Have Canadians brought terrorism on themselves?

Commentators duke it out this week over whether or not the Afghan War is the cause of attacks plotted against Canadians.

Occasionally in the insular world of op-ed pages, a writer expresses a thought so explosive that it reverberates in columns around the country for days. Such was the case this week, when the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui penned an article that many of his colleagues interpreted as saying Canadians have brought terrorism upon themselves.

Among Siddiqui’s contentious statements were that while a common justification for fighting the Afghanistan war is “to ensure that the terrorists don’t come here,” a legitimate counterargument is “that they might come here precisely because we are there.” We must “stop being in denial that there is no connection between the wars we wage and the terrorist mayhem that they trigger,” he wrote, and recent terror arrests in Ottawa “should give us pause — so that we are not herded into blindly backing endless wars and occupations abroad.”

This is incendiary stuff for pundits to the right of Siddiqui, which to be fair is just about all of them. In the National Post, Adrian MacNair calls Siddiqui’s piece “an equivocation of a magnitude rarely seen in print” and accuses him of something called “yesbuttery.” The “logical extension to Mr. Siddiqui’s argument,” says MacNair “is that we have invited retribution from Muslims through intervention in their countries.” Siddiqui does not acknowledge that intervention in Afghanistan was legitimate and backed by the U.N. (Take note: this might be the first and last time a National Post columnist takes the U.N. seriously.)

The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente summarizes Siddiqui’s viewpoint as “It’s our foreign policy, stupid!” and writes, sarcastically, “If only we stopped waging war in Afghanistan, kowtowing to the imperialist Americans and sucking up to Israel, then people wouldn’t get so riled up they’d want to blow up Parliament.”

Not to be excluded, Terry Glavin of the Post also chimed in, calling Siddiqui’s concern an “imaginary problem,” saying no one’s “asking us to be ‘backing endless wars and occupations’ anywhere, blindly or otherwise. Even our Conservative prime minister is now firmly in the “troops out” camp.”

Looking forward to Siddiqui’s next column yet? It comes out tomorrow.