Canada Prof Shocked, Shocked at Being Charged in Paris Synagogue Bombing [on Hassan Diab]

Hassan Diab is a part-time instructor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. Now he is wanted in France on multiple counts of murder, attempted murder and wilful destruction of property for by a bombing outside a Paris synagogue that killed four people in October 1980. The bombing was apparently the work of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is universally described as a Marxist/nationalist group. In this as in its other operations, however, it acted as either a willing or unwitting tool of the jihad against Israel.

In this article, we hear about what a terrific guy he is, how he would weep if he had to swat a fly, how he petted dogs and gave candy to orphans. We have seen this before. It was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders: “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet -- apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written…"

Were these SS mass murderers really decent fellows? From their own perspective, and that of their friends and family, they probably were. And that is what makes what they did all the more chilling in the grotesque banality of its workaday evil. They were adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational and good, and the murders were a means to that goal. It was not just a noteworthy achievement, but a necessity, for them to remain “decent fellows,” for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society (but what was in reality one that created a nightmare of fear and coercion and totalitarian control, as does Sharia). That their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble them, for it was all for -- in their view -- a goal that remained good.

Today’s jihad terrorists are likewise the adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. And those murders, here again, are not committed for their own sake, but for the sake of a societal vision hardly less draconian and evil than that of Hitler, but one also that portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good -- as the resurgent Somali jihad shows us yet again. But the continued reference to such people as “terrorists” pure and simple, and the refusal of Western governments, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative, as I am being reminded yet again this week) and most law enforcement officials to examine their ideology at all, only reinforces the idea that these people are raving maniacs who are interested solely in chaos for its own sake. The society they want to build, and the means besides guns and bombs that they are using to build it, remain below the radar screen of most analysts. These people are just “terrorists,” interested only in “terror.” And so the clueless mainstream media is continually surprised when their friends and family affirm that they are nice guys after all. Decent fellows, like the genocidal family men of the SS.

“Ottawa prof accused in Paris bombing shocked by charges: lawyer,” by Matthew Pearson for the Canwest News Service, November 15 (thanks to James):