Free Republic

Pay to pray irks MuslimsU of C students' union charges Ramadan rent Robin Summerfield Calgary Herald Wednesday, October 29, 2003 "We have to pay for prayer. I don't know the words to use to describe that," says Mubashir Iqbal, president of the Muslim Students' Association at the U of C. He's angry the university students' union is charging rent for Ramadan worshippers. Muslim students observing Ramadan at the University of Calgary are upset they will have to pay $2,500 for a place to pray on campus. The Muslim Students' Association, which represents 500 people on campus, is blaming the University...

Seven skiers dead in B.C. avalanche (Second in a month) Canadian Press Sunday, February 02, 2003 REVELSTOKE, B.C. -- Seven teens on a high-school ski excursion in the treacherous back country of east-central B.C. died Saturday when a half-kilometre-wide avalanche roared down from a mountainside and engulfed their group. It was the second deadly slide to hit the region in as many weeks. Seven adults perished in a slide in January. The dead were six boys and one girl, all in Grade 10 at Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School, a private day school on an expansive rural campus in the foothills southwest of...

Remembrance Day in Trudeaupia Mark Steyn National Post On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the guns fell silent. But peace is more than the absence of war. For the last decade, the world has been preoccupied with the messy unfinished business of the Great War, the "war to end all wars" -- first in Yugoslavia, the prototype multi-ethnic utopia, which fell apart along the old Habsburg/Ottoman fault line as if the last 80 years had never happened; and then in "the Middle East," an Anglo-French construct cooked up in the years after 1918. After...

Interview by Dan Goldwasser - (dsg@soundtrack.net) Release Date: 11/20/2001 Earlier last year, composer Howard Shore was signed to a three picture deal to score the highly-anticipated film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. SoundtrackNet had a chance to talk with Howard about his work on this epic film, and the challenges he faced in putting the soundtrack together. How long is the score in the film? The score is about two hours and thirty minutes in the film, although over three hours were composed. How did you figure out what to put on the album? That was ...

Saddle up and watch, Pilgrim Rondi Adamson National Post I appeared on a panel show recently, discussing the events of Sept. 11. Unfortunately, it was one of those shows where people phone in and say things. And when someone called in and berated the United States, saying it was acting "just like John Wayne," I could only roll my eyes. The John Wayne analogy is overused, and, worse, it is a bad analogy, inaccurate, one that insults not only Americans, in this case, but the memory of John Wayne. Saying "just like John Wayne" generally means someone has rushed ...

Unleash CSIS National Post The fight against terror at home is taking shape. On Thursday, John Manley, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs and chairman of Canada's Cabinet committee on security, announced new resources -- worth nearly $300-million -- that will be used to keep Canada safe. David Collenette, the Minister of Transport, will oversee new security equipment destined for our airports and other ports of entry. More and better trained customs officers will be on a heightened state of alert for the foreseeable future. Friday saw Elinor Caplan, the Minister of Immigration, unveil another aspect of the plan, a ...

How to frustrate further attacks John Keegan The Daily Telegraph The U.S. administration predicts the war against terrorism will last 10 years. Some members speak of a longer period, some of a war that can never end. There is no disagreement that the campaign will be protracted. It is certainly wrong to look for decisive results in the short term. Unless the Western forces enjoy quite remarkable luck, they are unlikely to find Osama bin Laden's whereabouts in the near future, destroy his hiding place, and arrest or kill him. They can make life very difficult for him, and ...

Freedom to denounce works both ways Canada has pitifully few warriors. It's not yet clear whether our government has led or followed public opinion since Sept. 11. The continued downplaying of our Parliamentary institutions, as the MPs stay on their Thanksgiving break, is deeply worrying. Nonetheless, Canada has gone to war again, by my count for the sixth time in the past 100 years (the First and Second World Wars, Korea, the Gulf War, the Kosovo war). The coalition has an open-ended commitment to waging war on terrorism. It may be a short and relatively easy campaign or it ...

Pacifists' ill-breeding scorns actual people What have we learned since September 11th? We've learned that poverty breeds despair, despair breeds instability, instability breeds resentment and resentment breeds extremism. Yes, folks, these are what we in the trade call "root causes." Which cause do you root for? "Poverty breeds instability" (The Detroit News)? Or "poverty breeds fanaticism" (Carolyn Lochhead in The San Francisco Chronicle)? Bear in mind that "instability breeds zealots" (John Ibbitson in The Globe And Mail), but that "fanaticism breeds hatred" (Mauve MacCormack of New South Wales) and "hatred breeds extremism" (Mircea Geoana, Romanian Foreign Minister). Above all, let's ...

As the United States and its NATO allies prepare to make war on terrorism, the British Columbia Teachers' Federation is urging public school teachers to teach A Culture of Peace. A new "lesson aid," as the teachers' union describes it, informs students "we go to war because we are misled or fail to use our intelligence to avoid it." Replete with quotes from the New Internationalist, a radical British group of anti-capitalist globaphobes, A Culture of Peace is chock-full of specious nonsense. If used, B.C. students will not learn that "Canada has soldiers that are buried all over Europe ...

