To: gao seng who wrote (189361 ) 10/5/2001 12:47:14 AM From: KLP Respond to of 769670 You will appreciate this article, gao....That woman has just set the women's movement back a century, IMO... Thobani's disgusting statement L. IAN MACDONALD Montreal Gazette Wednesday, October 03, 2001 The moral-equivalency crowd was out in force Monday at a feminist conference in Ottawa where Sunera Thobani said United States foreign policy was "soaked in blood." Thobani, a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, also called the U.S. "the most dangerous and powerful global force unleashing horrific levels of violence." So that's it. The Americans got what was coming to them. Six thousand people are dead under the rubble of the World Trade Centre. Guilty of going to work in the morning, they obviously deserved their terrible fate. Hundreds of thousands more have lost their jobs, and it's all their fault. Perhaps Thobani could explain her views to the widowed spouses, orphaned children, broken families and grieving communities, including dozens in Canada. Perhaps she could elaborate her position to the people who have been thrown out of work, including thousands of Canadians. Fry Said Nothing Sitting beside Thobani, as she made this intellectually disgraceful and disgusting statement, was Hedy Fry, the secretary of state for the status of women. Did Fry get up and leave the hall in disgust? Did she summon reporters and disavow Thobani's remarks? No, she simply did not join in the applause and a standing ovation. "People in this country are allowed to say what they want," she later told the Commons. "I did not support it. I did not applaud it. I got up and left immediately following. I stand in the House right now and say I condemn the speech." There is no doubt that the U.S. made some foreign-policy choices in the 1980s that have since come back to haunt it, notably supporting Iraq's Saddam Hussein against Iran, and the mujaheddin against the invading Soviets in Afghanistan. But from there to suggest that America's hands are soaked in blood, or that it is the most dangerous force in the world, is simply odious. But wait, there's more. Thobani wondered who felt the pain of "the victims of U.S. aggression." The victims of aggression are precisely the women of Afghanistan who suffer under the unspeakable cruelties of the Taliban theocracy, a tyrannical and repressive regime that publicly executes women in soccer stadiums. Who is speaking up for them? Not the women at the Ottawa conference, dripping with a sanctimonious sense of Canadian superiority. Such offensive smugness could only be found in a country such as ours, which has lived for a half a century under the security blanket of the United States, which also buys half of everything we produce in the private sector. The Americans don't need or deserve to hear, at a conference funded by government ($80,000) and attended by a minister of the crown, that their hands are soaked in blood. Unfortunately, there appears to be a constituency for this intellectual garbage, at conferences attended by the radical left, at town halls staged by the CBC and on campuses such as Concordia University - all funded by taxpayers. Fortunately, Canada and the U.S., unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, encourage such dissent among our fundamental freedoms of speech. Bad Taste We even encourage free speech when it is demonstrably misinformed and repulsively in bad taste. But as an American judge once observed, freedom of speech does not extend to yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. Of course, what happened in New York and in Washington can never happen here, and if it did we would expect the Americans to come to our aid. We would be outraged if they said that, in our smugness, we got what we deserved. Can't happen here? This just in from France, where Le Monde has reported on the trial of 24 members of one of Osama bin Laden's terrorist cells. The incriminating evidence includes the details of a chilling plan to explode a bomb on each of Montreal's métro lines if terrorist demands were not met. The plot, now confirmed by Montreal police, was apparently foiled only with the arrests. These are the bad guys. They murder thousands of innocent people. They have experimented with biological terror. And if they could get their hands on nuclear weapons, they would use them. Whereupon, in the warped logic of moral equivalency, it would be the fault of the U.S. for inventing them in the first place. - L. Ian MacDonald's e-mail address is imacdonald@generation.net.canada.com