Today's Citizen
Slippery driving
All school buses in all area districts were cancelled Monday morning due to significant...
We must not discount threat of terrorism
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, March 03, 2008Re: 'The warning lights are all blinking red,' Feb. 23
In downplaying the terrorist threat, University of Ottawa Associate professor Paul Robinson uses a strange form of accounting. With 3,000 dead, "even 9/11 only affected directly a tiny, tiny fragment of U.S. society," he proclaims. "The day after a terrorist attack, 99.9 per cent of Canadians would wake up as normal and get on with their lives... claims that we are engaged in an 'existential' struggle... grotesquely overexaggerate [sic] the scope of what is a nasty, but altogether manageable, threat to our security."
Mr. Robinson's relativistic body count -- "manageable", to his taste -- is premised on a strikingly-outmoded assumption: that future terror deaths will remain roughly stable as a proportion of North American society. This naïve calculus discounts proliferating weapons and materiel of mass destruction, such as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear ones, that have become the bragging rights of Islamic extremists who now boast of their ability to inflict carnage on an unimaginable scale in New York, Washington, Toronto or any city of their choosing.
All this should warn of escalating terror losses, corresponding economic, psychological, social and other societal disruption -- and the need to prepare. Even the rather complacent Mohamed El Baradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was driven recently to express his fear about dirty bombs: "Sometimes I think it's a miracle that it hasn't happened yet."
Mr. Robinson's remarks also ignore the nature of extremist-Islamic assaults as economic warfare -- and their costs. The U.S. Congressional Research Service found that post-9/11 economic fallout included $40 billion dollars in insurance claims, 130,000 unemployed, and a strained New York City budget. Looking ahead, it cautioned that a "sudden catastrophic event, such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11, could have set in motion a financial panic."
Claiming familiarity with the IRA, Mr. Robinson is bemused that some would view yesterday's Irish terrorists as "somehow ... different" from today's Islamic variety. Before we are lulled into a "management" mindset by Professor Robinson, we need to imagine the IRA with a mandate for world dominance, nuclear and biological weapons, a fanatical fifth-column in most Western countries, a target list that includes Canada, a reverence for martyrdom, and a track record that includes not only 9/11, but beheading Christian schoolgirls in the Philippines, machine-gunning children in Russia, and massacring political leaders in Pakistan.
Neville Chamberlain imagined that Adolf Hitler could be "managed." Six years later, 45 million dead proved him wrong. Mr. Robinson seems to advocate that we repeat history.
Alastair Gordon,
Toronto
Canadian Coalition for Democracies
