Obama's disconnect with the Islamic world

I was going avoid blogging until May but it is all too much.

President Obama is in Turkey spreading his gospel of hope and change, and sucking up to the Muslims.

He declared that the United States is not at war with Islam. Gee, that rings a bell. Oh yeah, it was that George Bush guy who used to say that regularly.

Hmmm. That doesn’t seem to be much of a change.

Is Obama leaving troops in Iraq? Yes. Is he sending more to fight Muslims in Afghanistan? Yes. So how is this a different message from the previous one?

Maybe this is the change. He has declared the U.S. to be in a partnership with the Muslim world “in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."...

I wonder what he means and who he is talking about. First, where would we find this “fringe ideology”? In the Koran and the Hadith, that’s where. If the Koran is the ineffable word of God, as Muslims claim, how can it be a fringe ideology?

And who are the faiths that are rejecting it? The head of the Church of England has been pushing for the introduction of Sharia law. The Pope has fallen all over himself to kiss Islamic ass after a strong start in naming the real problem.

What Muslim community has disavowed the tenets of the Koran and the examples of Mohammed that require Islam to be the dominant faith and required infidels to submit or die? Name just one, Mr. Obama. There is a problem, to do so would be to admit that the Koran is not the word of God. And if you admit that, then you open the doors to a reformation.

What Muslim community asked to be a partner with the United States in fighting this “fringe ideology”, anyway? The idea of a partnership is that it is a two-way street. See below for the Turkish Prime Minister's idea of a partnership.

Then there was this “pants dropper”.

"We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.”

Fourteen hundred years of jihad, and counting. How does this make the world better and exactly what has been the contribution of Islam to the richness of American life, besides a greater attention to national security after 9/11?

Did Mr. Obama read the remarks of Turkey’s Prime Minister from a few days earlier?

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rejected attempts to call Turkey the representative of moderate Islam. "It is unacceptable for us to agree with such a definition. Turkey has never been a country to represent such a concept. Moreover, Islam cannot be classified as moderate or not," Erdoğan said, speaking at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

So who was Obama trying to partner with in tackling the “fringe ideology”? Wasn’t that always supposed to be the “moderate” Muslims, who Turkey disavows? Maybe he should try his hopey-changey speeches on Hamas and Hezbollah, because the Turks aren’t buying into it.

Erdoğan pointed to the lack of dialogue between different religions and cultures, which has led to distressing incidents in the world history.
"The animosity, unfortunately, strengthens the scenarios that there is a so-called clash of civilizations in the world. Those, who defend such speculations, may go further to identify the terrorism with Islam which is based on peace," he maintained, adding that the situation helps those who try to globalize Islamophobia.

So, the real problem in the world is not Islamic imperialism, it the “irrational fear” of Islam.

Erdoğan also wanted Western societies to be more open to cooperation and dialogue with the East. "It should be known that adopting a malicious and offending approach toward the sensitive issues of Islamic world by hiding behind some democratic freedoms like freedom of speech and right of free publication is unacceptable," he said.

Yup, we sure wouldn’t want the cornerstone of our civilization, free speech, to stand in the way of the Islamic world.

Drawing attention to the importance of mutual understanding and respect, Erdoğan stated that he believes and respects Moses and Jesus, and accepts them as prophets. "I expect the same attitude from a Jew or a Christian toward my own prophet," Erdoğan noted. He underlined the importance of Turkey’s European Union membership in terms of establishing connections between the West and the East....

As Robert Spencer points out, in Jihad Watch, from where I pulled these quotations, saying that Moses and Jesus were prophets in a line of Islamic prophets, ending with Mohammed, is not the same as saying that Muslims accept the depiction of Moses in the Old Testament and that of Jesus in the New Testament. In short, those books are false, and only the Koran is the truth.

Mr. Obama may not see this as a clash of civilizations but Mr. Erdoğan does not harbour the same delusion.

The shame that is Britain

There is an interesting compilation of commentary on a video in the Brussels Journal concerning the British government’s refusal to permit entry to Geert Wilders.

Note at the beginning the correct quote about free speech attributable to the famous American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, where he used the word “falsely” and then consider the implications of the skewed version promulgated by Britain’s Foreign Secretary which leaves that word out of the quotation. It puts a completely different spin on the outcome.

Also note the closing sequence with Lord Pearson who rabbits on about marshalling the moderate Muslims to disavow the parts of the Koran that support violence.

