Thursday Post

Police in Ottawa at first arrested two men suspected of plotting terrorist acts. The number has now grown to six:

The RCMP identified six suspects on Thursday it said had plotted a terrorist attack in Canada. One was also accused of financing the purchase of weapons to be used against Canadian Forces.

All are Canadian citizens, the RCMP said.

The case is the latest indication that Canada has a problem with “homegrown extremists,” a term that refers to Canadians who have become so radicalized by al-Qaeda’s ideology that they want to commit terrorist violence.

There has been some condemnation:

The Muslim Canadian Congress expressed “shock” at the developments, but also commended RCMP for the operation.

“Thank God these men were stopped before they could carry out their alleged plot,” said vice-president Salma Siddiqui.

The organization warned, however, that until Canada’s Muslim leadership unequivocally denounces the doctrine of armed jihad, Wednesday's terrorism arrests will not be the last. Radical figures are becoming “heroes,” Ms. Siddiqui said, and leaders in the Muslim community have a duty to diminish them.

More can be done:

Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said yesterday’s arrests felt like “deja vu,” and blasted mosque leadership for failing to recognize the legitimate threat of homegrown extremism, even after a series of convictions in the Toronto 18 case. The mosque establishment, Mr. Fatah suggested, “keeps on saying that everything is safe, but it isn’t.”

Total ignorance:

But Scarborough imam Aly Hindy — who still believes too many people were rounded up the Toronto 18 case, and most meant no harm to Canadians — derides the “so-called war against terrorism,” suggesting the threat is largely exaggerated.

“We don’t have this feeling of any danger. We feel very safe,” he said.

Total vindication:

In a speech in Toronto on Aug. 9, when he would have already been briefed on the suspected Ottawa group, Minister Toews said he was increasingly concerned about the radicalization taking place in Canada...



But what we are seeing here is not about disagreement and debate. Our concern is with extremist ideologies that lead individuals to espouse or engage in violence. These individuals reject the values on which our country is based, and they must be stopped.”

Strong words. Use some muscle to back it up.



For some people, it's all about them:

News of the arrest of two alleged terrorists in Ottawa has some local Muslims and the police chief concerned about the impact on Muslim residents of the capital.

But others are not concerned, and some said Muslims should denounce terrorism.

Naeem Malik, president of the Ottawa Muslim Association, is concerned about the potential for a backlash.

He's hoping that there won't be a repeat of the days after the terror attacks on New York on Sept. 11, 2001, when Muslims were called names and told to go back to their "country of origin."

Nazira Tareen of the Muslim Women's Association said Muslims have worked hard for many years to build a peaceful community, "and we don't want these people who we do not know to come here and give us a bad name."

The RCMP and Ottawa police are planning a meeting with local Muslim leaders to discuss the potential for a backlash, Ottawa Chief Vern White said.

But Abdul Hakim Moalimishak, director of the Ottawa Islamic Centre, said Canadian Muslims have shown themselves to be patriotic and said, "I truly believe that Canadian society knows the difference between religious communities and individuals. I think they can separate that, so I'm not really that worried."

What total rot!

How is it that a single group can be so preoccupied with threats, real or imagined, that they attempt to supercede the very offending action of- as many will desperately point out- a few individuals? Did they forget that these individuals, radicalised in mosques, community centres and on the Internet, formulated a plan that would have killed or maimed innocent people? Not to mention the complete xenophobia exhibited by paranoid individuals in thinking that Canadians would snap and become violent thugs. I have yet to see that occur. As Mr. Moalimishak said, most Canadians don't think that way. This self-centred, self-serving attitude is grating as it is offensive. If Muslim groups are worried about this unlikely backlash, stop potential terrorists. Also, get acquainted with the country they live in, not just the crap that people are willing to unload on others.

Slavery in Saudi Arabia:

A Saudi couple tortured their Sri Lankan maid after she complained of a too heavy workload by hammering 24 nails into her hands, legs and forehead, officials said on Thursday.

