Canadians follow American policies, provoke same terrorist response

The burden of Walt's recent posts about the Boston Marathon bombing and now the alleged plot to blow up a VIA Rail train has been that Islamic extremists -- homegrown as well as imported -- are doing their damnable thing to protest American policies and actions in the Middle East.

As American presidents from Teddy Roosevelt onwards have not yet learned, if you keep on playing the bully -- trying to impose your ideas of what's right and good on other countries and other cultures by force of arms -- the 97-pound weakling will eventually fight back.

Walt doesn't know all his readers and followers by name [but he knows where some of you live! Ed.] but notes with delight sympathetic comments that appear on the Net and in the Twitterverse. One such was released into the ether yesterday by a possible "Waltist" -- Max Depontailler, a staffer for Céline Hervieux-Payette, former leader of the Liberal opposition in the Canadian Senate. Here's a screen grab of a comment M. Depontailler immediately regretted making.

This was posted yesterday, following news of the arrest of two Muslim fundamentalists who were allegedly plotting to blow up a VIA Rail train at the Whirlpool bridge near Niagara Falls.  M. Depontailler thought he was tweeting from his own account. Too bad for him he was still on the account of his boss! He deleted the post almost immediately, but it still appears on a number of cached sites.

Mme Hervieux-Payette hasn't commented publicly, nor is she likely to, since in times past she has expressed similar sentiments herself. In 2006 she wrote to American critics of the seal hunt that what she finds horrible is ”the daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of prisoners – mainly blacks – in American prisons, the massive sale of handguns to Americans, and the destabilization of the entire world by the American government’s aggressive foreign policy, etc.”

Which brings us back to Walt's (and Max's) point. As Americans (and Canadians) search for the root causes of the terrorist attacks on their countries, they might well start by looking in the mirror.

"Call me Steve" Harper might well ask himself why he would choose to ally Canada so closely with the USA, given the ROTW's resentment of American political and cultural imperialism. He might just as well sew a great big red-and-white target on the maple leaf flag.