Follow that Hybrid Car! How the LTTE Came to Canada, Jabarah, Terror's Singapore Front, Israel-Wold's Myopia

Follow that Hybrid Car! -- or the "billions of dollars in budget measures" -- and note "regulatory package" and "Kyoto targets" -- You will pay.

There were no new announcements but the ministers, who arrived in a fleet of hybrid cars, highlighted billions of dollars in budget measures aimed at making sustainability a core strategy of Ottawa's economic policy.

Ottawa serious about tying economy to environmental sustainability: ministers Feb. 28, 05, Steve Mertl, CP

BURNABY, B.C. (CP) - Kyoto was hardly mentioned but a squad of senior federal cabinet ministers delivered a message here Monday that Ottawa will no longer entertain tradeoffs between the environment and the economy.

"The old mentality that is always opposing the environment and the economy is over," said Environment Minister Stephane Dion. "More than ever now Canada will be involved in the fight to be a leader, a champion of the sustainable economy." [. . . . ]

Search: Dion, Goodale, Industry Minister David Emerson, Western Diversification Minister Stephen Owen, Xantrex Technology Inc., Vancouver, environmentally friendly, leading-edge firms, fuel-cell pioneer Ballard Power Systems, develops power-conversion technology, Jim Fulton, Suzuki Foundation, regulatory package, Kyoto targets

To all of the innocents who thought budgets were simply about apportioning taxpayer dollars where a particular government thinks it will deliver the best services for Canadians, read the whole thing, as well as my posts on the budget from Feb. 28, 05.

I am tempted to suggest this was a self-serving budget for some people -- but that wouldn't be "nice", would it -- and Canadians are supposed to be "nice". Judge for yourself by reading my posts and the material to which they lead.

Then consider where the budget and your common sense point.

At issue is a group that has killed thousands over the years, and done much of that killing with money from Canada. It is a disgrace that our government has not had the courage to list the Tigers as a terrorist group under our anti-terror laws.

John Thompson: How the Tigers came to Canada -- the LTTE February 28, 2005, National Post

John Thompson is president of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based research group focused on organized violence and political instability.

[. . . . ] On the edges of large nature preserves in India, farmers and fishermen often protect themselves from wild tigers by wearing a false face mask on the rear of their heads. Tigers like to attack from behind, and this two-faced look evidently confuses them.

When it comes to thwarting an equally deadly sort of tiger, Ottawa has its own two-faced approach. We are full and active partners with other nations in dealing with al-Qaeda and its jihadist ilk, yet have a sunnier face when it comes to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a violent insurgent group that is fighting to create an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. While other Western nations have properly designated the LTTE a terrorist group, we have not.

Despite the shaky February, 2002, ceasefire between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government, the Tigers remain a group to fear. It is the only terrorist group to kill two national leaders (Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lanka's President Premadasa). The group also pioneered the use of suicide bombings, perpetrating more such attacks during the 1990s than all other terrorist groups combined.

To support its soldiers and terrorists, the LTTE has built up a global criminal structure combining heroin trafficking, passport forging and people smuggling -- all facilitated by a sophisticated network of numbered companies. The acme of the group's skills is reflected in the 1997 hijacking of a shipment of 32,400 Tanzanian-produced mortar bombs destined for the Sri Lankan Army. The vessel chartered to carry the shipment had disguised its LTTE ownership. In the end, the Sri Lankan Army got its mortar bombs one Tiger-fired salvo at a time.

But what really makes the LTTE unique is its use of overseas communities of Sri Lankan Tamils to finance its operations. Regrettably, Canada's Tamil population has been critical to this Tiger strategy. [. . . . ]

Read the details.

This is a lengthy exploration from the MacKenzie Institute on a topic our government apparently prefers not to address -- hence the great hoohah over same sex 'marriage' and the huffing and puffing and waffling. My assessment is that if the PM and Co can just

* keep Canadians from learning some of what is written in various reports on the state of Canada's security,

* keep hiding of the details of what the government has allowed and/or encouraged to happen--using a compliant mainstream media,

* keep Canadians from agitating about what must be done,

then . . . what? Why, Canadians would vote for more of the same. Do explore further here.

Other people's wars: A Review of Overseas Terrorism in Canada




Canadian waits in U.S. jail on bomb-plot charges -- U.S. officials won't discuss Jabarah case nor will his lawyer Feb. 28, 05, Stewart Bell, National Post

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons database lists him as inmate 06909-091, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a 23-year-old detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.

Nearly three years after his arrest, this is the only official U.S. acknowledgement of the fate of Jabarah, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian accused of plotting to blow up Western embassies in Southeast Asia.

At parliamentary hearings this week. . . .

