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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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This seems to be a claim that you are just taking at face value

Well, I provided a link, and frankly it is pretty common knowledge. The Heritage Foundation has written about it and federal law now requires that the State Department issue biannual reports on the practice.

So you seem to be suggesting that India (parliamentary democracy, not authoritarian government BTW) faked evidence

  1. No, as I said, "The Interpol reference might not mean much" and "My only point was that the fact that Interpol has issued an arrest warrant does not, in and of itself, necessarily mean anything." Note the tentative nature of those statements.
  2. Ostensible parliamentary democracies can be authoritarian. See, eg, Hungary. And if you are not aware of the trends toward authoritarianism in India in recent years, you should be. Again, it is common knowledge and has been a somewhat thorny issue re US foreign policy of late.

but wouldn't do the same thing to try to have him extradited from Canada?

As noted several times, neither you nor I know what efforts India made to extradite him, and we certainly don't know what evidence it gave to Canada in support of any application it submitted.

But would send assassins to shoot him on Canadian soil?

  1. I have not opined that they did. I simply noted that the Interpol action is not necessarily evidence of anything.

  2. However, yes, regimes sometimes prefer their opponents dead to the alternative of giving a forum to their views via a trial. Especially a leader of a secessionist movement. Moreover, an assassination gives the regime deniability, unlike a trial. So there is nothing inherently illogical about it.

So my initial comment on this was:

The big picture question is why wasn't he extradited already, considering that he's been wanted by India/Interpol since 2016 for involvement in what seems to be clearcut terrorism. (theatre bombing)

Given the history with Air India, he doesn't seem like somebody we would normally want to keep around, had India made a request to bring him back for trial -- I wonder whether it's wise for Trudeau to stir the pot too much on what did or didn't happen in between now and then?

How in the world would you interpret this as me having extreme certainty about the Interpol warrant or anything else to do with extradition?

It is simply that I wonder why nobody moved to extradite him between 2015 and now, and whether questions about this will make the Trudeau government look all that great. (depending on the answers to those questions, of course -- but anything that could be spun as "harbouring accused theatre bomber" is probably not politically beneficial for them)

The entire rest of this thread is extremely tangential to this point, which I will raise again as a persistent discussion pattern with you that would be better avoided.

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