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attack, our government seemed more concerned with preserving the status quo than strengthening our defences against terrorism. Lawrence MacAuley, the Solicitor-General, for instance, suggested he would fast-track legislation taking away the charitable status of known terrorist fronts, but did not want to make a "mistake" by moving too quickly and actually outlawing these organizations. Elinor Caplan, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, responded to those who called for tough new immigration and refugee policies by denouncing them vaguely as "anti-immigrant, anti-everything." But, to their credit, Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, and the ...

Dr. Doolittle had a two-headed creature called a Pushme-Pullyou, capable of going forward both ways. The Romans had a two-faced god called Janus, capable of looking both ways. In Canada, land of the free and once home of the brave, we have developed the soft-option crowd that wants it all ways. It is time to drag a sad, cowardly, thoughtless, hypocritical and contemptible part of the Canadian character out of the shadows and look it in the eye -- or in the mirror, as the case may be. I speak of those one-in-six of us, as revealed by a ...

Tepid speech, tepid nation Chrétien's yawner illustrates how soft country has grown TORONTO - The nation famous for Vimy Ridge and Dieppe, whose soldiers are buried in immaculate little graveyards across Europe, who died in their thousands in two world wars to win ground that other Allied troops could not, was last night praised as a land now best-equipped to offer hugs to a grieving planet. This was the astonishing sum of the message from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien last night in a speech to a Liberal fundraising dinner in downtown Toronto. It was his first major address since ...

In the two weeks that have passed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, much critical attention has been focused on the deficiencies of Canada's Armed Forces, intelligence-gathering services, anti-terrorism laws and refugee policies. Yet one weak link in Canada's fight against terrorism has escaped scrutiny: the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. The 3,600 men and women of the CCRA are the first to observe and interview new arrivals to this country. Given this significant responsibility, why hasn't Ottawa provided them with the authority, support or equipment necessary to properly do their job? Anyone who regularly crosses the border between ...

A Deficit in Protection Martin's comments show what priority national security really has Finance Minister Paul Martin did the nation's security forces no favours when he linked them to the possibility of future deficits. No more tax cuts or debt repayments? Sorry, too many people in uniform. Not, we notice, all departments will take a two per cent budget cut to pay for extra security. Cut spending? Not this government. Run a deficit and blame the people who might have to stand in harm's way. It was a performance synchronized with everything else which has taken place in Ottawa ...

Canada's war is already over Manley's promise of ground troops is less manly than it sounds Mark Steyn National Post Last Friday, while Canadians were demanding to know why they didn't rate a name-check in President Bush's speech, a unit of Britain's special forces, the SAS, came under enemy attack deep inside Afghanistan. There's the answer. If affronted Canucks would step back a moment, they'd see that the unusual feature of the Presidential address was that it was almost wholly free of the polite fictions of the foreign policy establishment. There was no mention of a "global coalition" or ...

I am old enough now that many things, especially in my own newspaper game, have become absolutely predictable. Mine is a wretchedly cyclical business anyway: A story breaks; in its wake comes the pure commentary, in the main remarkably uninformed; then the reaction to the reaction; and then, usually, before ordinary folks with a lick of sense have had a chance to digest what just happened, let alone pronounce themselves upon it in any way, it's gone, to be replaced by another. One such sequence was played out last week. First, out of San Jose, there was the news ...

President Bush, meet President Bartlet Can The West Wing survive the real America's new administration? Dan Brown National Post Now in its second season, The West Wing is NBC's flagship drama. The Wednesday-night program, which stars Martin Sheen as fictional president Josiah Bartlet, generates more buzz than the network's former standard bearer, ER, and draws an average weekly audience of almost 20 million viewers in the United States and Canada. Loved by viewers and television critics alike, The West Wing has nonetheless faced stiff competition in recent weeks from Fox's Temptation Island. But, because the Fox reality series comes ...

The president who just won't go away Unfortunately, we will have Clinton to kick around still Mark Steyn National Post 'What is the National Post thinking?" wrote Jack Todd in his Montreal Gazette sports column almost exactly two years ago. "This week a silly, meandering piece of almost transcendental stupidity made the front page, with some guy named Mark Steyn comparing Bill Clinton to OJ Simpson. Steyn seems to feel that having oral sex and fibbing about it is on a par with being an unconvicted murderer ..." Mr. Todd concluded by naming me as one of his "Zeros" of ...

Privatizing guns The federal government is looking to privatize its gun registry. Canadians (or Americans) who think they can do a better job than Anne McLellan of running it are invited to submit their proposals to Ottawa as soon as possible. Considering all the other government works that are crying out for privatization, the gun registry is an odd choice for action. Why not start with Canada Post, the CBC, or any of a dozen other government corporations and agencies? Granted, the gun registry does fit the profile of an organization deeply in need of private sector discipline: It ...