To his supporters, Stephen Harper is an honest man. To his critics, a hypocrite.
On Jan. 30 this year he stood in the House of Commons and fanned the flames of discord and prejudice: 'A great evil has descended on our world...' he intoned. He was talking about ISIS and how its existence justified his introduction of police-state laws and mentality to Canada. No sane human being would give moral, material or any other kind of support to this Sunni Moslem death cult. There are, however, statistics out there, which may give us a different perspective on Harper’s manufactured paranoia.
For instance, in 2013, 16,000 people were killed in Mexican drug wars, more than ISIS has killed in Iraq in the last three years. Hundreds of the 16,000 were beheaded, gutted or burned and hung in town and village squares. Mr. Harper, however, has never denounced this as 'a great evil.' It would seem that he considers corporate Mexico and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) much more important than the human rights of 43 students, kidnapped in Iguala, executed, burned and dumped into a mass grave. Since 2006, the estimated number of beheadings perpetrated by ISIS is in excess of 100. Yet in 2014 alone, Saudi Arabia recorded 87 beheadings, some of them for the heinous crimes of witchcraft or smoking weed. It should also be remembered that 15 of the 19 fanatics who brought down the Twin Towers were Saudis. And that, in a leaked 2009 cable, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist groups” - now including ISIS. Apparently, none of this is 'a great evil' either. In fact, instead of denouncing the Saudis for their support of ISIS, or for their floggings and beheadings, Harper will export, over the next 14 years, $15 billion worth of armoured cars and weaponry to his good friends the Wahhabi-Sunni Saud tribal dynasty, which rules Arabia with a rod of iron. It is entirely possible, therefore, that in the near future we will indeed witness 'a great evil': that of Canadian soldiers killed by Canadian armaments via Saudi Arabia, and due, almost entirely, to the hypocrisy of the Canadian prime minister.
JC Vallance,
Fernie, B.C.