I have been hearing this same tired mantra since the day after 9/11. After nearly 8 years and further bombings and killings when are they going to get the idea that moderate Muslims are not going to be riding to the rescue, now or ever?

We have to face radical Islam ourselves and draw the line.

Of course, when I say “we”, I mean North Americans, because it is clear that Europeans have given up the fight to save themselves.

I used to be proud of the fact that I come from English and Scotch-Irish stock, but the actions of the second raters who have been elected to the government of U.K. in giving in, not to a mob, but merely to the threat of a proposed mob, has caused me to feel deep shame and utter embarrassment for that country.

It is hard to believe that the U.K. is peopled with the descendants of those who stuck out their chins and told Hitler and his Nazis hordes to go to hell. Those people really were the greater generation, and the current one has let them down badly. A re-reading of Flanders Fields and some Rudyard Kipling would do this lot a world of good.

Ah, religion, what would the world do without it? Chapter 2, Honour killings.

Honour killings are not Islam, they are barbarism, according to Steve Rockwell, an imam in Toronto (see story at this site).

The columnist who wrote this, and included a number of similar claims by Muslims, took it at face value; i.e., if Muslims say that it is not Islam, then he will print that. There is a sense in the Canadian mainstream media that Muslims get too much bad press and this type of story appears mainly to balance the equation.

I think I would not be too far off the mark if I were to suggest the columnist knows very little about Islam, and if he had not been trying to use his print pulpit to “balance the cosmic scales of justice”, might have consulted with other spokespersons to get a balanced view of the subject.

This response of Rockwell and others was provoked by the news that the brother of Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year old girl who was strangled to death in the Greater Toronto Area, has now been charged with first degree murder. Aqsa’s father had already been charged with murder, and had recently had that charge upgraded to a first degree category (meaning the murder was planned and deliberate, not a spontaneous act).

The allegation in the media, from interviews reporters conducted with Aqsa’s friends at the time of her murder, is that she was the victim of an honour killing because she was refusing to wear the hijab and other traditional Muslim garb when outside the house. She was supposedly fighting with her family over these matters.

If these facts are true, then this would be Canada’s first recorded honour killing. There have been honour killings in the United States and a number of them in West European countries.

When Aqsa’s murder was first in the news I scanned a great many letters to editors from Muslims all saying the same thing: this sort of thing ought not to be laid at the door of Islam. It was tribal, or it was “cultural” or, as depicted by the outrageous Dr. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress, it was just the normal teenage daughter-father fight one might expect in any family.

For balance, I would say I saw a similar thing coming from a columnist in the Sun chain of newspapers urging her readers not to put any significance to the fact that Catholic trustees on the Toronto District Catholic School Board were stealing from the public purse. Her argument was that their kleptocracy was outside of their religion, so bracket the religion and put it aside as an issue in this case.

My response to that is simply this, if the whole point of having a separate school system based on religious grounds is not to provide a superior moral grounding (in Catholic eyes, that is), then the taxpaying public is being cheated out of education dollars needed to provide two costly competing systems instead of one simple school system for all. Her argument wasn’t helped by the fact that the Toronto Archbishop wrote a stinging letter claiming that the trustees had stained Catholicism. In short, one must ask oneself what is the point of religious training if not to prevent public servants from stealing the public’s money?

There is an online explanation of honour killings by the BBC at this site. It talks about how it is prevalent in the “South Asian” and “Middle Eastern” communities. Not once does it say the words Islam or Muslim. It does mention how a girl was stabbed to death by her father Abdullah over her western dress and her Christian boyfriend.

Since the article does not tell us why the religion of the boyfriend should be objectionable, I suppose we can speculate that her father was simply a murderous raving atheist. God knows, there are plenty of those walking around.

That last sentence was an oxymoron in case you missed it.

Near the end of this most PC piece we get some slippage:

Ram Gidoomal of the South Asian Development Partnership has campaigned for years for people to open up and turn in those who get away with justifying honour crimes.
He has consistently called on leaders in mosques, temples and churches to do more…

If honour killings have nothing to do with religion, why badger these folks about it?

I would go along with the assertions that honour killings are more culturally understood than religiously defined except that cultures are bred by religion, nourished by it, and continually informed by it. You cannot simply bracket religion as being an unimportant context to be ignored.

