As you are probably already aware, one of our more delightful and thoughtful guest and a good friend, Dr. Tamil Boom-Boom Singh, was killed yesterday when a car bomb exploded outside his official residence. We morn his loss, the loss of his wife, two of his five children and the innocent well-wishers a man of Boom-Boom’s stature and reputation invariably attracts.

Two groups are vying for the honour of having killed so many innocent people.

Boom-Boom’s crime according to official communiqués from The Army of Allah The Compassionate and The Army of Allah the Merciful was suggesting that the Muslim God was conceited and enjoyed inflicting pain. No explanation was given as to why so many others had to die for this alleged insult to Allah by an honest man offering an honest opinion.

No doubt the authorities will quickly sort out whose army deserves the credit for this God inspired massacre and they will receive a heartfelt apology for the alleged distressing remarks Dr. Singh made on this program.

What can someone say about Tamil Boom-Boom Singh the former terrorist, father, humanitarian, statesman that hasn’t already been said? He got his nickname Boom-Boom by doing some of the same things that his assassins did to him. Poetic justice some have claimed. They did not know him.

Boom-Boom was not a religious man which is probably why the violence he did and the violence he inspired never reached the level of barbarity and depravity that religion provokes. He was, for most of his adult life, a spiritual man in the best tradition of eastern religion, some would say eastern mysticism. He believed that there is more to this mortal existence but did not claim to have a special knowledge of why we are here or that we are here to serve some benevolent or tyrannical, invisible God. He was not an arrogant man.

Eastern spirituality informs us that we are part of the universe not apart as the three so-called great monotheistic religions that came out of the deserts of the Middle East claim.

Acknowledging that he was a part of Creation, it was only a matter of time before Boom-Boom realised that by harming his fellow men and women he was harming himself. This self-mutilation was a sign of insanity and this insanity had to stop.

He cured himself then made it his life’s work to help others. He began to live his life according to that simple rule for getting along from Mencius, a Confucian philosopher who, almost three hundred years before another great teacher of the humanities would take up the theme, said: “All things are within me, and on self-examination, I find no greater joy than to be true to myself. We should do our best to treat others as we wish to be treated. Nothing is more appropriate than to seek after goodness.”

Boom-Boom as a teenager and a young man believed that violence was justified to help the powerless and the poor overcome the real and imagined oppression of the rich and powerful. He killed and risked his own life believing he was helping the oppressed. That was an irrational justification for murder he would later realize.

Are those who murder and maim the innocent, the defenceless in the name of Allah suffering from a similar delusion or do they have a licence to kill; a licence to murder and mutilate granted to them by a higher authority? Do they have any claim to a higher purpose for the atrocities they commit?

The revered hero of Islamic terrorists and murderers is Muhammad Atta. You may remember him as the leader of the terrorist group that flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, killing almost 3,000 innocent human beings.

Muhammad Atta left a note of encouragement for his fellow murderers. He wrote and I quote: “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out.”

So many innocent people dying a horrible death, some blown to bits; others burnt alive by exploding jet fuel; others falling or jumping to their death in the plaza below to escape the fire above; the survivors of the initial attack crushed between slabs of concrete as the buildings collapsed, their lives squeezed out of them like so much toothpaste all for the sake of satisfying a groups of merciless young men’s sexual fantasies about what awaited them after their killing work, in the name of their God, was done.

Confucianism, not unlike the teachings of the Greek philosophers of antiquity, also informs us that “correct conduct arises, not through external force, but as a result of virtues developed internally through the observation of laudable models of behaviour.” For the murderers of the innocent there is an external force, it is a merciless, vengeful God called Allah; their laudable model of behaviour, His Messenger the Prophet Muhammad and the men he inspires, men like Muhammad Atta.

Muslim children are taught, at the earliest possible age, to fear this Allah and to be wary of, if not to hate anyone who does not fear him or acknowledge His existence. In adulthood, sometimes as teenagers, at the slightest provocation they will strike, not always out of hate, but out of fear of what this Allah will do to them if they don’t kill those who don’t fear or acknowledge Him and submit to His will. Sometimes, like Muhammad Atta and the depraved young men he led, they slaughter the innocent simply for the favours they believe this Allah will grant them, including the gift of young virgins, to do with them what they will, as payment for killing innocent and defenceless men, women and children.

Is there any hope that men who commit these atrocities will change for the better the way Boom-Boom did? We can only hope. I will, we will miss you Boom-Boom [regaining his composure].

Johnny: During the past four days we have heard from a renowned economist and author Dr. Diane Frances Smith and her theory that it was bad economics, freeloader economics was the term she used, that caused Canada to break up.

Next, we heard from the MAD man himself the Ayatollah Muhammad Abdullah Domeini and his assertion that it was religious persecution, specifically against Muslims that caused the country to splinter. His refusal to condemn the murder of Dr. Tamil Singh is not only a testament to his uncompromising reputation, some say madness, but also raises serious doubts as to whether there was actual persecution of Muslims prior to The Fracture as claimed by the Ayatollah during his visit with us.

What Muslims may have interpreted as persecution may simply have been measures taken in self-defence as believers tried through peaceful and less peaceful means to transform the democracy that had welcomed them into a theocracy governed by the Koran and the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad. Not unlike what is happening today.

Following the Ayatollah was the much loved and regretted Tamil Boom-Boon Singh who made the argument that it was extreme multiculturalism, the lack of a common history and the failure to promote core Canadian values such as secularism, democracy, freedom of speech and expression instead of unthinking tolerance that made The Fracture inevitable.

After Dr. Singh, it was committed feminist, author and obvious admirer of that great late Canadian expatriate economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Maude Elizabeth Barnstone, with her theory that The Fracture was a rebellion by what Galbraith called the underclass against the politics of a plutocracy, government by the wealthy.

Today, we hope to talk with the Vice-president of Québec, Jean Joseph Souviens who, you may have noticed, is not here. We hope to reach him via teleconferencing in his office in Québec city. [looking towards his producer]

My producer tells me that it will be a few more minutes before we hear from Vice-president Souviens which gives me time to answer a question that was sent to us from a French viewer. French as in France that is.