Category Archives: Canada

‘The latest hand-wringing on multiculturalism and its first cousin, immigration, in reality is a debate about Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim-bashing dilutes our democratic values

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 11 June 2006

Bigotry increases in times of trouble, as we have seen in our own age.

An anti-French backlash was palpable in English Canada when bilingualism was introduced in 1969 and a year later we had the FLQ crisis. I felt it in the Prairies when the paper I worked for, The Brandon Sun, had the foresight and courage to support the Official Languages Act and oppose the War Measures Act.

The recession of the early 1990s stoked anger at multiculturalism and helped spawn the anti-immigrant Reform party.

The 1990 Oka crisis, the 1999 Mi’kmaq fisheries dispute in Nova Scotia and the Nisga’a land deal in British Columbia led to charges that “race-based rights” for First Nations would undermine common Canadian values.

On all those occasions, as also during the recent standoff in Caledonia, pessimists said racism lurks just below the surface and can bubble up any time. Congenital optimists like myself dismiss such episodes as aberrations, confident that the Canadian social equilibrium will always reassert itself.

The post-9/11 period, even while helping Canada become more Canadian, is slowly Americanizing our public discourse. It has fanned an anti-Islamism that resembles the old anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

The arrest of 17 Muslims on terrorism charges has made matters worse, and also rekindled the debate on multiculturalism: Are we being too tolerant of different cultures? Do we instill enough “Canadian values?” Should we make newcomers sign a code of ethics?

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How racism has invaded Canada

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“This has been a good week to be in Canada – or an awful week, depending on your point of view – to understand just how irretrievably biased and potentially racist the Canadian press has become. For, after the arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on “terrorism” charges, the Toronto Globe and Mail and, to a slightly lesser extent, the National Post, have indulged in an orgy of finger pointing that must reduce the chances of any fair trial and, at the same time, sow fear in the hearts of the country’s more than 700,000 Muslims. In fact, if I were a Canadian Muslim right now, I’d already be checking the airline timetables for a flight out of town. Or is that the purpose of this press campaign?”

Robert Fisk in The Independent, 10 June 2006

Canadian ‘terror’ suspects: innocent unless proven guilty

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“What have been reported in the press are alleged acts and not proven facts. Only a trial by the public courts system – and not the media – can determine the difference…. Canadians should bear in mind that this recent wave of ‘anti-terror’ arrests is not the first. Two years ago, as many as 26 Muslim men were arrested in Toronto in a sweep called ‘Project Thread’ that received widespread international attention and that, according to at least one government official, had uncovered ‘an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell’ in Canada. This statement was proved to be false.”

Rabble news, 8 June 2006

‘Blaming all Muslims, or Islam or multiculturalism is just a McCarthyesque witchhunt against a rather powerless minority community in Canada’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No easy answers

Toronto Star, 8 June 2006

By Haroon Siddiqui

Blaming all Muslims, or Islam or multiculturalism, is just a witchhunt against a rather powerless minority community

Dalton McGuinty said it best. He found the alleged Toronto terrorist plot to be both “unsettling and reassuring,” the latter because law enforcement agencies have done their job, removing what has been described as Canada’s greatest terrorism threat.

Now the courts will decide whether that’s what it was.

Let the rule of law prevail, in fair and transparent trials.

If we are hearing some skeptical voices about the dramatic charges, there is a reason. Similar claims made in 2003 against 22 Pakistani and Indian students — that they had planned to topple the CN Tower and the Pickering nuclear reactor — proved to be utterly false.

That episode of incompetence, coupled with the Maher Arar tragedy and the ongoing detention of four terrorism suspects without charge on security certificates, devalued the moral currency of the law enforcement agencies — always a liability in a democracy.

This time, however, authorities seem to be on firmer ground.

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Canadian Muslim leaders fear backlash, appeal for calm

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim leaders in Ontario are worried their communities are becoming targets for violence and they are calling for calm after an alleged terrorist bombing plot was revealed, resulting the arrest of 17 people this week. Faith leaders say a backlash occurred in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Now a backlash is happening again, starting with threats and vandalism.

Windshields were smashed Saturday night in the parking lot outside the International Muslims Organization Mosque in Rexdale. Windows in the mosque were also broken by vandals. “This is our mosque (and) to see an attack like this is hard on us,” Imam Hamid Slimi said Wednesday.

Leaders of nearly every Muslim community in the Greater Toronto Area met with Lt. Governor James K. Bartleman on Wednesday to discuss their fears that the broken glass may be the start of religiously-motivated attacks. “We are in a phase of danger … when it comes to our security,” Slimi said. He asked Bartleman for support to prevent potential attacks against Muslims.

