Category Archives: Canada

Muslim girl ejected from tournament for wearing hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Asi MansoorFive young teams from across Canada walked out of a Quebec soccer tournament Sunday because a young Muslim girl was ejected for wearing a hijab.

Calling the rule banning the headscarf worn by Muslim women racist, four other teams followed Asmahan Mansour’s team, the Nepean Selects from Ottawa, after she was thrown out for running afoul of a Quebec Soccer Association rule.

CBC News, 25 February 2007

“The tremendous support shown for the Muslim player is an indication that common sense and respect for religious differences are more powerful than arbitrary rules,” said CAIR-CAN Executive Director Karl Nickner.

CAIR news release, 26 February 2007

See also “Muslims decry soccer referee’s call on hijab”, Montreal Gazette, 27 February 2007

Another plug for Taj Hargey

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The legal efforts by a Muslim father to force a Buckinghamshire school to permit his 12-year old daughter to wear the niqab should be resisted by sensible integrated British Muslims. This misguided judicial action, if successful, will not only set a deplorable precedent for Muslim exceptionalism, but will also exacerbate frayed tensions between a (largely) self-segregating Muslim community and an antagonistic general public. This legal test case is so critical as to serve as a defining moment in the battle for the hearts and mind of Muslims in this country.

“The disputed decision by a father to protect the ‘human rights’ of his daughter by insisting that she wears the full-face mask in school should not be seen in isolation. It is at the root of a frightening theological convulsion that is underway in the Islamic world. Driven by a toxic combination of Wahhabi-Salafi-Ikhwani-Deobandi religious extremists, this militant movement seeks to resurrect the caliphate not only in the heartlands of Islam itself, but elsewhere as well.”

Taj Hargey (for background details see here) writes in the Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2007

And who exactly are these people who want to “resurrect the caliphate not only in the heartlands of Islam itself, but elsewhere as well”? Not even Hizb ut-Tahrir holds that position. Whatever your view on the niqab issue, to portray this as part of a campaign to impose an Islamic state in the UK plays to all the worst paranoid stereotypes about the “Muslim threat”. It’s no wonder Taj Hargey is enthusiastically promoted by the Torygraph and the likes of John Ware.

Unfortunately, Cristina Odone seems to have fallen for Hargey’s spurious claims to represent “moderate Muslims”:

Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2007

Meanwhile in an article entitled “School at centre of veil row gets overseas backing“, the Guardian reports that Hargey is boasting that he has the support and financial backing of a group calling itself the Muslim Canadian Congress. This is an organisation that participated in the hysterical “No sharia law in Canada” campaign against the proposal to extend state-sponsored faith-based family arbitration to Muslims in Ontario. In August last year a section of the MCC split away to form a rival organisation, the Canadian Muslim Union, accusing the MCC of aligning itself with the enemies of the Muslim community. The breakaway faction were denounced by the MCC leadership as “Canadian supporters of Hezbollah” – because they had joined a demonstration against Israel’s attack on Lebanon!

So this is where Hargey is getting his international support from – an organisation whose politics are evidently barely distinguishable from those of Harry’s Place.

Canadian town tells migrants: you can’t kill women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HerouxvilleImmigrants wishing to live in the small Canadian town of Herouxville, Quebec, must not stone women to death in public, burn them alive or throw acid on them, according to an extraordinary set of rules released by the local council.

The declaration, published on the town’s Web site, has deepened tensions in the predominantly French-speaking province over how tolerant Quebecers should be toward the customs and traditions of immigrants.

“We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here,” said the declaration. “Therefore we consider it completely outside these norms to … kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc.”

Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, said the declaration had “set the clock back for decades” as far as race relations were concerned. “I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion … in a public document written by people in authority who discriminate openly,” he told Reuters.

Reuters, 30 January 2007

See also BBC News, 31 January 2007

Hitch confronts ‘the Islamist menace’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HitchensIn the Winter 2007 issue of City Journal Christopher Hitchens reviews Mark Steyn’s book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, not uncritically. He does take issue with Steyn’s sneers at Martin Amis, pointing out that liberals like Amis share much of Steyn’s hostility towards Islam and Islamism.

Hitchens writes: “Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.” To prove his point Hitchens quotes Amis’s vile anti-Muslim diatribe from last September – which proposes subjecting the Muslim community as a whole to travel bans, racial profiling, strip searches and deportation – while at the same time describing his chum as “profoundly humanistic and open-minded”.

(To be fair, Hitchens does baulk at a statement from Sam Harris, who has written: “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.” Hitch characterises this as an “irresponsible remark”. You could say.)

The basic problem with a lot of liberals, Hitchens says, is that “they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the ‘Third World’.” Furthermore, this inexplicable sympathy with the oppressed has given rise to “the stupid neologism ‘Islamophobia’, which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism”.

Like Steyn, Hitchens warns against “the Islamist project of a ‘soft’ conquest of host countries”. He tells us that “Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s ‘real’ spokesmen … encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish”. With evident approval, Hitch cites Steyn’s complaint that “most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another ‘faith community’ … and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism”.

Overall, despite minor criticisms, Hitchens endorses “Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization”.

Anti-Muslim incidents on the rise at Ontario college

Posted on by Bob Pitt

McMaster University’s director of human rights and equity services is worried that racism and Islamophobia are growing on campus. Mark Walma said it is often subtle but it is affecting the environment for the school’s minorities, which include 1,500 students who are Muslim. He organized a seminar on campus yesterday to address the problem. It was attended by about 100 students. “We’ve been tracking an alarming number of racist incidents ranging from derogatory comments and opinions expressed by students and faculty to physical violence against Arab and Muslim students and it’s not a healthy climate for studying or working,” says Walma.

