Simcoe's eternal rest is disturbed

JOHN GRAVES SIMCOE, FOUNDER OF THE CITY OF YORK (NOW TORONTO), ONTARIO

I don’t have a problem with Canada’s immigration policy as we seem to be attracting immigrants of good quality, but sometimes you have to wonder.

There is a story in today’s Toronto Sun about a British couple with two children who want to immigrate to Canada and applied under the skilled worker category. They were turned down because they only scored 65 points and they needed 67 to make the cut. They are appealing the decision to the Federal Court of Canada.

Apparently, they scored low on the section called “Adaptability”.

I live in a part of the country where women walk around in Burkas. There are whole neighbourhoods that, except for the quality of the housing, look like they were transplanted from Dacca or Delhi, judging by the dress commonly worn by the residents and the nearby houses of worship. Other communities have every street sign and store window written solely in Chinese. Many of these people don’t speak a word of English, or prefer to converse in their native language. Government notices are printed in about 7 different languages.

But the British couple failed on adaptability???

Simcoe must be rolling over in his grave.

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.

A great victory for the Muslim community

Geert Wilders has been banned from entering Britain by the Labour government. On February 12 he was to attend a meeting with members of the House of Lords to screen his anti-Islamic film, Fitna, and to answer questions concerning it, at the invitation of the Lords.

One Muslim Lord, Nazir Ahmed, had threatened to turn out 10,000 Muslims in the streets to block him from getting to the meeting. On learning of the ban, Ahmed declared it a “great victory for the Muslim community”.

If the prevention of the exercise of free speech by a member of a Parliament of an EU member is great victory for the Muslim community, then what does that say about the Muslim community? It says exactly what Geert Wilders says about it – it is totalitarian in outlook and intolerant of liberal-democracy.

Lord Pearson renewed the invitation and published the following media release:

Despite threats of demonstration from a British Peer and Muslim community leaders, the meeting will go ahead. Wilders’ film Fitna features verses from the Quran alongside images of the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001, Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. The film equates Islam’s holy text with violence and ends with a call to Muslims to remove ‘hate preaching’ verses from the Quran. It provoked protests in Muslim-majority countries including Indonesia and Pakistan.

The leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, Wilders has lived under 24 hour police protection since 2004. Following Fitna’s release online in March 2008 al-Qaeda issued a fatwa calling for Wilders’ murder.

Wilders currently faces prosecution in Holland for incitement to hatred and discrimination. The charges are based on his film Fitna and comments in the Dutch press last year in which he argued that as Mein Kampf has been banned in Holland, the Quran should similarly be banned under Dutch incitement laws.

Wilders called the Dutch Court of Appeal’s decision to prosecute an attack on freedom of expression. “Participation in the public debate has become a dangerous activity. If you give your opinion, you risk being prosecuted,” he said.

Wilders has indicated his intention to go to London despite the ban.

While many people support Wilders campaign to prevent the Islamification of Europe, they are disturbed thar he seems hypocritical by advocating a ban on of the Koran. In fact, his point is that the Netherlands bans Mein Kampf and ought to be considering the Koran in the same light. Wilders should just have called for an end to the ban on Mein Kampf.

In Canada, the huge retail bookstore chain, Chapters Indigo, that controls about 80% of the retail book trade in Canada banned Mein Kampf from its stores. But you can still get the Koran if you go to this site.

A British journalist's view of Canada

This has been around for a while, but it was recently sent to me again by acorrespondent and I thought it was worth another blog posting, since we are just past Remembrance Day. It is from the Sunday Telegraph. Since it was written Canada has lost 97 soldiers and one diplomat in the Afghan conflict, safeguarding the Sharia law in that country.

The country the world forgot - again

By Kevin Myers
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/04/2002

UNTIL the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a US warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price which Canada pays for sharing the North American Continent with the US, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: it seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

advertisementYet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10 per cent of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British". The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign which the US had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and film-makers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer British. It is as if in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakeably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1 per cent of the world's population has provided 10 per cent of the world's peace-keeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peace-keepers on earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peace-keeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement which has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the US knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.

This weekend four shrouds, red with blood and maple leaf, head homewards; and four more grieving Canadian families know that cost all too tragically well.

The United Nations won't defend its agents

This an editorial from today's Toronto Star with which I am in complete agreement. There are so many wishy-washy, western civilization-loathing Canadians who cannot see the importance of taking strong stands on issues like these and who forget which team they should rooting for. It's nice to see a newspaper that I believe normally caters to these useful idiots (thank you, Vladimir Lenin, for the phrase) taking such a stance. I wonder if the head editorial writer was on vacation when this found its way into print.

Regardless of how the Persian Gulf standoff between Iran and Britain plays out, the United Nations has emerged looking bad. Simply put, the Security Council failed to forcefully stand up for British troops serving the UN, when they were treated outrageously by a scofflaw regime.

Like Canada's military in Afghanistan, the 15 British sailors and marines from HMS Cornwall who were seized by Iran's Revolutionary Guards on March 23 were on lawful UN-sanctioned duty. They were assisting Iraq's elected government by monitoring merchant shipping along the Iraq-Iran maritime frontier to thwart smuggling and security threats. They should never have been arrested, much less held this long.

Recognizing that, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government last Wednesday demanded Iran "immediately release" the captives, noting they were engaged in "legitimate and routine boarding operations." In Washington this weekend, U.S. President George Bush went further, calling the sailors "hostages" and slamming Iran's "inexcusable behaviour."

The European Union has also voiced "unconditional support" for the British side, chided the Iranians for "a clear breach of international law," and demanded the troops' "immediate and unconditional release."

Given this barrage of international condemnation, the UN Security Council should have been emboldened to forcefully condemn Iran's outrageous action and to threaten stiff sanctions, if only to deter future attacks of this sort on forces deployed on its behalf.

But the council managed to issue only a feeble statement last Thursday voicing "grave concern" and urging an "early resolution of this problem."

It was a pitiful show of weakness that hurt the UN's credibility and betrayed British troops serving the organization. Far from undercutting Iranian hard-liners such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it will boost their stature and sap UN efforts to get Tehran to renounce nuclear weaponry. It also won't help the United Nations the next time it appeals for countries to provide troops for some peacekeeping mission.

By yesterday, as pressure continued to build on Tehran, senior Iranians announced they want to resolve the crisis through talks with Britain on how to avert future disputes. At the same time, both sides continued to dispute whether the British sailors were operating a kilometre or so on one side of the unclear Iraq-Iran border or on the other.

But even if the British craft did stray into Iranian waters, something Prime Minister Tony Blair denies, Iran's better-armed Revolutionary Guard vessels could easily have warned them off and escorted them back into Iraqi waters. A technical violation of Iran's sovereignty by a UN-approved force would pose no great threat to Iranian security.

Even so, Iran's forces arrested the sailors at gunpoint and took them to Iran. They refused British diplomats access, threatened to put the captives on trial and paraded them shamelessly for propaganda, mouthing statements praising their captors and "confessing" they had trespassed.

It was a shameful, lawless spectacle.

The Security Council should have said as much.