Why we will never learn the truth, cont.

The very high likelihood that the Canadian police will cover up the Greyhound murderer’s Islamic connections, assuming such connections exist, can be demonstrated by means of a thought experiment.

Suppose that a man, riding on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba, Canada, suddenly pulled out a Rambo-sized hunting knife, turned on the passenger sitting next to him, who was a complete stranger, and calmly and robotically stabbed him in the neck and chest fifty times, gutted and beheaded the lifeless body, and triumphantly held up the severed head to the sight of the terrified and puking passengers. Suppose the killer did not come from a Muslim country and did not have a Muslim name, so that there was no immediate way of knowing whether he was a Muslim. Suppose further that the police, after arresting the man, found out that he was indeed a Muslim, and that he had carried out the murder in order to wage jihad on non-Muslims. Suppose further that apart from the Canadian authorities, the only people who knew that the man was Muslim were his fellow Muslims, who obviously would have a strong motive not to go public with this fact.

Do you think that the government would tell the public that the man was a Muslim? I think they would not. As I’ve written here and here. the authorities would rightly fear that the news would be so shocking, its implications so frightening,—Canadians might be slaughtered and beheaded, anywhere, any time—that the Canadian people would refuse to accept living on such terms and would start to demand the de-Islamization of their country, thus threatening to turn it into the very thing its elite most loathe, a “racist” country. Therefore, in order to preserve Canada’s ethos of peace and tolerance, the government would determine in their secret councils that it was absolutely imperative that the truth about the killer be concealed.

And that is why I say, that if Vincent whatshisname Li really is a Muslim, we will never find it out.

- end of initial entry -

Adela G. writes:

You write: Do you think that the government would tell the public that the man was a Muslim?

No. But since the crime Li is alleged to have committed is one Westerners have learned to associate with Muslims, I think if he were not a Muslim, the Canadian government would make a point of saying so, repeatedly. I think it would emphasize the absence of any connection between any Muslim and this crime, if at all possible, in order to forestall any negative reaction from non-Muslims.

So government silence on that issue could reasonably be taken as evidence of the likelihood, if not certainty, that Li is a Muslim.

Doesn’t Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations come into play here? If it comes out that Li is, in fact, a Muslim, then won’t the government divert emphasis from the fact that a Muslim has beheaded a Canadian—in Canada!—to the notion that Canadians must do everything they can to prevent an outbreak of Islamophobia? Won’t the government warn of a [non-existent] backlash by non-Muslim Canadians against innocent Muslims for this horrific crime committed by an insane person who just happens to be Muslim?

I suspect that if Li turns out to be Muslim, the Canadian government will merely shift the blame to non-Muslim Canadians and ultimately the backlash that never materializes will somehow be portrayed as more horrific than the beheading that actually occurred.

LA replies:

Adela is very perceptive to realize that I’ve been forgetting or at least suspending my own principle. I’ve been assuming that if the killer was Muslim, it would finally break liberalism—at least as far as tolerance and inclusion of Muslims was concerned. But of course that assumption violates the First Law, which says that the more threatening and even horrifying any minority or non-Western group becomes, the more whites cover up for that group and blame their own racism for the fact that anything negative about that group even became visible! And that could happen here.

But… but… Everything has a breaking point—even liberalism. And my feeling has been that the reality that there are people among them who want to behead them would finally break the liberal deal for the Canadians. I could be wrong. Look how the Israelis in the mid ’90s kept living their daily lives, getting on buses—BUSES WHERE THEY WERE LIKELY TO BE BLOWN UP. They passively put themselves in positions where any Muslim with a bomb belt could turn their bodies into a cloud of flying body parts. Talk about liberal nihilism! Instead of saying, we can’t live like this, the Muslims have got to go,—which any normal, non-liberal people would have said—they continued getting on buses. Now for myself I would never get on a bus where I thought there was any possibility of there being a bomber. It would be out of the question. I would just refuse. But the Israelis didn’t refuse. They kept getting on buses and betting turned into clouds of flying body parts.

