Segacs’s World I Know

I’ve long maintained that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it. Wingnuts have been doing it for years… and apparently, it’s paying off.

A new poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid found that now, five years after 9/11, over one in five Canadians believe that the whole thing was a US-concocted conspiracy:

One in five Canadians believes the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden and were actually a plot by influential Americans, according to a poll released on Monday.

The Ipsos-Reid poll found that 22 percent of Canadians, and 26 percent of young Canadians, agree with the conspiracy theory. The number was the highest, at 32 percent, in Quebec, which has shown the least support for the U.S. war on terror.

The poll asked if the events of Sept. 11, “including the thousands of American citizens who lost their lives on that day, were actually orchestrated by a group of highly influential Americans and others as part of a wider global conspiracy to profit from and gain power and who are actually protecting Osama Bin Laden from being captured.”

Objection, Your Honour, leading the witness? Er, not exactly. Though another one of my favourite sayings is that “figures don’t lie but liars figure”, if anything, I’d expect that the blatant nuttiness of this question would, if anything, underestimate the number of people who believe in some sort of 9/11-related conspiracy theory. In all likelihood, there are even more people who would’ve answered “yes” to a question with softer wording. Scary thought.

And here in La Belle Province, next time you’re out for drinks with a few friends, look to the left and look to the right; one of you has been taken in by the conspiracy theorists.

Has it really been five years? It seems like just yesterday when I was waking up to the news that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

How could any of us have known, at that moment, that life would forever be defined as “before” and “after” that moment? How could we have realized the impact that this event would have?

Now, five years later, the world certainly isn’t any safer. Maybe we’ve opened our eyes to what we were willfully ignoring before. Maybe things have really gotten a whole lot worse. Maybe it’s both. In any case, terrorism has become part of our collective language, part of the daily discourse, an almost-expected part of the news cycle. And I look around and see a war that has no end in sight and no marked progress being made.

This is the world we live in now. A world that is much less innocent, much less naive. A world filled with scary things. Will Iran get nuclear weapons and launch them at Israel or the West? Will North Korea go renegade? Where in the world will Al-Qua’eda strike next? What major disaster will befall us next?

But I also see a world with so much potential, a world where extraordinary people are accomplishing amazing things every day. A world worth fighting for.

After five years, maybe it is finally appropriate to put aside this chapter of mourning and focus on our collective potential?

Hezbollah’s latest cheerleader? None other than George Galloway:

Who’s surprised? (Hat tip: Eric).

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is taking more steps to stamp out dissent and reform in Iran:

Iran’s hard-line president urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country.

With his call echoing the rhetoric of the nation’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad appears determined to remake Iran by reviving the fundamentalist goals pursued under the republic’s late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iran still has strong moderate factions, and since taking office a year ago Ahmadinejad has moved to replace pragmatic veterans in the government and diplomatic corps with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners. His administration also has launched crackdowns on independent journalists, Web sites and bloggers.

Hey Mahmoud, what’s wrong? Can’t stand the blogging competition?

Just a year and a half after UTT St-Laurent was firebombed, another Jewish school was attacked last Friday night, when someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the window.

The Orthodox Jewish boys’ school in Outremont already had enhanced its security, along with the other Jewish schools in the city, after the UTT incident. The attack was caught on video, though the assailant’s face wasn’t recognizable.

Several prominent people have already denounced the incident, including Quebec government representatives. The CJC is urging authorities to treat this as a hate crime, though police are still investigating and further evidence will surely be required to support this theory, obvious as it may seem on the surface.

Now, it seems that security will have to be upgraded even further, and additional funds will be needed to accomplish all this. Last time around, the community raised huge sums of money, and gifts poured in to rebuild the destroyed school library from people such as Russell Crowe, even. But this year, with such a priority being placed on rushing emergency funds to Israel, it may be tougher to address these needs at home, coming as they do at a time when schools are reopening and anxious parents have to worry not only about homework and extracurriculars, but about the safety of their children while in the classroom.

It’s sickening to me that, right here in Montreal, grade school children should require extra security. Children ought to be off limits. Period. But this hasn’t ever been the case in Israel, and it is no longer the case here at home.

If there was any justice in the world, the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes would be made to pay for the additional security requirements. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, we’ll keep paying for more cameras and guards and security measures, while people keep committing hateful acts. I don’t particularly like to think about where this road leads.

So is it a planet or isn’t it? Pluto’s dubious status continues to cause debate among scientists, stargazers, and a lot of people with nothing better to do.

In the meantime, it seems they’re filming a movie in my neighbourhood. This struck me as more than a little odd when I passed by the orange signs, since I can’t even begin to fathom why anyone would choose my area – good for cheap rent, not much good for atmosphere – for a film location. So I checked out the information on the signs. The film, it seems, has a working title of “Neptune” – which, as far as I know, is definitely still a planet. No information about it appears yet on IMDb, as far as I can tell.

Oh, and a European space probe crashed into the moon yesterday. Seems this was designed to satisfy people who’d become bored with “World’s Scariest Police Chases” and spectacular NASCAR crashes.

I was away over the long weekend so I didn’t hear the news until last night. Steve Irwin was a real Australian icon. Though he had his fans and his critics in life, his death has sent shock waves through the world. A real tragedy.

Wind chimes.

Who thought it would be a good idea to put them up in an apartment building, anyway? My neighbours, that’s who.

Living in a wind tunnel just got much more musical.

It’s Labour Day Weekend, and we all know what that means. That’s right, they’re everywhere: Ontario drivers have invaded our highways, side streets and alleyways. The “Je Me Souviens” uniformity has been broken up by a sea of “Yours to Discover”.

Some are bringing their kids to school and helping them get settled in the residence. Others are just visiting friends or relatives, or simply taking a weekend vacation. Whatever their reasons for being here, though, they have one thing in common: They don’t know how to drive in Quebec.

Even though their license plates are nearly the same colour as ours, they’re easy to spot: They’re the ones going 100kph in the fast lane; they even slow to 70 on the Met, thinking for some strange reason that the speed limits mean something here. They stop at crosswalks. They use their turn signals. They make 3-second stops at stop signs. They stubbornly insist on driving at their speed even when all the traffic around them is whizzing by and giving them a honk-and-finger tabarnac.

In short, they’re a major menace and they’re bound to cause numerous accidents. Watch out for them.