Dear Editor:

I doubt that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are very high on the average Canadian’s worry list. Being one of the luckiest countries in the world leads many of us to be complacent, smug and deluded into feeling safer than we really are from being attacked by the various fanatics who are creating havoc all around us. However, the fact is the more we become involved in fighting the bin Ladens of the world, and we have no choice, the greater our chances of being attacked. Canada is the only country targeted by al Qaeda that hasn’t been attacked, but we’d have to be very naive indeed to think they have forgotten us. People like Haroon Siddiqui and Jack Layton are wrong in thinking we can negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda and Hezbollah whose sole aim is to destroy us. What we should be doing is everything in our power, in alliance with our allies, to, at least, contain these fanatics. This is not to say we should never negotiate with our enemies. It was John F. Kennedy who said: ” Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate” . And the late Moshe Dayan said: “If you want to make peace, you do not talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” This advice is sound as long as you’re dealing with rational people. but our enemies are not rational. On the contrary, they are religious fanatics, suicide bombers and rag-tag tribes masquerading as nations. And they cannot be reasoned with because their stated aim is to destroy not only us but their co-religionists who disagree with their twisted version of Islam, and in destroying their enemies, they are only too happy to destroy themselves as well. Our worst nightmare is that one of these gangs will some day acquire a nuclear weapon. Imagine a bin Laden armed with nukes? However, if we keep talking ourselves hoarse calling each other war mongers or peaceniks instead of showing our enemies a united front, we’ll have only ourselves to blame when our luck runs out. And we can’t say we haven’t been warned, al Qaeda has published its hit-list and we are on it. Forewarned is, or should be, forearmed.

William Bedford,
Toronto, Ontario

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 6:14 am and is filed under Canadian Politics, Letters, Terrorism, World events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.