Category Archives: Canada

The WPI and the right-wing journalist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Premier Dalton McGuinty was tapdancing very cautiously around sharia law yesterday. And rightly so. Of all the nasty issues likely to blow up in his face before the next election, this is a huge one. What it boils down to is, how much multiculturalism is too much? Chowing down on souvlaki at Taste of the Danforth is one thing. But what about entrenching an ancient legal system that, in its extreme forms, calls for stoning and amputation?”

Christina Blizzard in the Toronto Sun, 7 September 2005

The article includes a friendly interview with Homa Arjomand of the Worker Communist Party of Iran. I confess to being unfamiliar with Christina Blizzard’s oeuvre. However, I googled her name and found her described as “one of the most partisan pro-right writers in Ontario in the mainstream media”.

Why the West has lost goodwill of Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why the West has lost goodwill of Muslims

By Javed Akbar

Toronto Star, 29 July 2005

These are treacherous times. Peace seems to have become ever more elusive and we are all traumatized, as if an impending danger is lurking over our heads. The victims, who are falling to acts of either individual or state-sponsored terrorism, have mainly been innocent civilians.

This vicious cycle of tit-for-tat madness must stop. Every innocent life lost is too precious, too great.

To honour the souls of the more than 50 people who died in a planned and pathologically-motivated attack in London, people the world over did stop in solemn silence and paid their respects by adopting the slogan: “Today we are all British.”

It was a poignant way to express solidarity with the bereaving families and nation. Paradoxically, when more than 200,000 people were killed in attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, no one said: “Today we are all Iraqis or Afghanis.”

What hypocrisy. What gall.

The horror of 9/11 and now the aftermath of the London bombings reveal, more than anything else, the discord between the true nature of Islam, as religion, culture and civilization, and the way it is projected in the current palpable cloud of Islamophobia. Islam is relentlessly portrayed as an obscurantist, unethical enterprise. Muslims now actually wear the garb of the very demons that the media have been projecting as a collective profile for an entire community and a whole faith.

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Seeking a way to combat terrorism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britons see the connection between Iraq and their troubles. It’s not just Ken Livingstone, the leftist mayor of London, or rebel MP George Galloway, or some British Muslim leaders. So does a confidential security report. So does a public report by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. So does two-thirds of the public….

“Why are Western governments and the media so afraid to examine whether or not the terrorist Muslim mayhem that we are suffering is the extremist response to what America and its allies are doing in Muslim lands, or are complicit in?”

Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, 24 July 2005

We need to talk less, listen more, to Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

We need to talk less, listen more, to Muslims

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 14 July 2005

Germany has been as vociferous as France among the G 8 nations in opposing the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. It has also been increasingly skeptical of Washington’s war on terrorism.

Germany also has a sophisticated understanding of, and good relations with, the Muslim world. In addition, it considers itself the closest European ally of Israel. The German perspective on terrorism, especially on young European jihadists, is, therefore, useful.

“We need a dialogue with the Muslim world but there’s too much distrust,” said a very senior policy official in Berlin in a lengthy and candid interview, given on condition of anonymity, and conducted before last week’s bombings in London.

“There’s distrust because of our double standards,” he said, citing the Arab-Israeli dispute, and because of what he called the Bush administration’s “hegemonic” policy: Occupying Iraq to control the oil and the region, especially Iran, and controlling Afghanistan to have access Central Asian oil and gas reserves.

Worse, the Americans are carrying out the policy “in such a blunt way that they can’t see that they are destroying everything in their path … When the American soldiers see Iraqi women and children in a car, how can they shoot?”

Yet, he said, Washington wonders: “‘Why do they hate us?’ Easy. They hate us because of the policies.”

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Sensationalism shrouds the debate on sharia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“More than stopping sharia, we need to stop the hysteria surrounding it. So misleading and dishonest has the debate been that it reveals more about our political and media prejudices than the minority in question. A request by a small Ontario Muslim group to start faith-based family mediation or arbitration between two consenting adults – a practice long used by Christians (Mennonites and Catholics in particular), Jews (especially the Orthodox) and one sect of Muslims, the Ismailis – has been blown up into the spectre of Taliban-like justice coming to Canada.”

Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, 12 June 2005

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Security targets Canadian Muslims: Report

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Canadian security agencies use unacceptable intimidation tactics, aggressive behavior and threats of arrest against Canadian Muslims while investigating allegations of terrorism, according to a leading Muslim group.

The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) has said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used intrusive tactics such as discouraging legal representation and threats of arrest under the Anti-Terrorism Act, to compel individuals to accept interviews.

