Readers: Harper and Century

readers: And 2012, alert readers will grasp, isn't as long ago as the 12th Century, according to Rabble. But that was then and 2018 is now, and not just as far as Harper is concerned. Still, wouldn't terrorism be a fair description of the Inquisition, the brutal effort to root out heresy carried out from the 12th to the early 19th centuries by what was effectively a non-state actor, as we say in the bland militaristic bureaucratese of the 21st Century And isn't the idea of excommunication for whatever reason, even if it is not much practiced any more, the sort of behaviour we associate to this day with religious cults I ask these questions only as a sort of back-handed defence of Stephen Harper, the former Conservative prime minister who obviously has far too much time on his hands these days, for travelling to Paris last Saturday to give an apparently well-compensated speech to a Free Iran rally sponsored by an Iranian exile group Harper's own government classified as terrorists as recently as 2012. Mojahedin-e Khalq, the group in question, often referred to as MEK and also known as the People's Mujahadeen, was declared by various Western governments to be a terrorist group in 1979, back in the days it wanted to overthrow the Shah of Iran, a geopolitical ally of the United States. Eventually, MEK ceased to be officially branded a terrorist group. The same year, as it turned out, someone else overthrew the Shah. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.