Mondo Cane

Here is a story from the U.S. about a family of Liberians who have decided to disown their 8-year old daughter because she was gang-raped. I suppose it is better than being lashed and jailed for such an offense, or murdered as an "honour killing". Still, why should the health and safety of a member of your own family not trump the concern about what the neighbours think?

From Saudi Arabia comes this story of a Miss Beautiful Morals contest winner, a young lady shrouded from head to toe throughout the contest, the object of innumerable jokes on the Internet. Apparently, she was selected over the other 274 contestants because she articulated answers to conventional Arabian morality better than the others. I wonder if she also wished for "world peace" as the clincher.

Finally, we have this column from venerable Canadian journalist, Robert Fulford, commenting on honour killings and the lashing of women in, oh, let us say "more conservative" societies, and wondering why the voices of Western feminists are so silent. I think he found his answer from one of them.

But more typical is the feminist blog of Deborah Kate, who acknowledges that feminists have been accused of ignoring Muslim women. Kate comes out against stoning, enforced marriage, female circumcision, etc., and wonders idly whether countries guilty of crimes against women deserve sanctions like those levelled at South Africa in its apartheid days. No, she decides, exhibiting the fondness for fashionable moral relativism that is now epidemic in feminist circles, “I realize I cannot force my version of feminism upon non-Western women.”

Exactly!

Amen to Tarek Fatah who upbraids the Islamic apologists in today's National Post for their dishonesty in dealing with the problem of "honour killings".

We "celebrate" 9/11

Tomorrow, at Ryerson University, in the heart of Toronto, a weekend lecture series will kick off under the auspices of the Al-Fauz Institute of Islamic Thought. The AFIIT is a new player in the game of educating young Muslims in Toronto. The series is called, From Caliphs to Kings, the rise and fall of the Muslim ummah.

Its guest lecturer for this series is a British-based, Palestinian-born academic, Dr. Azzam Timimi, who, according to writer Terry Glavin, in The National Post, is an unabashed supporter of suicide bombing, Hamas, the Taliban, etc. Glavin spoke to the folks at AFIIT, who disavowed knowledge of Timimi's political views. You can read Glavin’s columns here and here.

I looked at the AFIIT site and it contained two videos of Dr. Timimi lecturing in Britain in September of last year. He didn’t engage in any of the pro-violence stuff that Glavin writes about, but he still had some disturbing messages – disturbing to this Canadian.

In the first video he gives a very white-washed view of how Islam spread from Arabia. I shouldn’t be too critical of this, since President Obama gave his misdirected Cairo speech and did very much same thing. However, Dr. Timimi is here to guide young Canadian Muslims, so I will critique him.

In reference to Palestine, for example, which he acknowledged was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, he talked about how Islam was welcomed by the people because it brought justice – something he claims they didn’t have.

I don’t know enough about that place and that time under the Byzantine Empire to be able to confirm or deny what Timimi says about the level of justice enjoyed by the non-Arabs, but after the Arabs arrived there are definitely some things they didn’t have. Wives no longer had husbands because they were slaughtered. Husbands who escaped no longer had wives or children because they were carted back to Arabia and sold as slaves. Property that was once owned by Christians and Jews (the majority of the residents) then became the property of the Muslims who supplanted them. Much of the early spread of Islam had to do with Arabs carrying out commerce in the old style – stealing and killing.

He talks about the spread of Islam to India in the most benign language. He left out of the description the fact that Muslim invaders butchered more than one million Hindus and Buddhists and razed thousands of temples.

He starts his lecture by referring to the word minority as being a bad thing. Later he admits that minorities are well protected by laws in liberal democracies.

He pretends that minorities under Islam were protected and treated with respect, and that there were no problems with them continuing worship in the religion of their choice. In fact, they were protected only in so far as they paid a protection tax to the Muslim rulers, and they weren’t permitted to build new houses of worship or openly worship outside of those houses. There were a number of other restrictions that made it clear that in Islamic societies non-Muslims were clearly second-class citizens. And people with no religion, or no religion recognized by Islam, did not have even that status.

