Glenn Greenwald was in Montreal on Thursday and said some interesting things. In his own spirit of seeking to explode myths, I focus on some important mistakes he made.

The media have already ventilated the scandal around his article on the tragedy in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, where one soldier died and another was injured in an attack with an automobile. Greenwald’s article blaming Canada for the attack was published in the online magazine The Intercept, as he acknowledged, one hour before the murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial.

But in his talk at McGill University, he did not apologize for offending anyone’s sensibilities. Rather, just as he observed that emotions were “at their rawest,” Greenwald took the controversy in stride, as if it were all in a day’s work and the unavoidable price of his fame.

Besides projecting onto Canada the post-9/11 American question, “Why do they hate us?” Greenwald tried to assert that the attacks surprised Canadians because Canadians have been unaware of Canada’s participation in what used to be called the “war on terror.” This assertion is not credible.

Public opinion polls over the last decade have shown Canadians to be skeptical about the possibility of victory, for example, over the Taliban, yet they also showed us to be proud of our soldiers’ valour. But even skepticism about victory signifies awareness of the fight.

Perhaps the worst myth Greenwald continued to propagate was the American myth that terrorist violence in our midst is the result of our own misdeeds. It is easy to see why anyone would wish to believe this. If we blame ourselves, we gain the illusion of control: if we change, then circumstances will change.

Self-blame also matches the Canadian national character, one that is perhaps more open to self-criticism than any other, and seeks to give others the benefit of the doubt. After all, we apologize when someone else steps on our feet in a public place.

But in fact, some Muslims have been killing infidels and other Muslims for religious and political reasons long before Western interference, indeed since the dispute over the succession to Muhammad, which is at the origin of the Sunni/Shiite divide.

To take but one example, the current Iranian regime is better understood by a reading of the history of the Safavid dynasty (1501-1736) than by facile references to U.S. support for the shah. The Safavids were a militant and imperialist theocratic Shiite regime whose rulers were infamous for their slaughters of Sunni Muslims.

The present Tehran regime’s foreign policy claims coincide with and surpass the sphere of international political influence achieved by the Safavids. They may indeed be called “Safavid restorationists.”

Greenwald condescends to terrorists and dehumanizes them by denying them their human agency. He seems under the sway of the Enlightenment myth, popularized but not invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of the “noble savage” corrupted by Western civilization.

This approach also denies terrorists the individual responsibility that they in fact claim. At the same time, individuals are surrounded by circumstances that others create. We are all responsible for our own actions, but we are not the only actors. It would be blind and self-centred for Canadians to assume automatically that we deserve all the blame for our own problems, as Greenwald effectively would have us do.

[First published in Montreal Gazette.]