Sounds like it was the real deal:
A group of Canadian residents arrested for “terrorism related offenses” had amassed enough explosives to build huge bombs and were planning to blow up targets around southern Ontario, Canadian police said on Saturday.
Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said the group had acquired three tonnes of ammonium nitrate — or three times the amount used in the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — as they sought to “create explosive devices.”
Police said they had arrested 12 adults and five young people in coordinated raids in the Toronto area. The adults were from Toronto, its western suburb of Mississauga and from Kingston, Ontario, at the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, not far from the border with the United States.
“This group posed a real and serious threat,” McDonnell said. “It had the capacity and intent to carry out attacks. Our investigation and arrests prevented the assembly of any bombs and the attacks being carried out.”
Thomas Galvin asks: “For all those who are quick to blame the West for the world’s ills, what did Canada do to ‘deserve’ this?”
InstaPundit muses: “It’s also interesting that this happened at almost the same time as the major bust in London. So what’s cooking here in the United States?” A good quesiton.
Glenn also notes that “Internet monitoring” was a key aspect of the investigation that led to this bust. The Toronto Star has more on that aspect.
Michelle Malkin has a list of the would-be terrorists’ names. ThreatsWatch calls them “twelve adult Muslim jihadists and five juveniles…some of them second-generation Canadian citizens and some of them recent immigrants.” Canada’s National Post says they are “homegrown extremists…young followers of the al-Qaeda ideology.” The Star elaborates, calling them “Western youths who have never set foot in Afghanistan but allegedly were radicalized here, and who are thought to be potentially as dangerous as the cells that once took orders from Osama bin Laden. Western governments, including Canada’s, have repeatedly warned of this phenomenon and blamed recent attacks, such as last July’s bombings in London, as the work of such groups.” The Canadian authorities themselves called the plot “al Qaeda-inspired,” according to CNN.
Yet for some reason, Reuters didn’t see fit to mention any of that, or to specify whether the arrested terrorists are Muslims, or Arabs, or Islamists, or Al Qaeda members/sympathizers, or… anything. From the Reuters article, you wouldn’t know whether these guys are Osama bin Laden’s band of brothers, or a band of angry rednecks from Saskatchewan. Well, actually, maybe we do sorta know, because if they were angry rednecks from Saskatchewan, I’m sure Reuters would have told us that. But the fact that they’re members of the global Islamist terrorist movement? No, that’s not newsworthy. (The only reference to the global jihad is the second-last paragraph: “the Canadian Security Intelligence Service..[is] trying to keep track of ‘350 high-level targets’ as well as 50 to 60 organizations thought to be linked to groups such as al-Qaeda.” But that doesn’t tell us anything about these terrorists, the ones who have just been caught red-handed trying to blow sh*t up in Canada.) And all the “Oklahoma City” references, though sensible and relevant in context, might lead a reasonable person — if he was getting his news only from Reuters — to conclude that this wasn’t an Islamist thing, but rather an OKC-style plot by white extremists. (Then again, I suppose “reasonable people” generally don’t get their news only from Reuters, or particularly trust Reuters at all, precisely because of crap like this.)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not political correctness; this is dangerous obtuseness. We need to know the nature threat we face, and although 99.9% of Muslims are not terrorists, 99.9% of the terrorists we need to be worrying about right now — including these bastards who wanted to take down a major building in Toronto — are Muslims. That aspect of their identity is an indisputably important, newsworthy fact, not because we want to smear all Muslims but because we need to know our enemy. Luckily, most news organizations have more good sense than Reuters, so we do know that these evil men are a homegrown arm of the global jihad, and not some band of Timothy McVeigh clones. But if Reuters had its way, we wouldn’t know any of that. This obscuration of newsworthy facts by a “news service” is shameful and indefensible — but alas, not surprising.
UPDATE: A later version of the same article does make the connection, inserting the words “inspired by al Qaeda” into the lede. Well, good. But why on earth wasn’t that crucial piece of information — now correctly recognized as important enough to belong in the first sentence — mentioned in the earlier verison of the article?? It’s not for lack of information; the earlier version was published at 11:24 AM EDT, almost an hour after CNN reported that the bomb plot was “al Qaeda-inspired.” So the fact remains, somebody at Reuters made a conscious choice to completely leave out the Islamist angle (which isn’t really an “angle” so much as a centerpiece of whole damn story), and what I want to know is, does that person still have a job at Reuters? And if so, why should we have any faith that this sort of egregious and deliberate error won’t happen again, the next time Reuters reports on something?