Nearly 2 million Sri Lankans sought employment overseas last year and around 1.4 million, mostly maids, were employed in the Middle East. Many have complained of physical abuse or harassment.

L.T. Ariyawathi, a 49-year old mother of three, returned on Friday after five months in Saudi Arabia.

Her family only realized what had happened to her when she complained of pain and they took her to see the doctor, Foreign Employment Bureau officials said.

"The landlord and the wife of the landlord hammered 24 nails into her when she complained of the heavy workload," Kalyana Priya Ramanayake, media secretary of the Foreign Employment Bureau, told Reuters.

Ariyawathi has been taken to hospital for surgery to remove the nails, which according to the maid were hammered in when they were hot.

X-rays showed one- to two-inch nails in her hands and legs, with one over her eyes, officials said.

The Foreign Employment Bureau is consulting the Attorney-General while the Sri Lankan External Affairs Ministry is to take the matter up with the Saudi government, officials said.

We can re-build him.

Sarah Palin relaxes in a bubbly bath of total rightness:

No, the ex-Alaska governor/ex-Republican vice-presidential nominee wasn’t running for office herself. But the candidates she threw her weight behind all did well, often pulling off upsets....


At the very least, the results mean party bigwigs are going to have to take Palin seriously, rather than dismissing her as a right-wing whacko with big hair. She’s got influence and that’s something they understand.

Remember when people thought she was a total ditz and had no clue what she was doing? I'm sure they do, too, but won't admit it.


On August 26th, 1910, in Macedonia, a future angel of mercy was born:

On Aug. 26, 1910, Agnes Gonxha Bojakhiu was born of Albanian parents in the town of Skopje, Macedonia.

"By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus," is how she would describe herself.

Mother Teresa, as the world came to know her, is being honoured by millions today on the centenary of her birth. Not just by the Catholic Church, which already has declared her to be in heaven, and honoured with the title "blessed." The Peace Bridge between Buffalo, N.Y. and Fort Erie, Ont., will be illuminated in blue and white, the colours of the order of religious sisters she founded, the Missionaries of Charity. More than 4,000 strong upon Mother Teresa's death 13 years ago, they already had become the largest missionary order of women in the Church -- and this at a time when religious orders were collapsing the world over....

In 1952, Mother Teresa found a woman dying in the streets, half-eaten by rats and ants, with no one to care for her. She picked her up and took her to the hospital, but nothing could be done. Realizing that there were many others dying alone in the streets, Mother Teresa opened within days Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart), a home for the dying. In the first 20 years alone, over 20,000 people were brought there, half of whom died knowing the love of the Missionaries of Charity. Nirmal Hriday is where one dying man, lying in the arms of Mother Teresa after being plucked from the gutters and bathed and clothed and fed, told her, "I have lived like an animal, but now I am dying like an angel."

The love she must have had to do all that.

How would one feel about an art exhibit featuring Nazi propaganda posters without an explanation as to their purpose or their consequence? This is just as unbelievable:

If the painting Kim Jong-il, The Supreme Commander Of The Korean People's Army, Deeply Concerned Over The Soldiers' Diet were all one had to go on, one would assume that Kim Jong-il is indeed deeply concerned about his soldiers' diets.

Inspecting a humongous piece of fish, the leader of North Korea smiles as two cheerful chefs and a military aide look on with admiration. In reality, of course, Kim Jong-il does not seem to be all that concerned about the nourishment of his military--with 1.2 million men under arms, the fourth largest standing army in the world. Numerous visitors to the Demilitarized Zone along the Korean peninsula's 38th parallel have noticed that the North's soldiers are shorter, skinnier and weaker of frame than their southern counterparts.

The idea of art serving an end beyond the stimulation of the visual senses informs the exhibit Flowers for Kim Il Sung: Art and Architecture from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, currently on display at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK) in Vienna. The giant, fluorescent-coloured fish picture is but one of 100 paintings and posters in the first exhibition of art from the hermit kingdom to be opened to the outside world. It's all possible thanks to the co-operation of the National Gallery in Pyongyang and the Paektusan Academy of Architecture. Both institutions, like everything in North Korea, are state-run.

