Oh Islam! You are just so confusing.

On the same day that I read this column by The Toronto Star’s, Haroon Siddiqui, serving up his usual pastiche of the wonderful religion of peace, and, in the process chastising westerners for their ignorance of Islam by making fun of their concerns about the niquab: “On what legal basis does a democracy ban one person's veil but favour another's bikini”, I then read this story about a Sudanese female journalist facing a penalty of 40 lashes for the crime of wearing trousers in a restaurant.

I guess Mr. Siddiqui would be in no doubt what the legal basis would be in an Islamic society for banning clothing, so that is not worth writing about.

Why does everything look so small and far away with these binoculars?

Our good friend in The Toronto Star, Haroon Siddiqui, for whom the sun only shines out of Muslim backsides, has penned one of his patented “end of era” stories about how the recent, long-planned departure of American soldiers from Iraq shows the whole adventure to be a huge imperialist failure. They were “yanked” out of the cities, says Siddiqui.

He is right about the failure, of course, just not about the empire. He is like a man who looks through the wrong end of binoculars and notes that everything seems so small and far away.

The U.S. military forces destroyed the much vaunted Iraqi military in approximately a month after its invasion, and finally put an end to Saddam Hussein’s dreams of empire (seizing territory from Iran and annexing Kuwait). Then just about every jihad fighter in Islam descended on Iraq, spurred on by Osama bin Laden’s vision of a worldwide Caliphate and the Islamic conquest of the entire globe. There were 4 years of vicious fighting, and more than 4,000 U.S. casualties, but Islam was hammered into the ground, to the point that America feels it can safely withdraw its troops.

To take a conceit from Siddiqui’s story, nowhere does he mention the 300,000 plus Iraqis that Hussein murdered or the nearly one million Iranians who died from his war. Nowhere does he mention that the vast majority of the bloodshed in post-invasion Iraq came from Muslims killing each other, contrary to the dictates of the Koran.

All sustaining liberal democracies were born from conflict, but as Benjamin Franklin once said to a citizen outside the chambers where the American constitution was being debated, “We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it.”

I am not anticipating it will fail, but if Iraq should fail as a liberal democracy after this, it will be the responsibility of the Iraqis to shoulder the blame, not the United States. And if it is Islam that dooms the fledgling democracy then I suppose we will have our answer to the question of whether Islam can truly be compatible with democratic values. Who then will Siddiqui blame for Iraq’s troubles?

Militarily, there is no way Islam can defeat the west, even when armed with the weapons of the west. That has been the case for the past four centuries. However, the peaceful invasion of Islamic immigrants to western societies may have better outcomes for dreams of Islamic empires.

Religion versus free speech versus the faithful versus free speech

Our good Islamic apologist, Haroon Siddiqui, has penned an ambiguous column in the Toronto Star about free speech versus religion. He says he is agnostic, not in the sense of a person who claims that he does not know whether God exists or not, but in the meaning that he is undecided about whether free speech trumps the sacred when it comes to religion; i.e., whether religion should be off-limits for critical analysis.

He lives in a secular state that nominally stands for free speech. He is most concerned with alleged Islamophobia, being cognizant that free speech advocates are very vocal and visible when it is Islamists that try to shut down free speech, but invisible when it is others attacking Islam.

In the normal course, one would expect this where the majority religion, as in this country, is Christian and the minority religion, by a long shot, is Islam. But he is right on the scales of fairness and justice, this is not right. What is sauce for the goose must also apply to the gander.

What is convoluting the problem, in my view, is that many people (and I think Mr. Siddiqui is one of them) fail to distinguish between a religion and the people who adhere to the religion. Islam is the religion and Muslims are the people who follow the religion.

In our society, you are perfectly free to be a Muslim (however you define Muslimism). Nobody is entitled to criticize you for your choice of belief system, and would be considered a bigot if they did so. But that is not the same as saying that your religion is exempt from scrutiny. I can say anything I like about Islam and you, as a Muslim, have nothing to complain about (at least in Canada). I don’t think that Muslims understand that because it is an axiom of Islam that the religion is beyond criticism.

Likewise, you can criticize religions such as Christianity and Judaism, but you cannot criticize Christians and Jews; i.e., the people who have chosen their paths of belief. This is the problem that the Khalid mosque experienced; it did not criticize Judaism, it attacked Jews.

This is a free country, and that is what it means – you can believe any nonsense that strikes your fancy. It doesn’t mean that the fancy that strikes you is beyond analysis and criticism.

Here is the difficulty: if you say a religion is nuts, then you are, by implication, however unintended, saying a person who believes the dogma of that religion is nuts. The belief system and its tenets are wrapped up in the psyche of the individual believer. They cannot distinguish between an intellectual dissection of their belief system and their own self-worth.

This is the underpinning of the problem with section 13 of the Canada Human Rights Act. Muslims have taken the language that protects them from criticism and attempted to stop criticism of Islam. Neo-Nazis rain contempt on Jews, not on Judaism. Mark Steyn criticizes the political aspect of Islam and its political activists, not Muslims as a whole – there is a difference.

In a rational society dedicated to reason and skeptical argument it should be perfectly acceptable to question a belief system without personalizing it for those who accept it.

We seem to be a long way from being a rational society. But we should not make the mistake that is implicit in the resolutions of the United Nations to make the scrutiny of religion off-limits. I don’t how Mr. Siddiqui could be ambivalent about that.

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.