P.S. I hope y’all can forgive me for leaving out the perfunctory modifier “alleged” to the word “terrorist” throughout this post. Sorry, but when you get caught red-handed with 3 tons of bomb-making material, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt from me. You’re still entitled to the presumption of innocence in a court of law, of course, and if someone tried to take that away, I’d be up in arms. But I’m not a court of law, so I’m allowed to operate on the basis of reasonable assumptions based on available facts. Available facts strongly suggest that these guys are terrorists. Until that changes, I’m calling them “terrorists.”
P.P.S. Sorry for the several hours’ delay in the appearance of the CNN Breaking News alert below. There was a technical glitch.
UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers! While you’re here, please have a look around. I’ve been blogging about a lot of stuff in the last 20 hours or so: hurricanes (you might remember me as the Katrina blogger from last year), the joy of being appreciated by our troops, the utter incompetence of the Department of Homeland Security Stupidity, and of course, the coming Civil War. And more. Just go to my homepage and scroll, baby, scroll.
P.S. I recently made some tweaks to my blog’s appearance. If this page looks like a monolithic one-column layout, it means your browser isn’t loading my stylesheet correctly. This page should look approximately like this (allowing, of course, for variations in browsers and window size). If it doesn’t, please clear your cache and/or cookies, and reload. Thanks!
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Categories: Terrorism & Homeland Security, The Media & Blogs
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June 3rd, 2006 at 12:10:42 pm
Thomas Galvin should know that Canada has sent troops to kill “muslims” in Afghanistan. I suppose that’s “…what did Canada do to ‘deserve’ this?â€?
June 3rd, 2006 at 12:49:23 pm
Y’all? I thought you grew up in Connecticut, and went to school in California and Indiana. I see no reason for you to be using y’all . . . weird.
Me? I’ll stick to avoiding using Yinz. (Look it up if you are curious.)
June 3rd, 2006 at 1:27:47 pm
Roto-Reuters Covers Terror Bust, Omits Any Mention of Islam
Roto-Reuters Covers Terror Bust, Omits Any Mention of Islam
June 3rd, 2006 at 1:39:36 pm
I use “y’all” because the English language does not have a formal “ustedes” form, and “y’all” gets the point across. So I’m want to say “you” but refer to multiple people, I generally say “y’all.”
June 3rd, 2006 at 1:42:50 pm
If Canadian authorities said the assholes were inspired by Al Qaeda, Reuters should have at least mentioned that.
As for the Internet monitoring, guys like Drudge are trying to make it sound like it was the result of the U.S. datamining project. It’s not. It is the result of Canadian authorities using Google to find Al Qaeda sympathetic sites and then using legal means to track down the assholes to see what they are up to.
I have no problem with that approach, versus casting a net over the entire country without legal justification or transparency and spending tons of resources investigating “patterns” which 99.999% of the time mean absolutely nothing.
June 3rd, 2006 at 2:55:29 pm
#1: Why don’t you go to the CBC, Globe&Mail, canada.com, or ctv.ca for Canadian content? CNN, Reuters, and all the rest are likely just using the CP files from there anyway.
#2: In Canada, we do not presume someone is Islamic or Arabic or Black or White simply because of the type of crime that may have been committed. The RCMP/Police in Canada will generally not bother releasing the information because it *has no bearing* on the validity of the charges itself. Rather, it simply causes racism and discrimination. That behaviour is generally echoed by the Media in Canada as well.
#3: as far as “deserving”… Canada is up to the kilt in Afghanistan, and our current government is buddy buddy with the Bushies… probably more than enough reason there.
June 3rd, 2006 at 3:06:41 pm
“Al Qaeda inspired”, but what inspired al Qaeda?
June 3rd, 2006 at 3:18:38 pm
Anton: Sorry to burst your bubble, Canadians weren’t sent to Afghanistan to kill muslims,
I think you may find that as part of a NATO operation they are busy dealing with a group of Muslim
extremists known as the Taliban who supported someting called Al Qaeda, in supportof a Muslim government.
Chris: “In Canada, we do not presume someone is Islamic or Arabic or Black or White simply because of the type of crime that may have been committed. ” No, but when their (19 of 19) names are things like Muhammed al Something that is what the real world calls logical inference given the context, even in lovely Canada.
June 3rd, 2006 at 3:22:27 pm
Chris Alemany Says: #2: In Canada, we do not presume someone is Islamic or Arabic or Black or White simply because of the type of crime that may have been committed. The RCMP/Police in Canada will generally not bother releasing the information because it *has no bearing* on the validity of the charges itself. Rather, it simply causes racism and discrimination. That behaviour is generally echoed by the Media in Canada as well.