I hope some less than bedazzled young Muslim attending these lectures this weekend asks the good doctor why it is that millions of Muslims can live on equal terms and openly practice their religion in predominately Christian-based, secular western societies, but there are very few Christians and even fewer Jews to be found in Muslim countries, and those numbers are rapidly declining?

Timimi made it quite clear in the second video that he does not see Muslims integrating with western secular societies. He claims Muslims are principally disliked because they are part of a global ummah and this transcends geographical and national boundaries. He depicts western society as if it has a Gestapo-complex regarding Muslims – referring to the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

His lecture must have been given before the trial of the airline plotters, because he claimed that everyone of them was innocent. In fact, three of them were convicted, but not for conspiracy to destroy airplanes over the Atlantic.

Finally, the dead giveaway for me was a reference he made to “celebrating” the anniversary of 9/11.

Only a jihad supporter would use a term like that.

The one really honest thing Timimi said was that there was a war going on with Islam. Not that there is a war going on with people who claim to be Islamic but are not really representative of Islam, as the U.S. and British governments try to pretend, but with Islam -- period, full-stop, no qualifications, no obfuscations.

George Jonas: "Jihad rules! Jews suck!"

A lady who once worked for me as an executive assistant and who is now in her early fifties came to Canada from the Ukraine when she was two years of age. She speaks Ukrainian (poorly by her admission) and English excellently. Her mother, who has now resided in downtown Toronto for half a century, does not speak a word of English. She has never had to learn it. She lives in a largely Ukrainian neighbourhood and can get virtually any service in her native language. Occasionally when she had to see a non-Ukrainian medical specialist, her daughter would accompany her to translate.

In this part of Canada, the story of this unassimilated woman is not unique.

I mention this because for some time now there has been a hue and cry raised over the state policy of multiculturalism. We have had this in Canada as official policy since the 1970s. The anguish about multiculturalism is that there is no incentive for ethnic pockets to assimilate with the general population. Questions regarding inter-ethnic strife, human rights, and general loyalty to the country are raised within the umbrella of the multicultural policy.

However, my Ukrainian example goes back to the 1950s, long before the so-called multicultural mosaic was identified as a cultural phenomenon and then subsequently embraced by the polity as policy. I don’t believe for a second that my friend’s mother would have lived a different life whether there was a state policy regarding her culture or not, except for one that might have discriminated against her for not assimilating.

Ukrainians, for the most part, belong to the Eastern Orthodox Christian church, the remnant of the old Byzantine Empire, which, in turn, was the remnant of the eastern half of the old Roman Empire. My executive assistant used to take days off work to celebrate “Ukrainian Christmas” and “Ukrainian New Year”, which arrived later in the calendar than the national statutory holidays of Christmas and New Year.

Except for this departure, I would never have identified her culture as being religiously determined. Ukrainians have distinctive native costumes, peasant wear, which they trot out during Ukrainian cultural festivals. Generally, however, in dress and conduct they are indistinguishable from the great mass of other Canadians.

This brings me to a rather misleading column by the otherwise excellent journalist, George Jonas, in today’s National Post.

Jonas is commenting on the published e-mails that passed amongst the female relatives and friends of the famous “Toronto 18”. These are the alleged wannabe Islamic terrorists who were supposedly plotting to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange, CSIS (Canada’s anti-terrorist organization), and storm the Parliament buildings and behead the Prime Minister.

He is struck by the fact that the hatred of the women towards Canada and some members of the Canadian community, namely homosexuals, are expressed primarily in idiomatic English.

The remarkable thing was seeing their admiration and hatred posted, not in a foreign language, not in misspelled, broken English, but in the colloquial idiom of soccer moms in Toronto's bedroom community of Mississauga.

He then extrapolates from this the following conclusion.