I joked earlier about atheist honour killings, but the fact remains that all honour killings occur amongst people who practice one of the traditional religions. It is also true that most of these reported killings are committed by persons who come from very ordinary walks in life. In short, they are not Koranic or Biblical scholars. They are simple people who were taught some religious precepts, and, if they keep up their attendance at their various houses of worship, continue to be fed the doctrine. Furthermore, almost every instance of an honour killing is the result of a male (father, brother, uncle, cousin) attacking a female; sometimes mothers join in to support the males.

Could there be something in the religious texts that would give these South Asian and Middle Eastern cultures the idea that males have some right to dominate women, and give some women the idea that they should be submissive to such males?

That is simply a rhetorical question in case you missed it.

The Koran, Hadith, Old Testament and New Testament are rife with misogynist and male dominance pronouncements. Maybe the culture would improve if the religion were improved.

The absurdity of Canada

Yesterday the Canadian Human Rights Commission dismissed the complaint of Islamophobia against Maclean’s Magazine for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone. The charge had been brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress under the leadership of Mohamed Elmasry.

The CHRC is not forthcoming in its reasons, but the only reasonable ground, short of naked political survival instincts, is that the charge lacked sufficient evidence to sustain it. One would normally think that. However, as we have learned about this human rights agency racket, anything can, and does, pass for evidence.

Still, the decision leaves Canadians, not just Muslims, puzzled about human rights in this country. If CHRC doesn’t think the piece would likely cause Muslims to be held in contempt, what are we to make of the statement of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, courtesy of Barbara Hall, which also did not process the claim, but left no doubt that the articles complained about were indeed hateful, and except for a flaw in OHRC’s mandate, likely would have been actionable?

Is the Canadian decision applicable to everyplace in the country except Ontario?

Is it now up to British Columbia to clarify our human rights?

This is so stupid it should cause people to remove the little maple leaf pin from their backpacks when they travel abroad, lest foreign folk take them to be Canadians.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me

When I was a kid and other kids called me names, my mother always recited this old saw, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Whatever happened to our mothers and their wisdom?

Some posts back I got a comment from freespeecher who advised me that if I wanted to live a long and healthy life I should stop reading the Toronto Star. If I took that advice I would miss all the fun of reading my old friend Haroon Siddiqui’s columns.

He had another beaut in the Sunday edition of the Star, and, as you might expect, if you are familiar with his output, it was full of “Muslims, lefties/progressives and four legs good: anti-Islamic, righties/conservatives and two legs bad” sentiments.

Here’s a sampling:

But freedom of speech is not absolute. "Except for the U.S., virtually every Western democracy has laws against hate," notes Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress. "Our anti-hate laws are probably the most underused."

The Supreme Court has upheld those laws. Jewish, gay and other groups have long advocated their use. Few Canadians complained. But now that Muslims are, many are.
"That's really what it's about," Farber told me. "When non-Muslims were using it, nobody really cared.

"People need scapegoats. It used to be Jews. Now it's Muslims, to a great extent. Tomorrow, it may be Bahais or somebody else ...

"People should focus on the law, not on those using it. If the complaint is frivolous, the system will deal with it."

And here is what I think about this.

As long as the Human Rights Commission’s confined their anti-hate speech prosecutions to basement and garage neo-Nazis, and other fringe, white power weirdoes, nobody did care. The Jews, who are a small minority in this country, seemed to be taking out the garbage and they were quite welcome to do it, as far as the rest of us were concerned.

It was when gays started to attack Christians through the mechanism of HRCs that suddenly it was no longer the exceptional case, it became mainstream.

Neo-nazis and white supremacists form probably no more than one-tenth of one percent of the population of this country, if that. Christians, however, comprise 72%.

When Christians who expressed anti-gay sentiments were put through the meat grinder of the HRC process, other people, like me, an atheist, began to notice that gay rights were trumping religious rights. And, as pro-gay and anti-religious as I am, I do not like the idea that people who have firm beliefs based on a bedrock of millennia-old scriptures should not be entitled to express their views, even if I think they are wrong-headed.

After we started to squirm over this development, along came the Canadian Islamic Congress complaint against Maclean’s magazine, and vicariously against one of the most popular journalists in the world’s conservative press, Mark Steyn.

There are some things that are touchstones of Canada: hockey, Canadian Tire, Tim Horton’s, CBC and possibly Maclean’s magazine.

The CIC is not a Canadian touchstone. Futhermore, its chief spokesperson has a not very enviable reputation for uttering hateful comments. One wondered why he wasn't in the dock instead of Maclean's.