Well, sure, but if there is a serial murderer or rapist working my neighborhood I sure would appreciate knowing if it was a male or female (cuts my suspects in half) and a racial description (black, white, asian, arabic, hispanic, albino) starts cutting the remaining suspects down to a manageable number. I’d sure know not to open the door to some folks with out a good deal more information.
June 3rd, 2006 at 3:40:08 pm
Excellent news. And of course, law enforcement officials are quite rightly being praised for their work on this. But then, liberals have always praised the work of law enforcement officials on terrorism; it’s conservatives who freaked out at the idea that terrorism should be dealt with as a law enforcement issue. And yet the cops seem to do a much better job of stopping terrorism than, say, invading Middle Eastern countries.
So can we go back to treating terrorism as what it is and always has been — a law enforcement issue?
June 3rd, 2006 at 4:38:01 pm
In case you haven’t noticed, something CNN reporting something doesn’t necessarily make it so. Perhaps Reuters withheld reporting the Al Quaeda connection because they wanted to make sure it was actually, you know, true.
Then again I guess among certain audiences these days, having a “reality-based” news organization isn’t exactly a selling point.
June 3rd, 2006 at 5:31:45 pm
Fred-
Someone named Muhammed al Something most likely will be Muslim, but statistically speaking that doesn’t make them an Islamist or a member of Al Qaeda.
June 3rd, 2006 at 5:36:49 pm
Eff and Chris-
Glad to see someone else on this blog has some common sense regarding the reporting of these things.
Somebody should yell at CNN for not telling us if the guy that was just arrested for the Indianpolis killings is a Christian? What is CNN trying to hide?
June 3rd, 2006 at 6:41:26 pm
[…] Initial reports from the news services were loathe to bring up any Middle East connections. You can see on the first page of the Times report that the suspects are identified as being of "South Asian" descent. On page two, the report names the suspects and the link is apparent. […]
June 3rd, 2006 at 7:20:51 pm
The fact that Muhammad al-Jihadi was arrested with tons of ammonium nitrate alters that calculus just a little, wouldn’t you say? Maybe he just had a big lawn to fertilize? Keep grasping at straws while the rest of us actually apply a little critical thinking. Despite his faults, Lenin was spot on in describing people like you.
Well, if he was killing in the name of God, then they would be remiss not to mention it. I don’t know of any evidence to support such an assertion, though.
June 3rd, 2006 at 7:55:22 pm
EUPHEMISM O’ THE DAY: “BROAD STRATA”
Oh, dear Lord. A jihadist plot, possibly of global scale, unravels in Canada…and what do law enforcement officials do? Try to whitewash the obvious jihadi profile from the public’s mind. At the press briefing held by the Royal Canadian Mounted…
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:03:48 pm
Anybody who looks to Reuters for objective reporting is ten years out of date. Reuters is as objectively owned by Arab intersts as Al Jazeera.
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:25:09 pm
[…] Irish Trojan has more here, Michelle Malkin has more here […]
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:01:47 pm
Gotta hand it to you Brendan. You’re the only one I can see with the guts to a) come close to admitting that your attack on Reuters reporting may have been a smidge hasty and b) allow comments so people can call you on it. You’re may have 1/100th the traffic, but youre 100 times the blogger than Instapundit will ever be. Not sure who exactly Michelle Malkin is but I’m sure you’re 1000 times better than her too.
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:49:09 pm
[…] InstaPundit It’s also interesting that this happened at almost the same time as the major bust in London. So what’s cooking here in the United States?” […]
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:53:04 pm
Thanks, ewe, but while I am always more than willing to admit when I realize that I was wrong about something, I don’t think I’ve done so here because I don’t think I was wrong. I updated the post with the factual report that Reuters had updated their article, but as I expressed in the post itself, I don’t think that exonerates the initial mistake. I’m still having a hard time finding an innocent explanation for the failure to initially report the Al Qaeda connection, as I explained here.
As for letting people “call me on it,” I do encourage (and participate in) free-wheeling debate around here, but in fairness, I completely understand why InstaPundit and Malkin don’t have comments. It would be a logistical nightmare. For one thing, they would be crushed under the weight of the comment spam. I get about 10,000 spams per week, most of which are caught by SpamKarma, but some aren’t, so I have to deal with those ones manually — and regardless, it’s a huge load on the server just to automatically catch them, even if neither I nor my readers ever see them. And as you say, I get vastly less traffic than Glenn and Michelle; I imagine that they would get literally millions of spams per week if they allowed comments.