Hamilton Spectator, 19 January 2007

The sick mindset that breeds Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

From Pope’s anti-Islam comments to Church signs saying, “You must remember, Islam is the enemy”, and “The Koran needs to be flushed”, a Church in west Windsor, Canada, came out in its true colors with publicly promoting anti-Islam hatred.

On January 11, 2007, Campbell Baptist Church organized a lecture of a purported former Muslim terrorist, Zachariah Anani, to warn the public that Islam is a religion of war being brought to Canadian soil.

Donald McKay, senior pastor at the church, said the event was organized simply to propagate what the church believes to be “absolute truth”. So the “absolute truth” which the Church decided to propagate through Anani’s lecture, entitled The Deadly Threat of Islam, is that Islam teaches nothing less than the “ambushing, seizing and slaying” of non-believers – especially Jews and Christians.

According to Donald McKay, “We have no desire to be offensive. We have no desire to polarize people unnecessarily”. It is, in his words, the Islamic faith that is “oppressive” and “vicious”.

Media Monitors Network, 14 January 2007

See “Rage over anti-Islam rally”, Windsor Star, 12 January 2007

Ethnic smears hinder good government

Posted on by Bob Pitt

More on the “Islam won” story (see here). The statement was originally attributed to Omar Alghabra after he was selected as a Liberal Party candidate in Canada. When that account was shown to be a fraud, the accusation was shifted to another Muslim politician, Khalid Usman.

“It’s an allegation Mr. Usman vehemently denies. ‘I know for a fact I never said Islam won. It was nothing about Islam taking over something,’ he said. ‘There is no way in the world. I never would have said it.’ Mr. Usman said he was out of the room for much of the meeting and, when he came in, was invited to the stage to make a few comments. He allows he may have uttered a traditional praise to Allah, but not with the intention of bringing religion into politics. If a Christian politician were to shout ‘hallelujah’ after a victory, would there be a controversy?”

Yorkregion.com, 29 December 2005

Cases of detained Muslims tarnish Canadian Mounties’ image

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Canada’s top law enforcement agency has been shaken by the aftershocks of its role in the abduction of a Canadian Muslim in 2002, when U.S. agents transported the man from New York for interrogation under torture in Syria.

Last week, the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police resigned, even though he had already apologized publicly to the victim, Maher Arar. On Tuesday, the government announced new inquiries into the cases of three other Canadian Muslims who had been imprisoned in Syria, and a judicial commission recommended broad new oversight of the RCMP’s intelligence arm.

The spotlight on the RCMP resulted from a two-year judicial inquiry into the case of Arar, now 36, who was stopped while changing flights at an airport in New York City in 2002. The Canadian citizen was bound, blindfolded and spirited to his native Syria by U.S. agents for questioning about terrorism.

Arar was kept for 10 months, much of it in a coffin-like dungeon, and tortured before being released without charges to return to Canada. In September, the extensive inquiry concluded that Arar was an innocent computer programmer who was named as an “Islamic extremist” because of fabrications and incompetence by an overzealous Mountie intelligence operation.

Washington Post, 15 December 2006

The ‘long Eurabian night’ closes in on us

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SteynBill Murray summarises Mark Steyn’s paranoid ravings about the Islamisation of Europe in his new book America Alone:

“Birthrates in many European countries fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1 for every woman, compared to regions of the Muslim world where women typically bear seven children each. The result, Steyn posits, will be a dramatic shift in global power in the coming decades, with the chief beneficiary being radical Islam. ‘How bad is it going to get in Europe?” he asks. ‘As bad as it can get, as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it.’

“… Steyn’s choicest attacks are reserved for a Europe run by closeted elites. For the past 60 years, he insists, they have sustained an environment of weak social contracts where the relationship between rights and responsibilities for a European and his or her government ‘is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship’. A European welfare state that promotes dependency and extended adolescence is, in Steyn’s eyes, as grave a cultural sin as can be committed, leading to divided communities, large-scale violence and a wholesale replacement of Europe’s dominant culture.”

Bloomberg.com, 26 October 2006

Authoritarian currents swirl in debate on veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

 

Authoritarian currents swirl in debate on veil

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 22 October 2006

The controversy over women’s veils is the latest example of Muslim religious/cultural practices being held up to disproportionate scrutiny.

This is a reflection of the fear-driven paranoia about Muslim terrorism and, mistakenly, all Muslims. Or, it is part of a political strategy to divert attention away from the catastrophic failure of the “war on terrorism” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Israeli Occupied Territories.

It’s easier to blame a minority than confronting our complicity in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians abroad and, second, our gnawing panic that rather than curbing terrorism, we are fanning it.

It’s also hard to accept that the niqab — the garment that covers the woman’s body, including the face — is not a Muslim issue alone but rather one central to democracy.

That a majority of Muslim women do not wear the niqab, or even the hijab, the head scarf, does not nullify the right of those who do.

Otherwise, a democracy ends up emulating either tyrants (Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, or the late Shah of Iran and the late Kemal Ataturk of Turkey) who persecute hijabis, or unforgiving clerics (the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran and Saudi Arabia) who persecute non-hijabis.

The only sound democratic approach is to leave the decision to the sovereignty of the individual woman.

Those who argue that Muslim women may be under male pressure to conform are being as patronizing as the men who assume women are incapable of independent judgment even in free and democratic societies.

Some Muslim women might face social and religious pressures but we can’t know that they are subjected to any more of it than women in other religious communities. They may face less, given the lack of a central authority in Islam.

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