A lot of Canadian bloggers north of the border have discovered why a lot of you Kossacks detest The New Republic: It apparently likes to publish inaccurate articles with numerous errors.
This particular piece online talks about Canada's "terrorism problems" and why the US should be worried about us... and this was started over a successful arrest of a group before they did anything to anyone. When did good police work earn scorn?
Lets take a look at the crux of the article and a point by point rebuttal of it:
First off.. we get this:
Islamist groups have raised money there with impunity. Dangerous men with alleged links to Al Qaeda pass in and out of the country seemingly unchallenged, and some parts of the nation even have considered enacting sharia law. Citizens of this ally seem largely unconcerned about the threat of Islamic radicalism.
Okay, let's break down this opening paragraph bit by bit:
* Under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, 35 terrorist groups are officially banned. Raising money for them is a federal crime.
* In the past five years, dozens of people with suspected ties to terrorist groups including Al Qaeda have been arrested (sometimes wrongly), sometimes with the cooperation of the United States.
* No part of the nation has ever considered "enacting sharia law." For details about what did not happen in the province of Ontario (which would, at any rate, be one part of the nation, not some parts), keep reading.
* If Canadians seem unconcerned, it's perhaps only in contrast to the pants-wetting responses that our friends at TNR may be more used to in their daily lives. At any rate, our relative calm may be because, when there are "homegrown terrorists" in this country, they get arrested before they can actually do anything.
And that's just the opening paragraph. It's all downhill from there. Again, when the article's not just plain wrong, it's wildly misleading. Take this howler, for example, which is meant to spread the usual junk about Canada's porous borders:
Canada takes in roughly twice as many refugees and immigrants, on a per capita basis, as the United States
Sounds distressing, doesn't it, until you remember that Canada's population (that would be the "per capita" part) is only about a tenth that of the United States. That means, assuming the article's figures are correct, that the USA lets in five times as many refugees and immigrants as Canada does every year -- and those are just the legal ones. Who's got the porous borders again?
And then there's this; if this sort of thing isn't plain old race-baiting, I don't know what it is:
Today, working-class neighborhoods in Toronto and other cities are melanges of Lebanese restaurants, Thai noodle houses, and Arab coffee shops.
Oh noooooo!!!! Fear those noodle houses! Eeeek!
And even as immigration has brought many law-abiding citizens to Canada, radical Islam has arrived as well. Canadian intelligence and police identified this threat, and started watching mosques in Ontario and elsewhere.
So, law enforcement was on the job from the start. So what's the problem?
But the Canadian government passed no counterterrorism laws.
Except for, you know, the Anti-Terrorism Act.
Amazingly, the province of Ontario even considered allowing local Muslim groups to start implementing sharia law for some civil disputes.
Really, really misleading. What happened was this: in Ontario, divorcing couples often are encouraged to negotiate their terms in private arbitration, to prevent the court system from getting clogged up. A number of religiously based arbitration groups, including a number of Jewish, Christian, Native, and other tribunals, had been successful parts of this process.
The Ontario government didn't want the sharia system in place, but because the government can't discriminate by religion, banning the sharia tribunals would have meant banning all the other ones also, something the government was very reluctant to do and tried to find a legal way to avoid.
In the end, the Ontario government bit the bullet and banned all religious domestic negotiations including the sharia ones. Some people still think that banning all religious negotiations was unnecessary, but the Ontario government concluded it was the only legal thing to do. But there was never any chance of the government "enacting sharia law."
The TNR piece, for some reason, keeps getting its knickers in a knot over things that didn't happen. Which may be why it's prone to weird counterfactuals like this:
Washington has not gone far enough in helping Ottawa understand that it can rethink its immigration and refugee policies without abandoning its democratic values and concern for privacy rights.
How on Earth could this particular US administration help anyone understand that, when it hasn't done so itself?
Perhaps these arrests will finally wake up our northern neighbor--and the Bush administration. But don't bet on it.
Well, I realize that quiet competence can seem lackadaisical to those who are running around in a state of panic. And, perhaps the lack of candy-coloured terror alerts is insufficiently dramatic for our friends at the TNR. Nevertheless, this article seems awfully alarmist, given that it is based on a successful arrest of would-be terrorists who never got a chance to do anything. The TNR seems determined to turn a success into a symptom of failure. Why, I have no idea.