So the infamous cutting of the hijab never happened. You may have heard: An eleven year old female Muslim student, supposedly minding her own business on her way to school, claimed some man sneaked up behind her to snatch a snippet from the cloth of her face covering, laughing all the while. The horror! The hate! The incident was immediately proclaimed by major media outlets within an hour so, not least the CBC, gushing indignation, giving the impression of some sort of anti-jihad pogrom against vulnerable Islamic schoolgirls. Both the Prime Minister and the Premier of Ontario, whose names I seem to have difficulty typing, publicly condemned the crime.
Now, it’s all been exposed, if such be the term, as a hoax. The story in the National Post offers no details; just that the police have ‘closed their investigation’. Was this a set-up? Why did the little eleven year old cry wolf, when wolf there was not? Did she deliberately lie? Is this a foil to build up even more national sentiment on behalf of Islam, protecting them from hidden phalanxes of niqab-cutters?
One is reminded of Belloc’s little Matilda, who told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes…Or, at least, it made the CBC gasp.
I am reminded of the curious clock boy of 2015, Ahmed Mohammed, who brought an odd home-made ‘alarm clock’ to school, packed into a suitcase, that looked suspiciously like a ticking bomb; the teacher called the principal, who called the police, who questioned the teenager for an hour and a half, the whole thing blown up (har, har) into some international incident. Conspiracy theorists claimed the affair was planned by his family, to garner Muslim sentiment, and to win some money from lawsuits alleging profiling and discrimination, as though every boy brought a bomb-type ‘clock’ to school. The Mohammeds did indeed try to sue various institutions and media personages, Glenn Beck, et al., but all the cases were thrown out of court on First Amendment grounds. The family has since moved to Qatar.
They should have tried in Canada, joining ranks with the newly-minted millionaire Mr. Khadr, who is, ironically, being civilly sued in the United States to the tune of $134 million by the widow of Captain Chris Speer, the Green Beret medic whom Khadr killed with a grenade. I share many of Mark Steyn’s reservations about the American justice system, but this is one time we might hope the long arm of U.S. law finds its man, or at least his unrighteous moolah, right into the heart of Albertan cattle country, or wherever Khadr is.
All sort of odd, protecting a religion that has as its official aim world domination, and the submission of the entire world to the tenets of Islam, under a realm of coercive fear. Submit, indeed.
Do you think Trudeau would be so strident in condemning attacks on Christians? Has he ever done so?
Speaking of attacks, there was a false alarm in Hawaii, that a ‘ballistic missile’ was about to hit the state in minutes. It seems some radar-watcher got trigger (or button)-happy, but this could have been much worse, if it had not been quickly checked. Imagine, as in that 80’s film War Games, that the United States had automatically retaliated, and blitzed North Korea. These launchers are set up with artificial intelligence, which is anything but intelligent, and most certainly not prudent, nor moral.
The Holy Father, on a plane on his way to Chile and Peru offering another of his scrums, declared that the world is at the ‘very limit’ of nuclear war, and that “one accident is enough to precipitate things”. He handed out a photo of a boy badly burned at Hiroshima.
There are deep moral complexities here, concerning the notion of deterrence and the prospect of mutually assured destruction. As I wrote back in the balmy days of summer, the deliberate killing of innocents, and the annihilation of entire cities, is an intrinsic evil, as Gaudium et Spes teaches:
Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.
Is this Hawaiian false warning itself a warning from on high? Certainly, it makes one think about what one would do should such a notice arrive on our radios, cell-phones, televisions, computers, as they are programmed to do…and you realize you and everyone with a three mile radius of you might have only a few minutes to live before being incinerated in an inferno the temperature of the Sun’s interior. A sobering thought.
Then again, for those who strive to live in a state of grace, confess regularly, receive the Eucharist, practise charity and live a life focused on God, can hold their heads high, and live without anxiety. As Saint Francis de Sales said, whoever thinks well on eternity troubles himself little about what happens in these three or four moments of mortal life,
which is about how long it would take for an ICBM to hit Honolulu, once detected in a real alarm.
One thing is sure: We are all hanging by a thread before the veil of eternity, and must always be prepared to meet Christ, whether or not at ground zero.