By offering the views of Wahhabist Islam on homosexuals in words she borrowed directly from our culture, Ms. N was demonstrating that acculturation, a much-touted remedy for the risk of fragmentation in immigrant societies, isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

I don’t want to sound to picky, but I have always considered English to be nothing more than a language, a language of convenience, if you like, when you live in a county where 90% the population converses in it and where it is an official language by law.

I never thought of it as being “culturally distinctive” such that its use by an Arab would be considered remarkable. To be sure, within the confines of the language, there are cultural markers – expressions used to describe things that would be associated with someone from Canada rather than someone from England or Australia or the United States. But that is not what Jonas is talking about.

What he is on about is how a cultural norm, in this case Arabic, survives long after someone has been swimming in the deep end of the cultural pool of Canada.

Our great-grandfathers assessed matters more accurately. They had taken it for granted that integration is a process of considerable complexity that occurs over historic time. It isn't achieved by a quick immersion in another culture, even when the immersion is … superficially complete. Our generation not only overestimated the effects of such cultural silver-plating, but tried reducing it even further by the imposition of multiculturalism.

Cultural silver-plating may not achieve much beyond teaching al-Qaeda idiomatic English anyway, but multiculturalism makes it stick even less and wear off even quicker. Cultural silver-plating may produce amusing incongruities, like jihadists with pre-nuptial agreements and Wahhabi feminists who retain their maiden names after marriage. But computer-literate fundamentalists take us no closer to a harmonious society. They only illustrate how ultra-liberal policies, slogans and practices confuse and alienate vulnerable youngsters of foreign ancestry and increase the number of our solitudes.

I don’t believe multicultural policies and practices have anything to do with alienation of these young women.

This is because they do not have a culture distinct from their religion, unlike my Ukrainian examples. Islam determines their culture, on everything from defecating rituals, to eating habits, to attitudes towards non-Muslims, and so on. I am surprised that Jonas would overlook this cultural influence and chalk up assimilation failure to the straw man of multicultural policy.

It is the religion, dear boy, and that is what you should be targeting.

Cream pies and free speech in Canada

Richard Warman mocks Ickes

We have heard a great deal over the last year from Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn about free speech, the craven media, and the activities of Jewish award winner, Richard Warman, a former Canadian Human Rights Commission investigator who appears to have made a handsome financial return from the human rights industry in Canada by posting racist comments on websites and then complaining about how he was offended by postings on those websites.

This link takes you to a fascinating British documentary on a fellow named David Ickes who has a worldview not in keeping with the norm. He may be a kook, but, in my view, he is entitled to say what he thinks. The video is 50 minutes in length, and the last half is devoted to Ickes’s reception in Vancouver, where a coalition of Jewish activists tried to shut him down.

He was kicked out of Canada’s largest book chain when he went to a book signing that he had been invited to and he was booted from a radio station that had invited him to a morning talk show. He did manage to appear on television, but the host started the questioning with an on-the-street university professor who pronounced Ikes a kind of a nutter. Normally, you would ask your studio guest to elaborate his theory before turning to others to challenge him.

Altogether, it was a very poor showing from the Canadian media establishment and Canada’s Jewish establishment, particularly since Ikes never says anything that is anti-Jewish. The Jews are persecuting him for a perceived metaphor.

However, what becomes clear, as he progresses through Vancouver, is the general good sense of the ordinary Canadians who clearly recognize the value of free speech and discount the efforts of the establishment and the elites to muzzle Ickes.

Watch for Warman to equate an attempt to throw a pie in the Icke’s face, intended to interrupt, humiliate and discredit him, with an exercise in free speech. Lost on Warman is the idea that Ickes should be free to speak without a pie in the face.

Unfortunately for Canada, I think the intellectually-warped Warman mentality prevails amongst the establishment and the elites.