Even worse than the spam problem, though, is the troll problem. The bigger you are as a blogger, the more honest-to-goodness trolls you have to deal with. I got a taste of that after Hurricane Katrina, when my traffic briefly soared to 20,000-35,000 per day, and the quantity of comments increased, but the quality of discussion seriously suffered for a while because of a few persistent trolls. Far moreso than usual, rational discussion would break down into insult-fests, threads were constantly getting hijacked, and the old regulars started to feel like they were losing their much-loved hang-out to a band of rude invaders. :) Eventually things settled, the trolls went elsewhere, and lots of others stuck around and became valued parts of this little comment community we have going. But I can only imagine if Michelle Malkin allowed comments. It would be impossible for anyone to have a serious or reasonable discussion about anything because of all the hundreds of people calling her a “racist Asian b*tch” and such (she gets stuff like that via e-mail all the time; imagine if it was even easier for people to insult her). And Glenn would get all sorts of nasty stuff too. Bottom line, it just isn’t worth it when it gets that bad, so I can’t fault them for choosing to turn comments off.
And another thing: when major bloggers allow comments, they tend to get tarred through guilt-by-assocation by any idiotic comments that people on their rough side of ideological spectrum happen to make, unless they specifically repudiate them (and imagine how much time and effort repudiating every idiotic comment would take!) Kos — who uses a different software, Scoop, which is more orientated toward “community” sites, hence some of the technical issues being less problematic for him, BTW — has this problem all the time. Lazy journalists and even fellow bloggers will read something that some random Kos commenter said, and attribute it to “Daily Kos.” (I try, though I may not always succeed, to distinguish between “Kos” and the “Kos Kidz” when I’m attributing things, and I also try not to highlight truly isolated idiocy, but only point it out when it’s at least something of a pattern. But many don’t even bother to try to make any such distinctions.) And as a blogger, it’s hard enough to be responsible for everything that you say, when you’re constantly pumping out commentary that’s inevitably going to occasionally be overheated, misinformed, etc. … you don’t want to be held responsible for OTHER people’s wrong opinions, too! But it’s easy to imagine, if Michelle Malkin allowed comments, and she posted something about, say, the Muhammad cartoons, and how we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be silenced by violent extremists, and them some racist idiot leaves a comment along the lines of “yeah, all those damn Muslims are terrorist bastards,” and Malkin — who has better things to do — doesn’t specifically repudiate it, liberals would pounce on it and say, “See? Malkin’s a racist!” I perfectly understand why she doesn’t want to deal with that.
All things considered, trust me, it’s genuinely problematic to allow comments when you’re a big-time blogger. That’s a shame, but it’s the reality.
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:57:23 pm
I will say this, though. I think Michelle Malkin overstates the case a bit when she talks about a police and MSM-wide “whitewashing.” She and some others seem offended by the very concept of talking about these terrorists as being “homegrown” and representing diverse stages of life (students, employed, unemployed, etc.) But I don’t see those descriptors as some sort of euphamism. I think it’s perfectly valid to call terrorists who are basically self-trained “homegrown,” and no one in their right minds should feel their minds put at ease by that, considering the London 7/7 bombing was done by “homegrown” terrorists too. Likewise, the fact that there are lots of different ages and stages of life represented by these Islamist terrorists is an important and relevant fact, and not a “whitewash.” So long as the media and police are being straightforward about the “Al Qaeda inspired” nature of this plot, which most of them seem to be, I don’t see any problem in what’s being reported.
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:20:43 pm
Malkin doesn’t allow comments anymore because the vile hatred that clogs her inbox clogged her comments on her blog. Something about a woman and a minority having the audacity to be conservative drives moonbats insane. “Uppity Derangement Syndrome” perhaps?
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:58:48 pm
Yeah. That’s pretty much what I figured, though I had forgotten that she used to allow comments. As I said, trolls are the biggest problem for any big blogger. It’s sad but true. If you’ve never been in the position of trying to manage a blog that’s getting thousands of hits a day, it’s easy to throw stones at people who refuse to allow comments (ewe, I’m not accusing you of that, I’m just saying lots of people do it), but having had just a tiny taste of it, I really sympathize. Your comment section can very quickly become a totally inhospitable place where reasonable discussion is impossible, and at that point you might as well just shut it down to spare yourself the hassle of dealing with the vile vitriol.
It’s too bad people aren’t more civil.