As well, those who are familiar with the Koran and the Hadith know that Islamic teachings do not promote equality and harmony with non-Muslims. They don’t even promote it within the Islamic world.

There is no doubt that the turmoil in the world caused by Muslim terrorists over the past decade has caused westerners to look very closely at this formerly foreign world of Islam and find some things about it that are unsettling.

But, to claim, as Farber does, that Muslims are just being scapegoated instead of Jews is foolish. In fact, by this statement, Farber does his own community a disservice since most recorded hate crimes (real crimes, mind you, not just words) still continue to be directed towards Jews in numbers far higher than the second most reported group.

It is when people wake up to the fact that the tail is starting to wag the dog that the trouble starts. We respect the rights of minorities, but when they want to start shoving the majority around, and use taxpayer-funded government agencies do their work for them, they shouldn’t be surprised if they receive a lot of pushback.

These fools at the HRCs have managed to accomplish what I would have thought impossible a year ago. They have made folk heroes out of neo-Nazis, tarnished the reputation of the Canadian Jewish Congress, united both the left and right media, and, with any luck, may end up putting themselves out of the hate speech business altogether (a growing source of funding for them).

Siddiqui ends his column with this trite observation:

People will always differ on what constitutes hate or where to draw the line on free speech. But most people would agree that free speech is not a licence to target vulnerable groups, let alone risk rupturing the common good in Canada.

In a country founded on the rule of law, due process, and equality before the law, in what respect could one say the HRCs in this country are upholding the common good in their handling of issues concerning free speech? The common good in this country would be better served if everybody just grew a thicker skin.

Finally if you don’t have due process, Mr. Siddiqui, everybody is a potential target and is vulnerable.

Canada owes one to Dr. Elmasry

Now that the “court” action in the Canadian Islamic Congress v. Maclean’s Magazine is over in British Columbia, there are three things that didn’t happen that I think were mistakes.

I suppose it looks rather silly for this blogger to be suggesting to high-priced and experienced legal counsel (Maclean’s lawyers) that they might have done something differently. After all, my legal status is best painted by former Ontario Premier, Bill Davis, who always puckishly referred to himself as “just a B student at law school”.

However, this law school B student would have asked the head sock puppet on cross-examination why he and his colleagues didn’t do what any other reasonable persons in their position would have done. When people are aggrieved at things they see in the media they write letters to the editor or they produce their own op-ed pieces and try to get them published. These whiners ran all over the media complaining that Maclean’s would not submit to their editorial demands. But they never produced the counter-Steyn article and submitted it for publication, either through Maclean’s or through other media outlets.

I think the fact that they didn’t do that goes to the heart of this dispute. It’s possible this course of events was never about getting a counter piece published. It was about forcing the issue into a human rights complaint and obtaining a fatwa. Dr. Elmasry, head of the CIC, is on record as having previously complained that the anti-hate legislation in this country is useless. Such a line of cross-examination might have unearthed that intent.

The second thing I would have done differently is to get down in the muck with the lawyer for the complainants.

Maclean’s chose to go the high road, not offering any evidence of it’s own, simply challenging the admissibility of the complainant’s evidence (about a 50% success rate) and confining itself to cross-examination of witnesses.

Maclean’s should have produced evidence on the importance of the right of free speech and how that is exercised in this country through vigorous debate in a free media. Never assume that “judges” have that understanding – especially when the ones in this case were viewed so negatively by those who are horrified by these proceedings.

Besides, if the real strategy is to get an adverse ruling that one can take to a real court on appeal, it is favourable to the appeal to be able to say that such evidence was presented at the trial court and was inappropriately and mistakenly dismissed by that tribunal.

Thirdly, it would not have hurt to present evidence from the blogosphere in support of free speech and to show that the very fact a human rights commission would even entertain this case is upsetting to many, many people. If the BC HRC had declined to admit irrelevant blogging evidence on behalf of the complainants, then maybe not, but since it did, then fight fire with fire. Don't be so prissy, legally correct and dainty about the fight. If there are no rules then make up your own.

The choice was to attorn to the jurisdiction or not. Once you accept the challenge in that forum, then go all the way and play the game the way it is intended to be played. You are either in the fray or you are not, but you are never above it.

Finally, Canada owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Elmasry and the CIC for turning over this human rights rock and exposing the bugs hiding in the shadows, nooks, crannies and crevices to the sunlight of international exposure and the court of public opinion.