Silly Little Country

Thank You, Metro Morning - Tamils and Radio Reception

Metro Morning is one of Toronto's drive-to-work talk shows. I normally find it too orthodoxly full of "Canadian values" and generally just find it annoying, especially when hosted by Andie Barrie.
But let me thank it and Andy for two things this morning.
a) The information that, in fact, CBLA is doing maintenance on its transmission tower; I was about to devote the better part of my morning, I suspect, trying to figure out why my reception was so frustratingly poor. This information saved me a lot of time and annoyance. Moreover, he even got in what seemed a pretty spontaneous witticism, "we are maintaining the transmission tower; no, that makes it sound like a kept tower - we're doing maintenance on it".
b) Air time granted to a prominent Tamil-Canadian - you can hear Ignasious Selliah here - who is even more offended than I am by references to the current demonstrators as "representative of the Tamil Community"; his view, like mine, and he surely knows better, is that these protests are pawns in the hands of the Tamil Tigers, a thuggish and murderous organization. One need only look at all the Tiger flags, and he was able to add as well that the crowd chants are Tiger chants, not generic Tamil chants. His recommendation was that Canada should request a Sri Lankan cease-fire only accompanied by a requirement that the Tigers stop holding the civilian population hostage as human shields (a tactic they have used, apparently, from their inception).

So when I read this:

Inside the legislature, Premier Dalton McGuinty is encouraging the UN Security Council to find a way for Canada and other countries to help civilians affected by the fighting in Sri Lanka.
McGuinty says he understands why people in Toronto are unhappy about protests, including one that shut down a major highway Sunday, but adds it's important to speak out in the face of a significant breach of human rights.
He says thousands of civilians are being killed in northern Sri Lanka and people here need to recognize that the protests are rooted in real concerns.
McGuinty says this is not a time for the international community to be silent and is favour of the UN Security Council bringing countries together to help.
He also commended the federal government for providing more aid to the region in recent days and says the province will continue to push Ottawa to do more.

...I find it clear that McGuinty (our provincial premier) KNOWS Canada is already doing everything that is the purported request of the protesters. And if he knows it, why is he kow-towing to a gang of thugs? It seems to me one of the key purposes of the state is to protect civil life from exactly this sort of thuggery. The only encouraging thing in the article was the news that police are out in force in riot gear. Of course the Tiger organizer would love their use, but in the end this has to be cut off somewhere.

Labels: Tamils

posted by Alan Adamson @ 12:57 PM