And you’re right, the hatred that gets spewed at Malkin in particular is really despicable. Why can’t people just disagree with her political views, and leave her race and gender out of it? The hypocrisy of acusing her of racism while calling her a “slanty-eyed c**t” and such, is just staggering. All racists suck, a lot, but I think liberal racists are the worst because they’re generally self-righteous hypocrites in the process of being prejudiced bastards.
June 4th, 2006 at 6:39:20 am
I would describe Ms Malkin as a race bating, racist, right-wing nut job who happens to be literate. Not hatred, just an accurate description.
June 4th, 2006 at 7:15:25 am
Hugh, all Malkin does is point out the obvious. Is it racist to believe in, and report, reality? And how, exactly, does a term like nut job prove YOU are not racist or race-baiting? After all, Malkin is a member of a protected and victimized minority!
June 4th, 2006 at 7:39:26 am
Hugh - that’s race-BAITING, as in fishing, not BATING, as in heavy breathing.
Literate, indeed.
June 4th, 2006 at 7:46:11 am
BTW, there is a lot of evidence that the OKC Bombing was helped by Islamic Terrorists.
Two bombings that used Ammonium nitrate in the US were the 1995 OKC bombing and the 1993 WTC attack.
Both had similar connections.
“Homegrown” does not mean what it seems.
http://www.jaynadavis.com/fn.html
June 4th, 2006 at 9:35:11 am
re: M. A. {{{ So can we go back to treating terrorism as what
it is and always has been � a law enforcement issue? }}}
…. The 1993 attack on WTC/America was treated as a law enforcement
issue. In 1998 Pres Clinton/ Dept of Justice indicted Osama.
In the meantime NYC cops doing their own intel linked the WTC basement
bomb to Iraq. If that isn’t correct, in hindsight it must be proof they
lied. However, terror as well as immigration mess, is law enforcement issue
and more. It involves Treasury…flow of funds, Interior…keeping our
public lands free of terror camps…Homeland…border security… Trasnsporation,
Transporations Security…so many others. After 9/11 we can’t wait for
the yellow tape to begin a criminal investigation, we demand dot-connecting
and attempt at detering pre-crime. This of course gives the Soros people proof
that Bush is Imperial..Nazi…a Chimp ( pick one or more…dissonance aside )
Where are Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick when we need them to keep us safe ?
June 4th, 2006 at 11:05:46 am
When a person’s religion is not really relevant to their crime, I don’t see the point of mentioning it except in passing. For example, the BTK killer was a churchgoing man and was in fact an elder in his church. BUT, it was not his religion that motivated him to torture and kill. In fact, his supposed religiosity was probably just a cover. He didn’t torture and kill in Jesus’ name.
In the case of pedophile priests, their religion definitely needs to be mentioned prominently … you can’t mention the fact that they are Catholic priests “in passing.” Again, however, their religion is not what motivates them to fondle altar boys. Even the fact that their religion requires them to be celibate is probably not what causes most of them to fondle altar boys … if it was just pent-up sexual desire, they could find a prostitute. Rather, what probably happens in 99.9% of the cases is that a pedophile joins the priesthood not out of any desire to serve God but to have access to a supply of victims.
What is different about Muslims is that their religion is directly relevant to the crimes they are accused of plotting or committing. They plan and commit terrorist acts in the name of their God, for the purpose of advancing Islam. And they believe, with considerable justification, that their scriptures sanction their actions. Therefore, not mentioning the religion of the accused prominently constitutes gross negligence on the part of Reuters, if they call themselves an objective news agency committed to keeping the public informed of all the facts.
June 4th, 2006 at 11:07:59 am
Thanks for illustrating my point. Comments are allowed so you can attack the person’s ideas, not the person themself.
June 4th, 2006 at 11:11:52 am
Hugh, you sure are an idiot when it comes to Michelle Malkin. She is a decent, intelligent human being and the furthest thing from a racist I ever saw.
It’s amazing how a dark skinned, female, Filipino becomes a “racist” in your book just because she happens to disagree with you. You probably consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali a “racist” too.
You just can’t imagine that someone can find fault with someone else’s CULTURE or RELIGION or POLITICAL IDEOLOGY without caring what race or color they happen to be.
June 4th, 2006 at 5:46:09 pm
Gregg:
It’s interesting how the defenders of Ms Malkin always use the fact(s) that she is Filipino and a female to explain why she couldn’t be a racist. I never knew, until now, that “dark skinned” Filipino women were, ipso facto, incapable of racism. I stand by my earlier point.
June 4th, 2006 at 5:54:44 pm
Hi again Brendan. While we may disagree on the Reuters angle, I appreciate your points on the nature of blogging comments. Thanks for the thoughtful response.
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