothing more than a rhetorical weapon for legitimizing all violence by Western countries, and delegitimizing all violence against them, even when the violence called “terrorism” is clearly intended as retaliation for Western violence.

Sounds like the shooter had a mental disorder as well as drug problems. I'm willing to bet that if he weren't a recent Muslim convert, we wouldn't be hearing the term "terrorism" tossed around quite so liberally (and of course cynically exploited to justify the Harper government's foreign policy). Mass shootings by Muslims are almost always classified as "terrorism" and offered as more proof of the inevitable clash of civilizations -- whereas mass shootings by non-Muslim white guys are typically attributed to the fact that the killer was "crazy", "mentally ill", a "lone nut", etc.

(Any of you guys remember Joe Stack? Flying a plane into a building to make a political statement sounds an awful lot like terrorism to me, but the mass media was incredibly reluctant to utter the T-word to describe this white libertarian, while we heard it constantly in the case of Nidal Malik Hassan.)

Anyway, it's pretty clear that Harper is ready to pull a George W. Bush and use this as his big rally-around-the-flag moment, the better to portray himself as a strong, decisive leader protecting Canada from the terrorists. Unsurprisingly, the government has already seized on the attack to push through pre-existing "anti-terror" legislation that further enhances the power of the military-intelligence apparatus.

Putting aside the political calculation and nationalistic boilerplate, a genuine tragedy took place in Ottawa this week. R.I.P. Nathan Cirillo.

 

[regwec]

I did read Greenwald's article, and found it to be pathetic.

 

[JJJ's Ulcer]

Glenn Greenwald is lately becoming an apologist for Islamic radicals.

 

[regwec]

He is just playing that old game of casual disloyalty and false equivalences, favoured by left wing intellectuals since the Cold War.

 

[SuperFerret]

Eh, he does have a point with how much the word "terrorism" has been overused.

 

[DeadPresident]

A Muslim convert (a domestically-born, white French Canadian male) who had previously tried to leave Canada to join ISIS, staked out a Government of Canada office in his car. He spotted a couple of uniformed soldiers (unarmed, performing office duties for the federal office located there) and ran them down. One is dead, the other lives. The killer was shot and killed by police during a confrontation.

The fact that Wednesday's shooting has the same kind of target, and the general profile of the killer is almost the same, gives this whole situation a sobering context indeed.

Ah ok, thanks. Sobering is one way to put it...I've got family in Hamilton, Ontario. I really hope Canada's civil society isn't going to become the new "trendy" target for attacks stemming from hate for the West.

On the topic of why "terrorist" might be a term that gets overextended, I think it would be useful to distinguish between internal and external sources of terrorist activity. Terrorism essentially has a strong ideological component that separates something like the Aurora shooting from these two incidents. Some "lone nut" doesn't necessarily have an ideological opposition to the people he's attacking, he's violently assaulting whoever he can get to and only who he can get to.

With the two incidents in Canada the attackers chose targets (as in buildings) and people because A) One would assume they have some sort of grievance they feel people in those locations contribute to or are complicit in, and B) Their attack is designed to have an effect (emotional/psychological) on people beyond just those who are in the immediate proximity of the attack. Choosing to attack a parliamentary building or some sort of government institution isn't about just physically harming the guards, its function is to create fear in the nation and its inhabitants who are represented by that government. And considering the globalized age we live in terrorist activities originating outside one's borders are more threatening because there tends to be an ideological component designed to establish an "Us vs Them" dynamic.

So while I'd say the case of Joe Stack and the Boston Marathon bombings are both acts of terrorism, the label is more likely to be applied to the case where there is (at least in consensus) a perceived attack on a nation rather than arbitrary targets that happen to be present at the location. To conclude this diatribe, if indeed both of these shooters were recent converts to Islam it is logical to assume in the current climate of Islamic attacks being not only commonplace but implicitly encouraged by groups like ISIS that people would have a knee-jerk reaction of classifying them unequivocally as terrorists. It's not really an unfair or hasty statement to make, the purpose of these attacks was to communicate to all of Canada that there are people in direct opposition to the fabric of their national community. The topic title is relatively apt.

 

[regwec]

I think everyone agrees that terrorism is the use violence or the fear of violence to advance an ideological agenda. That can be internal or external.

