My friend Mike from Calgary emailed me about this a few days ago asking if I’d captured a CBC News broadcast with my trusty recording equipment about this particular story, but I hadn’t. Then he found that good columnist Licia Corbella of the Calgary Sun wrote it up, yesterday.
I read the original story at the state-run CBC’s web site myself, but as was their intention, I saw no discussion of the grave and seriously alarming finding from the poll which was, alas, really pretty much buried—covered up—by the CBC’s web site as Licia Corbella explains in her column.
Here’s a part of her column:
Fear of causing offence and wilful blindness will only end the day innocent Canadians die
[…] Waaaay down in the online CBC story about this poll is the news that when “asked about the arrests last summer of the 18 Muslim men and boys who were allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in southern Ontario, 73% of Muslim respondents said these attacks were not at all justified.” That portion of the poll ended there. No more details. Why? The Environics website made no mention about this portion of the poll either.
However, on CBC’s The National television program on the same day, this part of the poll was fleshed-out and the results are alarming.
Fully 12% of Muslim Canadians polled by Environics said the alleged terrorist plot—that included kidnapping and beheading the prime minister and blowing up Parliament and the CBC—was justified.
Predictably, the CBC managed to find a talking head—in this case York University sociology professor Haideh Moghissi—who dismissed this disturbing revelation.
“It’s really negligible that 12 percent feel that the attacks would be justified,” said Moghissi. “I don’t think it even warrants attention.”
Miss Corbella goes on to do some math, as I did, and found that 12 percent amounts to some 84,000.
But just how “negligible” is 12% of 700,000 people.
Well, if Moghissi knew arithmetic like she knows denial, she’d know if this poll is accurate, 84,000 Canadian Muslims think it’s justifiable to behead our democratically elected prime minister and blow up the very symbol and centre of our democracy!
The Environics poll interviewed 500 Canadian Muslims and 2,045 members of the general population between Nov. 30 and Jan. 5 and is said to be accurate within 4.4 percentage points with regard to the Muslim respondents and 2.2 points with the larger sample group 19 times out of 20.
So, let’s err on the side of caution here. Let’s subtract the margin of error—4.4%—from 12%. That comes to 7.6%, so let’s say, just to be really non-alarmist, we round that down to 7%. That still means 49,000 Canadian Muslims believe conducting a terrorist attack on their own country—Canada—is justified.
Is it just me, or does this not strike anyone else as the opposite of “negligible?”
Isn’t this significant news?
But let’s not low-ball it. The margin of error is 4.4 percent, meaning that you could also add 4 percent to the 12 percent, rendering up to 112,000 folks who think chopping off the Prime Minister of Canada’s head and blowing up Parliament and the CBC and causing sundry other terrorist acts in Canada would be just lovely.
For my part, I’d of course be thrilled to see the CBC blown to smithereens, but only on a controlled basis and only when I’ve got a big huge bottle of Champagne handy.
With the recent (renewed) threats/demands/hints from al-Qaeda HQ to terrorize Canada specifically, it’s no wonder the Liberals and Layton’s you’ve got to be kidding party find this to be a perfect time to withdraw the Anti-Terrorism Act (further reading in this blog entry and this one) from the tools at our government’s disposal.
And just for fun, what do you suppose the headline was for the story on the state-run CBC web site?
“Glad to be Canadian, Muslims say”
.
Isn’t that cheery?
By the way, here’s how Muslims would vote, according to the poll:
54 per cent Liberal
13 per cent NDP
7 per cent Conservative
It all makes sense.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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