"Ignoring the biggest elephant in the room"

One that "sported the traditional Muslim male beard". Christie Blatchford of the Globe exposes the pandering of the authorities (full text not online).

I drove back from yesterday's news conference at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto in the northeastern part of the city, but honestly, I could have just as easily floated home in the sea of horse manure [elephant dung, surely - MC] emanating from the building.

So frequent were the bald reassurances that faith and religion had nothing -- nothing, you understand -- to do with the alleged homegrown terrorist plot recently busted open by Canadian police and security forces, that for a few minutes afterward, I wondered if perhaps it was a vile lie of the mainstream press or a fiction of my own demented brain that the 17 accused young men are all, well, Muslims.

But no. I have checked. They are all Muslims...

Barely two days after the nighttime raids...the great Canadian self-delusion machine was up and running at full throttle...

Such is the state of ignoring the biggest, fattest elephant in the room in this country that at one point Chief Blair actually bragged -- this in answer to a question from the floor -- "I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim or Muslim community" at the big post-arrest news conference on Saturday.

Indeed, law-enforcement types there took enormous pains to say just the opposite: The arrested men are from a diverse variety of backgrounds ("They're students, they're employed, they're unemployed" one official said, which is akin to running the gamut from A to oh, C); they come from all parts of Canadian society; blah, blah, blah...

But what came clear at that meeting yesterday [at the Islamic Foundation], which was an odd mix of community venting and news conference, is that many of those people who went to the microphone to ask questions, and some of those who answered them from the podium, are far more concerned about a possible anti-Muslim backlash to the arrests than they are about the allegations that a whole whack of their young people were bent on blowing something up in the city; that they are generally worked up about Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and the Americans in Iraq, and that even as they talk about Islam being a religion of peace, they do not sound or appear particularly peaceable...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 5, 2006 10:31 AM