Posted on 05/10/2007 2:08:57 AM PDT by Clive
Where would we be if we did not have Liberals to remind us Canadians are racists?
Take the ongoing Air India inquiry and this gem from Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh.
"Maybe it's harsh coming from me at this day and age," the former Liberal cabinet minister said recently. "But I genuinely believe if you had 329 white, Anglo-Saxons killed in an Air India disaster, you would have had an inquiry in no time. I've never spoken so harshly before, but that's the truth and Canadians have to, we have to, confront that truth."
Nonsense. The reason it took so long to hold an inquiry is that the trial of the two accused took a long time.
Canadians initially felt disconnected from the Air India bombing not because the victims weren't white, but because it was prompted by events half a world away that had nothing to do with Canada.
In addition, the actual bombing occurred far away from Canada -- over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland.
This 1985 atrocity was -- in the sick minds of terrorists -- retaliation for India's bloody raid a year earlier on Sikhdom's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, in Punjab. It stemmed from an internal civil war, as Punjab is claimed by both separatist Sikhs and India.
That, not racism, is why Canadians didn't think of it at first as a "Canadian" tragedy, although most of the 329 victims were Canadians of Indian origin. Appropriately, as we learned over the years about the bungled criminal investigation by CSIS and the RCMP, we became interested.
That's why we now have a public inquiry into this tragedy headed by John Major, a respected former Supreme Court judge. That's not what racists would have done.
Dosanjh, who, to his credit, was an early campaigner against Sikh extremism and was viciously beaten for denouncing it, should remember that after the two accused were acquitted in 2005, it was his then-Liberal government that refused calls for an inquiry.
As then public safety minister Anne McLellan put it in explaining her reasons: "There will be, tragically, some questions that may very well not be answered ... as hard as we look."
Good thing we didn't listen to her, eh Mr. Dosanjh?
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In early 1985, Rajiv Gandhi – prime minister of India at the time – was getting ready to visit North America. India asked Canada and the United States to keep close tabs on Sikh militants who might pose a security threat. Many Sikhs around the world were furious over the Indian government’s 1984 assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest shrine. Brian Mulroney – Canada’s prime minister at the time – agreed to India’s request.
Talwinder Singh Parmar
Security officials placed a British Columbia man named Talwinder Singh Parmar under around-the-clock surveillance. Parmar was the leader of the militant Babbar Khalsa sect, a group committed to the violent establishment of Khalistan, an independent Sikh homeland, in the Indian state of Punjab. Agents followed Parmar’s every move and tapped his phones.
As we all know, only White people can be racists; everyone else on Planet Earth gets a pass.
I bet if Dosanjh was white he might get elected to parliament.
Wait a minute....
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