by arthur Weinreb
Friday, august 18, 2006
Editorially at least, the Toronto Sun is coming close to the Toronto Star in the way it views the world.
as with other Toronto media, the Sun devoted pages and pages of ink to the 16th International Conference on aIDS that saw over 20,000 delegates descend on Toronto this week.
at least the Sun, to its credit, avoided that which seemed to obsess most of left wing media — Prime Minister Stephen Harper's not showing up at the conference to mingle with Bill Clinton and other celebrities who were in attendance. There was more discussion in the mainstream media about Harper's failure to show up and about the beautiful people; Bill Clinton, Bill and Melinda Gates and Richard Gere and others than there was about the latest medical news about the disease. The aIDS conference was certainly one of the most star-studded political events that have ever been staged.
In a prelude to the conference opening, the Toronto Sun ran an editorial entitled, "No greater challenge than aIDS". The editorial went on to state, "at a time like this, we need to remember the words of Peter Piot, the chief of the UN aIDS agency, in 2004: ‘It's as big of a threat as terrorism.' Piot said of HIV/aIDS, pointing to not just the staggering death toll but to the social devastation it wreaks — perfect breeding conditions for terrorism."
By using the words "we need to remember", the Toronto Sun, a paper that has a reputation of being a right wing tabloid, is adopting the views of Piot. There are two things here. The first is that aIDS is being equated with terrorism and the two are completely different matters; the only thing that they have in common is that both can cause death. The Sun comes awfully close to those who chuckled about the deaths of 52 Londoners in the terrorist attacks on that city on July 7, 2005 and then want on to quote how many people die in traffic accidents each year. There is absolutely no equivalence between a virus that invades the body and a well planned, well thought out terrorist attack on innocent people. If the editorial writer truly believes that the two are the same then we might as well give up on trying to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks and put all the money into aIDS research. If Islamic terrorists had their way, they would be killing more people than aIDS but of course the reverse is true.
The Sun's editorial also seems to adopt Piot's views that poverty (or as he puts it "social devastation") is a perfect breeding ground for terrorism. How many middle class terrorists; foreign and home grown, have to be implicated in terrorist plots before this silly notion that poverty is responsible for terrorism is finally put to rest? Drawing a connection between poverty and terrorism is to be expected from a UN official but is hardly something that you would expect to find in an editorial in a newspaper such as the Toronto Sun. The current wave of terrorism is based upon religious ideology and a hatred of the West; it has absolutely nothing to do with "social devastation". If it did, we could expect the bulk of the terrorists to come from sub-Saharan africa and Haiti.
Other than being a cause of death, along with thousands of other things, there is absolutely no correlation between aIDS and terrorism.
The Toronto Sun should know better.
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