News/Talk/Radio

This one is a bit harder to pin down, because it's partly a personal story as well as news-relevant.

On my way to work this morning, I was listening to JACK 92.5. I'm not sure if it's familiar to any of my St. Catharines friends, but I imagine it might be since it's a Toronto station, and probably reaches our smoggy shores in Southern Ontario.

The voice on the radio (because I'm not aware of the personality, or even if it was a Public Service Announcement) was speaking about the recent news of the video ABC had attained showing an Al-Quaeda suicide-bomber graduation. It's literally what it sounds like: graduation had come for hundreds of now certified suicide bombers in the blind attempt at worldwide Islamic rule, or jihad (keeping in mind that, as we're constantly reminded, that jihad literally means "internal struggle." How delicate.)

Some of these "graduates" are as young as 12 years old, which I'm sure comes as no surprise to many who are even halfway aware of the news flowing out of the Middle East every day.

That's awful enough as it is. But the radio announcer decided to up the ante by coupling that story with the seemingly unconnected story of the Hwy. 400 accident that occured Monday. The crash was a result of three young men drag racing on the highway. A transport truck swerved to avoid them and rolled, killing the truck driver. The three men have been charged.

Normally I'm not a terribly reactive person - I've come to expect the hypocrisy and utter stupidity of most of the Canadian news outlets that insist on turning a blind eye to all that could be considered even remotely "unbecoming" of the Canadian identity. But this certain radio DJ attempted to draw a connection by saying that, if a parent send their child into the streets with a nice car and a licence, then they are essentially doing no more than unleashing something akin to an adolescent suicide bomber into the GTA.

Hear that? Install a few speed humps along residential streets and put more cops on the highway, because we are currently at risk of teenage death-squads, not clad in Hamas colours and high-velocity explosives, but something far more sinister: Honda Civics.

The idea that this man could possibly compare an ideology (that has a vast global network that ceases to slow its growth) of death-cultism, one that is committed to the destruction of democratic law and civil society, is not only absurd, it's insulting in a manner that leaves me almost speechless.

And then, we get news saying that Stephen Harper and the American CIA are attempting to supress the graduation story, regardless of its harrowing portentions. Whether they are or not is irrelevent; the media in Canada and the US has been supressing this kind of information for years in the attempt to appear "multicultural" and "culturally tolerant." It's the jihadist's anger with the American occupation, it's the terrible conditions they live under, it's only a small percentage that believes in a violent jihad, etc etc. Well, some stories can't be excused away, and we're expected to be angry with the government for not acting sooner as we sit back and refuse to act at all. No, we'd rather think globally and act locally about the environment.

And they can't see their own hypocrisy.

We've done this to ourselves. Those adolescent time-bombs have been dispatched to NATO allied countries. That includes Canada. When it comes to being fearful of an explosion in Nathan Philip's Square, or the off-chance of a couple of irresponsible kids with a custom muffler, I know which one I'll be keeping my head up for.