"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last": Winston Churchill

I was wandering around in the book store the other day, looking for a good read, when I came across Bruce Bawer’s latest effort, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. I looked at it for a minute or two, noted the price ($30 Cdn) and wondered whether it was worth it. I am well read in Islamic subjects and follow a number of websites that keep me current on the subject. What could Bawer tell me that I didn’t already know?

What the hell. I bought it. And, as it turns out, plenty.

Bawer, a former literary critic, currently living in Norway, is a gay American who decided several years ago that gays could live a better life in Europe than in the United State and he moved to Amsterdam. Europe was not what he expected and he documented his epiphany in a previous book called, While Europe Slept.

His conclusion from his European foray is that Islam is slowly, but inexorably, swallowing Europe. Like a crocodile.

His new book spans the Atlantic, shifting between the United States and Europe, and outlines in cringe-inducing detail the lies and distortions of the members of the Islamic Project, and its enablers and useful idiots; namely, the mainstream media, politicians and university faculty and administrators.

Anybody concerned about this subject ought to read this book. Anybody who is not concerned about this subject ought to read this book.

I read the thing in one sitting, I couldn’t put it down.

Bawer is very good at cutting through the cant and obfuscation to get to the heart of an argument. His logical analysis of the bullshit that passes for intellectual argument is worth the price of the book, even if you know a great deal about the subject matter.

His detractors, who regularly brand him as a racist, miss the essential point of his argument, which is simply that Islam is incompatible with secular liberal-democracy, the values and ideals associated with the Enlightenment, and one or the other must prevail – there is no compromise.

One of the interesting perspectives he brings to the table is the plight of homosexuals under Islam.

We read a lot about women in Islam: should we insist they remove their veils to vote in elections; should headscarves be banned in public facilities; should the wearing of the burqua be banned outright; should we look the other way when husbands beat their wives, etc.

We have non-Muslim troops dying in Afghanistan so that Afghan women can go to school, so we are told. Yet we barely hear mention of Islam and homosexuality.

Women may be beaten, lashed, mutilated and abandoned within the tenets of the faith, but homosexuals are simply killed.

The odd thing is the support of gay groups for Islam. We had a bit of a local furor recently when a gay, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian organization marched in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade. Bawer dissects other examples of this odd phenomenon.

Bawer should be celebrated for speaking out forthrightly and telling the unvarnished truth. Sadly, too many people in our politically correct establishment cannot, as Jack Nicholson said, “handle the truth”, and it shows in the poor reviews he received in a couple of the mainstream newspapers in the U.S.

Given that other publishers have crumbled in the face of Islamic threats and either shredded their works or refused to publish their authors, it would be an oversight not to also congratulate Doubleday, a division of Random House, for publishing Bawer’s work.

Heading for the exits in droves, even before the fat lady sings

Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician whose popular Party for Freedom (PVV) did so well in the recent election to the European Parliament, appears to have Dutch Muslims on the run. A poll taken amongst Muslims in the Netherlands suggests more than half of them would consider leaving the Netherlands.

One Dutch-Muslim politician warned that Wilders' political rise is fueling a growing radical Islam in the Netherlands.

That’s odd, because I thought it was the other way around. A growing radical Islam and its enablers in the multicultural and politically correct establishment, that killed Theo Van Gogh, drove Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of the country, celebrated the murder of Pim Fortuyn, and the 9/11 atrocity, is attempting to prosecute Wilders, and causes Wilders to travel with police protection and to keep his whereabouts a secret, are the reasons why he has become popular in the Netherlands.

I am betting that those Dutch Muslims who express such victimization in the current political climate do not have to travel around with a police escort to ensure they are not murdered.

Apparently, when asked what they should do about this, 40% of them said they should just ignore the PVV. Twenty-five per cent said they should debate Wilders and his followers. Another 35% said they should “vociferously” protest. And just 11% thought they should get politically active and form a political party to represent Muslim interests.

Here’s another idea that seems not to have occurred to the respondents. Simply abandon Islam and embrace liberal secular values. Maybe then Wilders’ party will have more appeal to them.