While more incidents of vandalism have not occurred since Saturday, Slimi said the organization has received many threatening email messages. He added that the Muslim community is committed to ensuring the security of the country. Slimi also appealed for mercy for the families of the 17 accused, saying they are being “abused.”

CTV, 7 June 2006

It’s because they’re Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

I drove back from yesterday’s news conference at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto in the northeastern part of the city, but honestly, I could have just as easily floated home in the sea of horse manure emanating from the building.

So frequent were the bald reassurances that faith and religion had nothing -nothing, you understand – to do with the alleged homegrown terrorist plot recently busted open by Canadian police and security forces, that for a few minutes afterward, I wondered if perhaps it was a vile lie of the mainstream press or a fiction of my own demented brain that the 17 accused young men are all, well, Muslims.

But no. I have checked. They are all Muslims.

Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail, 5 June 2006

For a similar article by Andrew C. McCarthy, which claims that “the mainstream media continue to suppress the ‘Islam’ in Islamic terrorism”, see National Review, 5 June 2006

Ontario’s ‘Sharia Law’ controversy: how Muslims were hung out to dry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Arjomand and mediaRichard Fidler provides a useful overview of last year’s hysterical campaign against the “introduction of sharia law” (i.e. faith-based arbitration for Muslims) in Ontario. He writes:

“Among the most vociferous of the ‘anti-Sharia’ opponents was Homa Arjomand, a Toronto-based transitional counselor and refugee from Iran. She is the Coordinator of the ‘International Campaign Against Shari’a Court in Canada’, which claims a membership of 87 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists. Much of the material on its web site is outrageously Islamophobic.

“One such piece, by Elka Enola of the Humanist Association of Toronto, sketches a startling ‘Worst Case (but probable) Scenario’ of the effect of allowing Muslim FBA, starting with ‘Stage One – Using the Arbitration Act, the Shari’a courts appear to get legal sanction’ and ending with ‘Stage Three – Muslims now outnumber Christians and the majority rule of democracy is turned on its head as the majority Muslims make Shari’a the law of the land’. It concludes, ‘We must protect Canada from such a scenario’. Not surprisingly, the Humanist Association of Toronto proclaimed Arjomand its ‘Humanist of the Year’ in 2005.”

MR Zine, 27 May 2006

National Post ‘sorry’ about publishing wrong story

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Iran eyes badges for JewsCanada Paper Sorry About Erroneous Story on Iranian Jews and Christians

Associated Press, 26 May 2006

A Canadian newspaper apologized Wednesday for publishing an erroneous story last week claiming that an Iranian law would require Jews and Christians to wear badges identifying them as religious minorities.

The National Post article Friday caused an international uproar. Tehran on Wednesday summoned Canada’s ambassador to its foreign ministry.

Iran’s conservative parliament last week began debating a draft law that would discourage women from wearing Western clothing and encourage citizens to wear Islamic-style garments.

The Post erroneously said the bill included provisions requiring Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims to wear a patch of colored cloth on the front of their garments.

That incorrect description appeared to many as a chilling throwback to Nazi Germany when Jews were forced to wear the yellow star of David.

The United States, which is locked in a standoff with Iran over its nuclear program, criticized the bill. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a Jewish human rights group, had sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking him to investigate, according to the National Post.

Iranian officials labeled the newspaper account a lie and a copy of the bill, obtained by The Associated Press in Tehran on Saturday, made no mention of requiring special attire for religious minorities.

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Why the jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why the jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland

She catered to the worst prejudices about Muslims, Islam says Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 21 May 2006

The sudden fall from grace of Dutch Muslim MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali offers a cautionary tale about Western gullibility in these Islamophobic times.

She has been exposed as the equivalent of such Iraqi exiles as Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi. They told the tall tales the Bush administration wanted to hear to wage war. She told the stories the Dutch, and many Europeans, craved, to confirm their anti-Muslim prejudices.

Like the Iraqi exiles, she knew exactly which buttons to push.

She was an abused wife who had fled a forced marriage and also her vengeful family and clan. An “ex-Muslim,” she was out to liberate Muslim women and tame Islam to her liking and those of her benefactors.

She wrote and narrated the Theo Van Gogh documentary Submission about the subjugation of Muslim women that led to his murder and to death threats against her, placing her under 24-hour guard.

Along the way she let it be known she had lied about her name, age and how she had entered Holland in 1992, not directly from her homeland of Somalia but via Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Germany, a fact that would have undermined her claim, rather than expedited it.

The Dutch didn’t mind. Many refugee claimants embellish their stories. Besides, she was a heroine they had embraced, a “moderate” Muslim waging war against “fanatical” believers.

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