 

[DeadPresident]

Sure, but in terms of "terrorism" being overused I think there's a continuum of terrorism. Are internal acts of terrorism necessarily designed to cause fear in an entire nation? Using radical Islamist attacks as a comparison, those are designed to create national fear. When the terrorist is an internal citizen I think it's less likely that they're attempting to frame all members of that nation as the "out group" since they belong to it, hence why people are less inclined to use the label "terrorist". I'm not arguing that some people like using the term to further their own agendas, but it shouldn't be considered rocket science that external attacks tend to influence a larger number of people than internal ones. Perhaps it's human nature, but people never find members of their own in-group as threatening as members of an out-group.

 

[regwec]

I know what you mean, but it defends how you assess the "in-group". Bolsheviks/anarchists were usually domestic agitators, but they were feared and reviled in just the same way as Islamist terrorists now.

 

[DeadPresident]

Fair point, perhaps this is a specific contextual scenario that that explanation applies to rather than being universally applicable to all cases, past and present. I guess in this case the geographical distance between the West and Middle East is directly proportionate to the metaphoric distance between the beliefs and ideologies of their aggregate populaces, which is why it's so easy to classify anyone identifying as either Muslim or Middle Eastern as a "terrorist", irrespective of whether or not they're domestic citizens such as the case of the one Canadian guy.

 

[regwec]

Yes. I think there is also a tendency among both Islam's outsiders and Islamist sympathisers to see Islam as monolothic. If you are a nihilist who wants to upset the social or political order, and you affiliate with Islam, then it seems that you are likely to bomb or shoot people in the name of Islam, since that is a prefabricated counter-culture in the West. Similarly, the [potential] victims who are on the receiving end are likely to take the terrorists' statements of adherence to global Islamism at face value, and to perceive it all as one great evil.

Personally, I have no objection to the term "terrorist" being used in the way that it is, except that I think it might have the perverse effect of dignifying some petty revolutionaries in their own circles.

 

[PalmerTheThing]

I know a lot of friends who were close friends with Nathan (the victim of the shooting on Wednesday) as I used to live in Hamilton (the city he grew up in).

Very sad to hear!

 

[Axl Van Sixx]

Great discussion on the precise meaning of the word "terrorism" and whether it applies here. Honestly, I feel like I would have to have some idea of the shooter's own motivations before I feel ready to label him a terrorist, because as of right now we haven't really heard anything.

What bothers me about the whole mainstream discourse on terrorism is that it always seems to imply that the problem is simply "radical Islam" (or Islam as a whole from the bigot's perspective); the foreign policy of our countries never even comes up for discussion. Whether in Canada or the United States, the implication is that we were simply being peaceful and minding our own business when Islamic terrorists suddenly attacked us completely out of the blue for no reason, other than they "hate our freedoms" or some similar childish, nonsensical explanation. Again, as Greenwald notes, to point out causation is not the same as justification, which is typically how critics such as himself are smeared.

On another note, I would argue that Bolsheviks and anarchists had more support in Western countries during the first half of the 20th century than Islamic terrorists could ever dream of. Personally I find that comparison insulting, but it's undeniable that each of these groups at different times represented an official boogeyman demonized and targeted by the state.

Ironically, one of the reasons for the strength of Islamic terrorism today is that imperialist countries historically funded jihadists as a means of destroying the vibrant secular and socialist political movements that used to dominate the Arab world (aside from the U.S. funding groups like the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, Israel originally fostered Hamas as an alternative to the PLO, which it saw as its main threat at the time). Mission accomplished, I guess? And this isn't even ancient history; ISIS itself received funding and weapons from the U.S. and Arab dictatorships to fight the Assad government until very recently, and their atrocities didn't faze any government officials here until they turned against the American puppet state in Baghdad.

All this goes down the memory hole in popular discourse, naturally. But history illustrates that constant meddling in the Middle East has a tendency to simply create more terrorists. Strangely enough, people seem to react negatively when you bomb their countries. But regardless of the motivations of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, Harper has labelled the attack an act of terrorism in order to justify and double down on his militaristic policies -- which I'm sure will only create more love for Canada among those at the receiving end of our CF-18s.