The Prime Minister of Canada just made an idiot out of himself.
This article in The National Post shows why. Prime Minister Chretien blames Western "arrogance" for the September 11 attacks.
Last night I listened as a transfer student to my college told about how she left her college because people like Chretien told her friends who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center attacks that they bore some blame for their own deaths.
On behalf of all those who can no longer speak out against people like Chretien I have this message.
Allez au diable.
Jean Chrétien has linked the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to perceived Western greed and arrogance and said the United States should not use its position as the world’s only superpower to humiliate people in poorer nations.
Yup, we should be utterly respectful of those who want to kill us all, and enforce a system of laws upon the world in which women could be killed just for showing their face in public. That’s perfectly acceptable to stand idly by and watch as those people suffer, because we wouldn’t want to appear arrogant. What a heartless, spineless, gutless, and soulless thing for someone in a position of power to say.
The Prime Minister suggested Western nations — and the United States in particular — have alienated the rest of the world by trying to impose their values around the globe. Americans, he said, need to be nicer in how they operate on the international stage.
"It is always the problem when you read history — everybody don’t know when to stop. There is a moment, you know, when you have to stop," Mr. Chrétien said.
Our values are based on human rights, human freedom, and the human spirit. They are values which are not confined to one culture, but are innate to the human spirit. It is the height of ignorance and racism to say that the peope of the world do not understand or want such things. All humans strive for freedom. No one wants to be oppressed. No one wants to live in a society in which their dreams and their goals can never be met simply because they happened to be born female. If one is so seriously naive to believe anything otherwise, then they need a one-way trip to some country ruled by shari’a so they can see the difference for themselves.
This is the ignorance we face. This is the blind stupidity of those who no longer wish to bear the burden of spreading the light of freedom and peace throughout the world. It’s easy to say "no", to sit idlly by and not worry about offending anyone while the world burns.
Our values are worth fighting for. They’re worth dying for.
We will only defeat terrorism by standing up for those values. If standing for what’s right is arrogance, then let us be arrogant.
It is better to be arrogant in pursuit of justice than be a coward in the face of evil.
I find this curious. Americans claim not to understand why their culture is loathed by so many. The answer, in not so many words, is the squandering of limited resources on obsessed and self-centered navel-gazing.
The people that hate Americans with a deep and searing despite, who wish to eradicate American culture and the American people from the earth do so, among other reasons, because of the tendency of American culture to commodify and reduce to financial terms, to advertise, to turn real events into television, and subsequently force it upon the rest of the world.
The American reaction to the events of September eleventh and to its anniversary, in my opinion, will serve only to deepen and widen the hatred of those who use terror as their weapon, and will hasten their next attack.
In case the reasoning behind Dave’s reply isn’t entirely clear:
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html
You don’t think funding such operations might be a bit of a liability? Seems civilians always lose their lives in such operations, be it the CIA Terrorist Organization, or retaliation by the Al`Queda Terrorist Network.
Chretien was not reffering to what the majority of people do in the US, and what values they hold, but what is done in direct violation of those values on their behalf, and then never told about. Though it is more accurate to say that makes them uninformed by propaganda, not arrogant.
“I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world — in the field of advertizing — and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency … Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious … I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours … and we tend to disbelieve ours.”
– Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.