Viennese museum officials have been at pains to deny that there is any political motive behind the exhibit. Their mission is merely to provide a window into a society about which Westerners know very little. " Flowers for Kim Il Sung should in no way be viewed as a political statement, but rather purely as a unique opportunity to examine the idealizing art of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which is hardly known at all," says Peter Noever, director of the MAK, who was inspired to mount the show on a visit to Pyongyang seven years ago. "With this showing at the MAK, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has broken through its isolation -- at least in terms of artistic production."

But a visit to the exhibit and a survey of the accompanying press materials and programs designed around it paints a different picture. Flowers for Kim Il Sung contains no works from before the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948. It is not, as its promoters contend, a sampling of North Korean art, but a display of propaganda in service to the late Kim Il Sung and his son. By presenting it uncritically, the Vienna museum is subtly legitimizing the world's cruelest regime.

Take the short essay by Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian economy and society at the University of Vienna, published in a pamphlet for an upcoming symposium entitled Exploring North Korean Arts. Frank decries the "picture produced by our media" of North Korea, which he claims "is limited to news about famine, human rights violations and a highly militarized state that defies attempts by the USA and its allies to prevent it from possessing nuclear weapons." (Apparently, nearly two decades' worth of condemnations of the North's blatantly illegal nuclear weapons program by the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency -- both of which have headquarters just a few miles from the MAK -- are nothing more than the result of American machinations.) Frank claims that Juche -- the Marxist-cum-personality cult ideology founded by Kim Il Sung, which stands alongside Muammar Qaddafi's Green Book and Mao Zedong's Little Red Book as a classic in the dictator-worship genre -- "puts the human being at the centre and argues that with the right determination, anything can be achieved."

Moral relativism permeates Frank's analysis, which whitewashes the regime's internal repression and foreign aggression. "We know that reality is never the purest white or the darkest black," he writes, something that the starving masses of the North Korean countryside might dispute were they given the opportunity. Of the aftermath of the Korean War -- a conflict precipitated by a Sovietbacked invasion across the 38th parallel by the Communist forces of Kim Il Sung, resulting in over 2 million civilian deaths and the world's most heavily militarized border-- Frank writes blandly, as if there had been no responsible agent: "During the Cold War that ensued, [the Soviet Union and the United States] supported political forces that shared their respective ideals and interests."

As to the causes of the present political stalemate, he is hesitant to say anything remotely critical of the leaders who have ruled North Korea in Stalinist fashion for six decades. "Despite hard work by its people, recovery has been slow. Natural disasters, political and management decisions, and a hostile external environment have all served to aggravate the situation."

If Flowers for Kim Il Sung depicted North Korea as it actually is -- with its forced labour camps, crushing political conformity, politicized starvation campaigns, international brigandage and hostage-taking, illicit nuclear proliferation to fellow rogue states, and so on--it would not be so objectionable. The MAK is counting on visitors to possess independent knowledge of this reality and to realize that the exhibit wouldn't exist at all unless the sponsors had been willing to adopt a "see no evil" attitude toward the mercurial North Korean government. "I think we're all aware of the situation in this country as far as we know," Bettina Busse, the curator of the exhibit, told me.

Read the whole thing.


There have been many arguments about art and morality, particularly art used as propaganda, and the moral duties of an artist to portray the truth. Art is art. It either edifies or repulses. The moral duty of each person should transcend his profession. Is an artist any less culpable if he willingly paints propaganda for a tyrant? Granted, he is not the tyrant himself but he is aiding a monster. Why MAK would choose to exhibit these paintings with their gaudy colours and duplicitous tone without context points to a moral rather than aesthetic failing (though the paintings are dreadful). No one is asking for a vociferous condemnation of the Kim dynasty, only that the curators remind their patrons that the paintings are propaganda from a Stalinist state and let the patrons glean from them what they will.

And now, a kitten and monkey. Enjoy the cute companionship.