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A gruesome anniversary

We left behind a very interesting week: Nationwide, we sent our kids back to school and as we did, reports came out

We left behind a very interesting week: Nationwide, we sent our kids back to school and as we did, reports came out suggesting that our tertiary education standards have begun falling behind some Middle Eastern and Asian countries, hardly encouraging news; StatsCan produced another very controversial jobs report, suddenly setting a new record for self-employed people while reporting the loss of 11,000 jobs; Brent Rathgeber, former Conservative, now independent MP published a book likening Stephen Harper to a king and describing Canadian democracy as being in decline; in the province, as expected, Jim Prentice won the PC leadership race comfortably and secured his position as the new premier; and internationally, Prime Minister Stephen Harper took another step in taking Canada closer to the Middle Eastern powder keg by announcing that up to 100 Canadian special forces troops would be deployed to Iraq to support the fight against Islamic State, which occupies territories of Iraq and Syria and he also promised to contribute to a newly devised rapid deployment force for eastern Europe, mainly against Russia.

All of these developments have the potential of leading to intermediate or long-term impact on our lives as individuals, families, communities or as a nation.

But this week, we are also marking an anniversary of an event that shook post-Cold War world in such a way that we are still rattled by its aftershocks: 9/11.

If one were to remember the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there were so many different projections as to how the new international order would emerge: Francis Fukuyama, for one, declared the end of history; Samuel Huntington, for his part, predicted that the new international order would shape up on the axis of a new clash, this time not over ideology, but religion.

It looks like it is the latter prophecy that turned out to be the accurate one and 9/11 has played an undeniable part in the creation of the environment for the predicted clash.

To mark the anniversary, I downloaded the newest edition of “Loose Change” and watched it again. (It is freely available on the Internet.)

Loose Change is a documentary film questioning everything the public was led to believe in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The latest version of the film raises the bar further in making its point that there were lots of lies told to unsuspecting people throughout the world glued to their TV screens in the shock of the moment.

Questions raised in the documentary include:

- How did the towers collapse, and as importantly, how and why did a CIA/FBI service building (WTC 7-insured for $3.5 billion just weeks before) just across the twin towers come down when it was not targeted at all?

- Who really flew the plane to the Pentagon?

- Why were there no plane wreckage or remains of any passengers at the site of the alleged crash of the fourth hijacked plane (Flight 93) in Pennsylvania?

The US went to war in Vietnam based entirely on a (now officially acknowledged) fabrication, the alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack, which was totally imagined by the Pentagon to urge President Johnson to sign the act to send US troops to southeast Asia.

Whether the clash of civilizations, this time a global conflict, has been launched based on another lie has yet to be decided in the court of history.