Now, the Canadians are at least as liberal and Eloi-like as the Israelis, right? So my supposition—that Islamic head-choppers on Greyhound buses would be the deal killer—could be wrong. I may simply be projecting my sense of reality and love of life onto the Canadians. And if I am, then Adela will be right and it won’t be the first time.

LA continues:

This line by Adela really gets it well:

“[T]he backlash that never materializes will somehow be portrayed as more horrific than the beheading that actually occurred.”

John Hagan writes:

You really have hit this one out of the park. You have strung together the social psychology of the PC movement, and its grotesque appearance in what looks more and more like a concerted effort by Canadian officials to bury this story.

Winston Smith writes:

Adela G. writes:

“If it comes out that Li is, in fact, a Muslim, then won’t the government divert emphasis from the fact that a Muslim has beheaded a Canadian—in Canada!—to the notion that Canadians must do everything they can to prevent an outbreak of Islamophobia? Won’t the government warn of a [non-existent] backlash by non-Muslim Canadians against innocent Muslims for this horrific crime committed by an insane person who just happens to be Muslim?”

This prediction is 100% right. I know this with such certainty because it has happened before. In 2006, 17 Muslims were arrested for planning to blow up several buildings, storm Parliament Hill and behead the Prime Minister. The police said the group represented a broad strata of Canadian society and that Islam had nothing to do with the plot. [LA replies: yes, I remember the authorities emphasizing the “diversity” of the suspects: some had black hair, some had brunette hair, some were 5’10”, others were 5’9”, it was a remarkably diverse group!] I remember the Toronto police chief speaking in a business like manner when talking about the terrorist plot. However, when he talked about some broken windows at a mosque he was angry and threatened to prosecute the offenders to the fullest extent of the law.

I found the whole thing very upsetting because, although I was fully aware that Canada has been severely liberalized, I naively thought traditionally conservative organizations such as the police had not succumbed. It was a depressing wake up call.

Here is a good article written after a news conference by the police and Muslim leaders held at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto:

[LA notes: Normally I would link an article like this rather than reproduce the whole thing, but strangely it’s not online anywhere, and it’s a good piece, and very revealing of official Canada’s extravagantly PC mindset, and it was also attacked by Canadian Islamic Congress at the time, so I’ll copy it at the bottom of this page.]

Mike Berman writes:

If the DC sniper, John Allen Muhammad, did not produce the backlash that you and I would have expected, why should this case be different?

LA replies:

John Muhammad wasn’t a regular type Muslim. But still the lack of any enduring reaction or “lesson learned” was remarkable. It made no lasting impression. Almost as soon as Muhammad and his sidekick were arrested and it turned out they weren’t white, they disappeared from the American consciousness.

Terry Morris writes:

I personally think it’s a lot more likely that we will learn the truth about Li’s religious history than it is that the Canadian government will be able to successfully hide that information from public knowledge, particularly as time goes on. I also think that the Canadian public is likely to dismiss Li’s act as having any direct connection to the Muslim religion; that they will look upon it as simply coincidental that Li is a professing Muslim, and that Li’s act, the product of a “disturbed”, perhaps even “psychotic”, mind has nothing in reality to do with his faith; that Mr. Li is simply an extreme exception to the rule and that it’s completely unfair to Muslims and to their religion, “religion of peace” that it is, to make such an association.

I really doubt that the Canadian government believes that the Canadian People, reeling from the shock of what just happened in their country, will, based on that single occurrence, make demands on their government to place tighter restrictions on Muslim immigration to Canada. Indeed, I’d lay down good money that the government of Canada knows good and well that Canadians are an excessively “tolerant” and “fair” people, which is to say that the Canadian government knows that its society is thoroughly liberalized.

