Day: February 5, 2002

Clever Conman in Canada

This story has flown under the radar of the mainstream news in the United States, but a U.S. citizen in custody in Canada claims to be a U.S. Naval intelligence offer who had foreknowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The stories about this man claim that sometime in August he put his warning about a terrorist attack in writing in a sealed court document.

It turns out, though, that the document is not under seal and uses a pretty obvious technique to predict a terrorist attack — predict and predict often.

A JPEG of the man’s handwritten note can be found here. The man lists seven separate targets, including vague ones like “Water supplies” along with more specific targets like the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Sears Tower.

Given that a) both the Pentagon and World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been targeted by terrorist before September 11, and b) that the man would likely spend several years in detention in Canada as extradition proceedings grind on, predicting those targets as well as “water supplies” or the “Royal Bank Toronto” is hardly proof that this man had any sort of inside knowledge.

Finally, note that this exhibit wasn’t entered into evidence until October 7, 2001. Until then it was apparently held in a supposedly sealed envelope held by someone at the jail where the man was being kept. Gee, there are only about a couple hundred ways to pull the “sealed envelope” trick on an unsuspecting mark.

Anti-Semitism as Radical Chic

Yikes. Before the release of the movie recounting part of his life, Muhammad Ali apparently appeared at a banquet and told an anti-Semitic joke — “What’s the difference between a Jew and a canoe? A canoe always tips.”

That’s bad enough, but as Glenn Reynolds points out, what is truly disgusting is The Guardian’s Charlotte Raven who recasts this rather pathetic joke as some sort of expression of radical individualism. Raven writes,

The timing of this incident – a matter of months before the release of a film depicting him as an anti-racist icon – suggests to me that this was no unfortunate faux pas. I think Muhammad Ali knew exactly what he was doing. In refusing to fall into line with the identity thrust upon him by the Michael Mann biopic, he was offering a timely reminder that his brand of subversive politics will always resist definition.

Leave it to the European Left to present anti-Semitism as a subversive act. Give them a few years, and they’ll be writing about how burning crosses is a postmodern rebellion against the iconography of patriarchal cultures.

Researchers: Hunger is a Political Issue

Researchers Craig Jenkins and Stephen Scanlan recently used United Nations data to try to find out what was the single largest factor distinguishing countries that suffer from hunger. You might think the obvious factor would be the country’s food supply, but instead it turned out to be the level of internal violence with in a country.

Jenkins and Scanlan looked at 53 developing countries with populations over 1 million. They found that the level of violence within a country had the single biggest affect on food supply and child hunger. Lack of democratic government and high levels of arms trade were also significant factors in determining whether or not a country suffered from hunger.

As Jenkins summed up the findings,

Food supply is not the central issue in reducing hunger. Hunger is largely a political issue.

Whereas some researchers have absurdly claimed that democracy might contribute to hunger problems, Jenkins findings were just the opposite — the more democracy, the less hunger. “We found that political democratization encourages economic growth and improvements in basic needs,” Jenkins said. “We need more democracy, not less.”

Their study also found that, contrary to a widely circulating myth, food imports in developing countries do not increase hunger — they just don’t seem to help it much either. “At the very least, food imports are not harmful, as some people have suggested,” Jenkins said. “It may be that if we could separate the various forms of food imports we would find that food aid – food that is donated — actually does help reduce hunger. However, the results suggest that international food imports must be better targeted to address underlying hunger problems.”

Source:

Worldwide hunger more a political problem than a supply problem, study finds. Ohio State University, January 2002.

Is SHARK a Terrorist Group?

One of the things that really angers me about animal rights groups is how they frequently twist the facts to serve their agenda. But sometimes their more outspoken opponents also cross that line, and such is the case with Utah State Rep. Paul Ray.

In letters to the U.S. Olympic Committee and in television appearance, Ray has repeatedly characterized Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) as a group that supports terrorism. In a letter to Olympic officials, for example, Ray wrote,

The rodeo is a very important piece of our culture here in Utah. We cannot allow terrorist groups such as SHARK and PETA to frighten us with violence.

Ray offers a defense of his statements saying, “I called them terrorists. I grouped them all together because it’s really pretty hard to distinguish one from the other.”

Is he serious? It is easy to distinguish animal rights groups from each other, for the most part, and whatever else SHARK is, it is not a terrorist group.

In fact, SHARK’s Steve Hindi has been one of the few people in the animal rights movement willing to speak out publicly against animal rights terrorism. Hindi sent a letter to Animal People shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that read,

In light of what has happened in New York and Washington D.C., I hope animal advocates will take a renewed stance against such tactics. Clearly, the terrorists have not helped their cause; they have damaged it. Our cause will also be damaged by terrorism, and animals will pay the price.

Anyone who knows SHARK knows we like to hit our opposition hard and often.

But terrorism is not the way to go. In our cause, the animals are the victims, and this is the message that must be carried to the public. The SHARK Tiger truck, for example, exposes animal abuse in a very hard-hitting but thoroughly peaceful manner.

As a movement, let us drop any consideration of terrorism, and build a global Tiger fleet!

Hindi was arrested in 1996 for using a paraglider to try to scare away geese that were being hunted. I’m not a big fan of hunt saboteur’s, but that hardly constitutes terrorism.

SHARK has filed a libel lawsuit against Ray. I doubt it will prevail, if only because libel lawsuits are extremely difficult to win in the United States. But Ray is being extremely irresponsible in twisting and distorting the facts to fit his agenda.

We get enough of that from the animal rights movement — we hardly need Ray jumping in to contribute to the confusion.

Sources:

Group sues lawmaker for libel. Greg Burton, The Salt Lake Tribune, February 5, 2002.

Utah lawmaker sued for defamation after calling animal advocates ‘terrorist groups’. Associated Press, February 5, 2002.