Jim Judd, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the subcommittee on national security about several Canadians he said were "involved in the planning and execution of terrorist operations in other countries." [. . . . ]

I expect the mainstream media's knee jerk reaction will encompass "abandoned a Canadian citizen", "CSIS, overreaction and distrust" in the same sentence -- or some variation thereof. Don't forget to include "good boys" and regularly "attend mosque".

Don't you just love the way hyphenated Canadian has come to suggest "check it out" -- because our government has been too busy hosing money to . . . . . . to do its duty?

Search: Abdul Rahman Jabarah, Mohammed Jabarah, Mansour Jabarah said from his home in Kuwait City, aka Abu Hafs, trained at camps run by al-Qaeda, Oman, Yemen, Algeria




Dire Straits -- The war on terror's Singapore front

"The Straits of Malacca are a chokepoint. The U.S. has log[istics] support on Singapore"

Dire Straits -- The war on terror's Singapore front. Austin Bay, 03/03/2003, Volume 008, Issue 24, Singapore

[. . . . ] Just 60 miles above the Equator--astride the main sea lane between the Indian and Pacific Oceans--Singapore's location is still its raison d'etre. Prime property for 19th-century commerce remains key economic and geostrategic real estate in the 21st. [. . . . ]

Just 60 miles above the Equator--astride the main sea lane between the Indian and Pacific Oceans--Singapore's location is still its raison d'etre. Prime property for 19th-century commerce remains key economic and geostrategic real estate in the 21st. In the 19th century tin and tea and British troops were high-priority shipments. Today supertankers nose through the Strait of Malacca, connecting Middle Eastern oil fields to Asia's economic tigers. Merchant freighters move in both directions, as do warships.

All of which makes the ferry [Changi Point to Pulau Ubin] ride more than a tourist jaunt. [. . . . ] East of Pulau Ubin, one shipping channel . . . . to Singapore's Changi Naval Base, where U.S. Navy aircraft carriers berth occasionally and capital ships stop as they shuttle to and from patrol stations.

Know the terrain, the technology, and the terrorists, and you don't need a Hollywood imagination to peg the channel as a perfect site for an ambush. [. . . . ]

AN AMERICAN OFFICER familiar with U.S. Navy security concerns in southeast Asia first tipped me to the aircraft carrier scenario. [. . . . ]

continues here




Israel's Morality and the World's Myopia

Unfortunately, Israel is often a barometer of what the Western world will next face.

Canadians would be wise to read this.

Israel's Morality and the World's Myopia Daniel Gordis

Dr. Daniel Gordis (www.danielgordis.org) is vice president of the Mandel Foundation-Israel and director of its Jerusalem Fellows program. He is the author of several books, including Home to Stay: One American Family's Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel (Three Rivers Press, 2003). His "dispatches" on life in Israel have been widely reprinted in a variety of publications, including the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children.

Any discussion of the manner in which Israel has conducted its armed conflict with the Palestinians over the past four years demands, first and foremost, clarity about the nature of the conflict and what is at stake. Israel is at war—not against "militants," or against those who would seek to "liberate" the Palestinian people. Israel is engaged in a war for her survival, against well-armed and increasingly well-trained, highly disciplined groups of terrorists, who are wholly up front about their agenda. Their agenda is not the liberation of the "territories" that were captured in June 1967 in a war that Israel did not want. Their agenda, as Hamas and Hizballah (among others) freely admit, is the eradication of the "Zionist entity" from what should be, in their minds, an exclusively Muslim Middle East.

This is not the Chechens against Russia. All the Chechens seek is independence. Were they granted that, there is every reason to expect that Chechen terrorism against Vladimir Putin's Russia would cease. The same is true with the Basques in Spain. But not with Israel. The only way that Israel could bring an end to the terrorists' attempt to destroy any semblance of normalcy for Israeli life would be to cease to exist. Israelis understand that, and they know full well that any other country fighting for its very existence would be enraged at being judged as Israel has been judged, particularly by Europe, in the last four years.

How this War Began

Israelis also remember when this war began—immediately after Ehud Barak called Yasir Arafat's bluff. Barak offered the Palestinian people the state and the independence they had always said their decades-long terrorist campaign had been designed to bring them. But in Barak's agreement, Israel would have continued to exist. And that, in the end, Arafat could not abide. So he, and a multiplicity of loosely aligned terrorist organizations that include, but is not limited to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, Fatah, Force 17, and the El-Aksa Martyrs' Brigade sought to bring Israel to its knees by terrifying an entire population into submission.

Search: Camp David package, The most effective thing he [Arafat] could have done , tell the tens of thousands of Palestinians, CNN, Barak's proposal, New York Times, Kahanist notion, eradicating

This is lengthy and worth reading. Subsections include:

* No Peace in our Lifetime
* The World Ignores Israeli Restraint
* Myopia about the Separation Fence
* Israel's Vigorous Debate about its Conduct of the War
* Israel's Moral Campaign against Terror

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