LA replies:

But, if it’s so sure that the government and media can once again portray this as an unrepresentative incident having nothing to do with Islam, what do the authorities have to fear from releasing the information about Li? It goes back to what I said in an earlier thread: They do want to lessen the Islamo-critical impact. And the longer they wait, the more the impact is lessened. And they’re able to do that in this case because he doesn’t have a Muslim name, unlike the 17 arrested in the terror plot in 2006.

* * *

Here is Christie Blatchford’s article that “Winston Smith” sent:

Ignoring the biggest elephant in the room
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
The Globe and Mail, Monday, June 5, 2006, Page A1

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 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 that saw 15 of the accused arrested (the remaining two, in Kingston, conveniently were already in the joint on gun charges), the great Canadian self delusion machine was up and running at full throttle.

Why, it’s not those young men—with their three tonnes of ammonium nitrate and all the little doohickeys of the bomb-making trade—who posed the treat. No sir: They, thank you so much, are innocent until proved otherwise and probably innocent and, if convicted, it’s because of the justice system.

It’s those bastard vandals (probably crazed right-wing conservatives, or maybe the Jews) who yesterday morning broke windows at a west-end mosque who stand before us as the greatest danger to Canadian society.

As Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, who came to the building to offer his assurances that Muslims and Muslim institutions will be protected, said at one point: “hatred in any form and certainly in its expression in violence and damage to property will not be tolerated.”

Thank God: Windows everywhere in Canada’s largest city are safe, especially windows in Mosques. The war on windows will be won, whatever the cost.

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.

Even before I knew for sure that they’re all Muslims, I suspected as much from what I saw on the tube, perhaps because I am a trained observer, or you know, because I have eyes.

The accused men are mostly young and mostly bearded in the Taliban fashion. They have first names like Mohamed, middle names like Mohamed and last names like Mohamed. Some of their female relatives at the Brampton courthouse who were there in their support wore black head-to-toe burkas (now there’s a sight to gladden the Canadian female heart: homegrown burka-wearers darting about just as they do in Afghanistan), which is not a getup I have ever seen on anyone but Muslim women.

And from far outside the courthouse, if the Muslim question wasn’t settled, there was the likes of Scarborough Imam Aly Hindy telling the Toronto Star that: “Because they are young people and they are Muslims, they are saying it is terrorism.”

Now look, of course it is a good thing that Chief Blair, who is a wonderful guy, made the trek out to Scarborough yesterday.

It’s even good that he told local Muslims that their place of worship will gen extra patrols and that if anyone wearing traditional beards or the hijab is hassled, the police will investigate and treat it seriously.

The chief is right that now, as in the aftermath of 911 (talk about property damage), that all of us have to be particularly tolerant of one another.

And he is also right that there is a distinction, though in my view it may be a distinction without a difference, between terrorism motivated purely by religious zelotry, and terrorism, as was the alleged case with these 17 mostly young men, motivated by political ideology—even if the ideology seems to have been nothing more than the ideology of rage fulled by overseas conflicts.

And it should go without saying—but it never, ever can in this country, and must must be shrieked at every turn—that this whole business is as at least as distressing to the vast majority of good, peaceable Canadian Muslims as it is to everyone else.

But what came clear at that meeting yesterday, 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.

Only one question from the floor, this from a young man, really dared t depart from the conversation of deploring the supposed coming anti-Muslim backlash and the idea of Muslim as victim.

He asked what the imams were doing to ensure that the sort of violent views that allegedly motivated the homegrown terrorists were not allowed to “become entrenched in our community.”

Sheikh Husain Patel answered him. “It is important we educate our young brothers,” he said.

He mentioned a series of conflicts overseas, including Iraq and Palestine, then said: “You cannot justify a legal goal by using legal means. The politics of overseas should not be addressed in a violent manner in Canada.”

That did not ring in my ears as a renunciation of violence per se, but as a renunciation of violence in this country.

I wondered if the answer had satisfied the young man who asked the question, but I lost him in the crowd afterword.

The war on windows, though—that goes well.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 02, 2008 11:57 PM | Send