Yesterday, driving home from the office i hear on the radio that some two-thirds of Canadians want Canadian troops out of Afghanistan by 2009 even if the mission is not completed. The poll was conducted by Decima Research. Here is an excerpt from the 570 News website:

The vast majority of Canadians want this country's military mission in Afghanistan to end as scheduled in 2009, according to a new poll.

The survey by Decima Research, released Monday to The Canadian Press, found that two-thirds of respondents want Canadian troops to come home when the current mandate from Parliament expires in February 2009. Only 26 per cent of respondents believed the military mission should be extended "if that is necessary to complete our goals there."

What the???? Why not pull the troops out now and save the lives of our soldiers if the point is to show some token committment rather than to remove the Taliban and dampen islamic fundamentalism in the region ? Why wouldn't the Taliban simply go to ground and wait til 2009 to make a comeback if our committment is a political time line? Why stay at all? If we have a purpose in being there, and I for one (or one third) believe we do, then we must see it through. Otherwise, get the troops out now and we can contnue whistling past the graveyard, attempting to green the nation, while the struggle of our time washes us up on whatever shore it may.

via Instapundit:

Saudis close Canadian education booths staffed by women A Canadian embassy booth and another for a private Montreal college were shut down at a Saudi Arabia education fair last week because they were being run by women. Organizers for the Canadian contingent say three women staffing the booths were forced to leave the fair by the country's religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, even though they had received permission to be there. George Chrysomilides, president of the Canadian Education Network, said there hasn't been an incident like this in the 10 years Canada has attended the event, and he plans to get to the bottom of it. "From what I hear ... the religious police were very rude. They shouted at them in a way that was disrespectful and they shut down the booth, the Canadian embassy booth as well as the LaSalle College booth," Mr. Chrysomilides said in an interview yesterday.

EXPLOSIVE MOUSE

NPR reports:

One former Taliban official and Afghan author on the group says the Taliban's goal at this stage is not to take over Afghanistan — which they neither have the manpower nor popular support for — but to force the ouster of Western troops from Afghanistan.

(via: Gen X At 40)

Via Dust My Broom:

A Muslim journalist beaten with a cricket bat outside a Toronto-area home fears for his life after facing repeated death threats apparently because someone has deemed his writing to be anti-Islam.

A cricket bat? In North America the preferred club is the baseball bat... wait a second:

 The CP article doesn’t mention that the attackers were fellow Muslims.

With so much of the news rightly focusing on Virgina Tech, the mass murdering of muslems in Iraq by other muslems continues. CBC reports:At least 164 killed in series of Baghdad blasts

At least 164 people were killed and dozens were wounded Wednesday in four bomb attacks in Baghdad, one of the deadliest waves of violence since the start of a joint U.S.-Iraqi security campaign in the capital two months ago.

In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in a mostly Shia area of central Baghdad, killing at least 116 people and injuring 145, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.

 Victor David Hanson, as usual offers some perspective:

What is disturbing about the Iranian piracy is that it establishes a warning of what we can come to expect when Iran is nuclear, and how organizations like the UN, the EU, and NATO will react. If a few Iranian terrorists in boats can paralyze an entire nation and the above agencies, think what a half-dozen Iranian nukes will do. This was the hour of Europe to step forward and show the world what it can do with sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts, and how such soft power is as effective as gunboats—and it is passing.

Victor Davis Hanson is writing on historical islamic imperialism. It is well worth the read. Here is an excerpt:

But unlike the West, where Christianity began as the persecuted victim of the Roman Empire and conceived of its own empire as a spiritual one apart from the political realm, Islam “was inextricably lined with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers.” Muhammad could thus “cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura,” a rationalization of domination that drives the contemporary jihadists like Osama bin-Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini, who just like centuries of warriors before them justify their aggression by quoting Muhammad’s farewell address, in which the Prophet laid down the injunction “to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

Self-censorship in the face of the islamic ideology in Germany. More tolerating intolerance. So long to Mozart.