Security officials also used to ask intrusive and inappropriate questions, give improper identification and solicit informants through intimidation, the Muslim group said in a statement, a copy of which was e-mailed to IslamOnline.net Wednesday, June 8.

“It’s safe to say that the overall consequence has been one of alienation, loss of trust in our security agencies and civil cynicism. The results are quite alarming,” said Riad Saloojee, the council’s executive director.

A survey conducted by the Muslim civil liberties group showed that Canadian Muslims were routinely singled out and harassed by the security agencies. Eight percent of respondents to the survey, which included around 467 people, mostly young Arab males, said they were “visited” by the RCMP or CSIS officials.

Nearly half of respondents said visits by security officials made them feel fearful, anxious and nervous, while about one-quarter said they felt harassed and discriminated against. “What we found was that people are very scared in the Muslim community, even the people who filled out the survey were concerned about their safety,” council spokeswoman Halima Mautbur told CBC News Online.

The survey also showed that the interrogators asked questions on how the interviewed is committed to Islam, how often a day does he pray and what does he think of the Iraq invasion-turned-occupation. “They suggested that having a commitment to your faith is dangerous in this post 9/11 world or that it could get you into trouble,” Mautbur said.

Islam Online, 9 June 2005

CAIR-CAN seeks probe of McGill ‘harassment’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) today called for an investigation of reports that Muslim students at Montreal’s McGill University are being singled out for harassment by campus security guards. The reports of harassment follow the eviction of the Muslim students from their prayer space in the university’s Peterson Hall last week. Students said security guards entered the prayer room, asked everyone to vacate the area and changed the locks on the doors. Now, the Muslim students are reporting that security guards in Peterson Hall are continuing to harass them. In one report, the students say security personnel would not permit them inside the building until they displayed their student cards. The students said the guards then followed them throughout the building until they left.

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Quebec squashes idea of Islamic tribunals

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a pre-emptive strike against what it calls religious fundamentalism, the Quebec National Assembly has voted unanimously to condemn efforts to introduce Islamic tribunals in Quebec and in the rest of Canada.

During the debate yesterday on a motion tabled by the governing Liberals, members from all political parties opposed Muslim groups seeking to apply sharia, or traditional Islamic law, in marriage or other disputes in the Muslim community.

The decision, which drew immediate condemnation from some members of the Islamic community, echoed France’s recent and controversial prohibition of religious symbols in schools.

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Blaming the victim for Qur’an desecrations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Blaming the victim for Qur’an desecrations

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 26 May 2005

It is hard to believe but there are commentators who are berating those who protested the desecration of the Qur’an, not those who did the desecrating. This attitude of blaming the victims fits the tenor of the times. The colonial British and the French were also adept at holding the Indians and Algerians responsible for their own plight.

The pundits are being even more bizarre than the Bush administration, which skewered Newsweek for reporting the sacrilege, not those who committed it.

Even as the Bush administration continues its cover-up for presiding over one of the most shameful chapters in prisoner abuse, here is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, reprinted in the Toronto Star no less, hectoring the Afghans and others for being stupid enough to take to the streets in dismay.

He is not alone, and he and the other new Orientalists are entitled to their views, as also their logical contortions to continue rationalizing the war on Iraq. But their myopia does cause concern.

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Muslim world turned into a tinderbox

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim world turned into a tinderbox

Haroon Siddiqui says US is fooling no one over use of Qur’an as instrument of torture

Toronto Star, 22 May 2005

Iraq. Uzbekistan. The Qur’an. These issues in the news expose American double standards, hypocrisy and outright lies. They also help explain how George W. Bush has turned the Muslim world into a tinderbox.

It is his policies, not a Newsweek item on the desecration of the holy book at Guantánamo Bay, that sparked the anti-U.S. protests that killed 17 people. What the magazine reported, albeit sloppily, is not new.

Four Britons, one Moroccan, one Kuwaiti and at least one Afghan released from the American base last year have said, separately, that the Qur’an was routinely stomped upon, ripped apart and strewn about toilets. They spoke of three hunger strikes in protest.

The International Red Cross has confirmed it repeatedly told the Pentagon, starting in 2002, that detainees were complaining of Americans using the Qur’an as a tool of torture.

Whom are Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and others fooling, other than their pliant half of the American electorate, with phony pronouncements about how America would never tolerate such criminality?

The Qur’an episodes are but one part of a broad offensive of violating the religious sensibilities of Muslims in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Some had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Qur’an; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families,” said The Times of London.

Physicians for Human Rights also cited forced nudity, masturbation and other transgressions of religious and cultural norms.

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