(This column was published in the North Shore News on Oct. 6, 2004)
Appeasers will not keep us safe at night
By Leo Knight
LAST week's column generated a number of e-mail responses primarily consisting of people saying that they agreed with me but didn't feel like they were Ameri-cans or something similar - essentially trying to distance themselves from the unpalatable aspect of war.
Being in Dallas for the international conference that brought 17,000 security professionals from around the world together was an eye-opening experience. The interaction between people regardless of nationality served to demonstrate just how unifying the international war on terror really is and how affected every country is, the bleating of John Kerry notwithstanding.
I should also take a moment to pay tribute to Ken Doern, the former Vancouver police inspector who was attending the conference in Dallas and was stricken with a fatal heart attack Sept. 29. He was only 58 years old. When I spoke to him the night before he died, he said he was going to work for another two years and then spend a lot of time traveling with his wife, Pat.
In fact, she was in Dallas to meet him and they were going to spend a week or so touring the area before returning to Vancouver. Unfortunately, the vagaries of life did not allow that dream to come to fruition.
Doern had only been retired from the police department for two years. There's just something wrong with spending more than 30 years in public service to accumulate a pension and not being able to collect it for at least half as long as you put into it. That doesn't seem just.
And, I suppose, few things are in this world, like judges getting a 10 per cent pay raise when they simply refuse to do their jobs. Well not all of them of course. But there's a movement among some judges at least, to ignore the provisions of federal law that says they can order convicted criminals to submit a sample for the national DNA bank.
And I don't get it.
The DNA bank is a tool for investigators looking into murder, rapes, abductions and the sort of hideous, heinous crimes the public screams out for quick solutions. Think Cecilia Zhang.
I have argued in the past that the DNA law doesn't go far enough. And, having said that, the spectre of judges not applying the law for whatever personal political issues of their own is simply not acceptable. And I think that getting paid 10 per cent more for not doing their job is simply offensive to the beleaguered taxpayer.
Unfortunately for me, I was going to tear a strip off the Liberal government for a similar increase in the salaries of MPs, but the prime minister caught wind of the public's discontent with that little manoeuvre and kiboshed the attempt to fleece us a little more. No fool he when standing downwind of that kind of political stench.
But I digress.
My suggestion that Canada was a terrorist target was merely the stating of an absolute fact. The hand-wringers and Chamberlain-like appeasers think if they insult the Americans and handcuff our soldiers fighting in the war, the terrorists will leave us alone. Think of the Spanish national collapse in intestinal fortitude after the dual train attacks last March and the subsequent election of a terror-appeasing socialist government.
If the terrorists do leave this country alone, it is most likely because our moribund federal government simply refuses to recognize the obvious and tighten up our ridiculous refugee laws.
The terror types are not so foolish as to bite the hand that feeds, so to speak.
The Americans are fighting in a real war against those who want to destroy our civilization as we know it.
For the past 30 years our country has been slowly dismantling our ability to defend ourselves and, by default, ceding our sovereignty to the United States.
And this too is troubling. The left was railing against the proposed missile defence shield in protests in several cities across the country on the weekend.
It was the usual crowd - the anarchists, the Raging Grannies, the anti-globalization crowd and other assorted losers and layabouts.
They say that to co-operate with the United States in this program would be giving away our sovereignty, something I would argue we have already done
But for all that, the experience in Dallas was one of co-operation, support and collective single-mindedness in the effort to keep us all safe.
And not an appeaser in sight.
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