What did we learn?

I saw something the other day that highlighted a coincidence. The Dow Jones stood at exactly the same level on September 11, 2009 as it did on that day in 2001.

Oddly enough, I also was in the same place. I had been camping in Killarney Provincial Park in Northern Ontario and was driving home when I switched on the car radio to be startled by the live broadcasts from New York and Washington. Fortunately, this time my drive home from Killarney was uneventful.

That caused me to consider the events of that infamous day and what has transpired since.

It was said that it was a day that will change the world.

At a personal level, it caused me to get off my ass and to get concerned about religion generally and Islam in particular.

I had been a comfortable, complacent atheist for decades and paid little heed to religious issues or controversies. Raised as a Protestant and church-attending until the age of 13, I knew my Bible as well as anybody who wasn’t obsessed with it, and did not bother to keep a copy of it. Indeed, there was not one book in my reasonably extensive personal library dealing with any matter concerning religion or non-religion.

Eight years on, I have a good thirty works on the subject and have both a Bible and a Koran. I regularly scan websites devoted to these issues, as well as reading or watching anything that crops up in the mainstream media.

I not only schooled myself in religious issues, I joined and promoted organizations devoted to spreading science, reason and secularism as a counter to religious deference that seems to permeate our North American societies. As well, I started this blog partly to convey my thoughts on these matters. So, I am not just a passive reader and TV sponge.

If you had asked me on September 10, 2001 to tell you what I know about Islam, I probably could have come up with about 6 things of the most general nature. Now I feel I have a very good handle on that pernicious creed.

At a country level, I think not much has changed in Canada. I correspond regularly with several Canadians and I get the impression they think radical Islam is all somebody else’s problem.

They are not concerned that home grown terrorists are being convicted in their own backyards, that the recently convicted plotters in the U.K. were planning on blowing up Canadian airplanes, or that imams are permitted to spread hatred in the mosques of Canada while critics of Islam are subject to prosecution by government agencies, or that there are signs of apparent honour killings of females.

If you raise the danger inherent in Islam, you are met with a torrent of statements of moral relativism about “state terrorism” on our side. We are the problem, not the religion, according to these folks. If only we behaved in some non-aggressive fashion, Neville Chamberlain-style, we would be left alone by the Islamists.



Mainstream journalists regularly employ the term “Islamophobia” as if it were a real mental/emotional condition and not a propaganda ploy which they have uncritically swallowed.

Left-leaning bloggers decry the raw deal Muslims get in this country from the authorities, naming less than 10 Muslims, out of 800,000 Muslim citizens, who have been subject to scrutiny in one fashion or another by the security apparatus of this country. One wonders whether the “at risk” Muslims of Darfur, Somalia or Iran would prefer Canada to their countries despite this leftist-manufactured “hostile” climate of persecution. Jews still maintain the top billing as the victims of most of the hate crimes.

At the international level, what baffles me is the inability of western officialdom to define exactly what they are dealing with. They spend their time being apologists for this “great” religion of Islam, assuring everybody that the problem is not the religion of peace; President Obama being just the latest politico to join in this parade.

During the 45 years of the Cold War I don’t recall the same reluctance to name communism as the evil doctrine which must be defeated and to which all our efforts were devoted.

There were apologists for the practitioners of communism, like Fidel Castro, of course, but nobody except fringe players ran around defending communism as a preferred political/economic model.

Now the reverse is true, almost nobody wants to say a bad thing about the ideology of Islam, but only bad things about some of its practitioners, like Osama bin Laden.

On balance, I guess the world has changed, but not for the better, I suspect.

The fine art of parsing in politics and religion

Parsing refers to breaking down words in a sentence into grammatical components, distinguishing each from the whole. In grammer there are rules about this, but apparently not so in politics and religion. For some reason, western societies have a hard time parsing aspects of religion, particularly as they relate to politics.

Take Islam, as an example. It has two major components: Islam the religion and Islam the political ideology. Whenever conflict in society occurs one needs to examine whether it is Islam the religion or Islam the political ideology that is informing public debate. The former should command the equal measure of respect that other religions are accorded. The latter need receive no regard and no respect in western liberal democracies, since the essence of political Islam is to replace the foundations of these democracies with Islamic rule and Islamic law.

Over the past couple of years, some of the following events have sparked debate. In Minneapolis, Muslim cab drivers started refusing to pick fares at the airport who were carrying liquor bottles (consumption of alcohol is forbidden by Islam); in England, people in retail checkout lines holding liquor bottles have similarly been refused service by Muslim clerks; a dentist insists that all his patients, Muslim or otherwise wear a headscarf; employees in government offices were asked to remove personal paraphernalia from their desks that had pigs as the theme because Islam declares pigs unclean; Muslim visitors to hospitals refuse to wash their hands with the anti-infectious liquid soap provided because it contains alcohol;cab drivers refuse blind fares with seeing-eyes dogs because dogs are considered unclean; employees in a hospital were asked not to eat their lunches in the cafeteria because the Muslim staff were observing the fasting rituals of Ramadan; non Muslim women in Muslim dominant towns in England must wear headscarves to avoid harrassment; politicians in some areas are told by Muslim spokespeople that they may not enter those areas to speak to their consitutents; universities in the United States retrofitted bathrooms to provide footbaths for Muslims who must wash their feet before prayer; college swimming pools insitituted separate swimming hours to accommodate only female Muslim students; airports are expected to build separate chapels for Muslims instead of the standard non-denominational ones.

Aside from these we are also treated to the antics of the British government under Brown. At first government employees were forbidden ever to use the words "terrorism" and "Muslim" together. This has now gone a step further: official reports or comments on acts of terrorism committed by Muslims shall be labelled as "anti-Islamic."

Here's how I think these break down using my Islamic parsing guide:

Pig emblem removals, guide dogs refusals, dentist chairs rules, cafeteria lunch eating bans, liquor bottle shunning by clerks and cabbies, non hand washing in hospitals, no go areas, forced headscarves, and separate airport chapels are all wrong. These are manifestation of Islam the political ideology. Each one is a case where the larger non Muslim society is expected to change its rules and habits to conform Islamic tastes. Screw off.

Swimming pool hours and footbathing facilities are simple reasonable accommodation for a religion and not objectionable.

Since acts of terrorism performed by Muslim in the name of Islam are manifestations of Islam the political ideology and therefore should be censured because it is an anathemic ideology. It is unclear what valuable purpose could be served by pretending that these acts have nothing to do with Islam. Put another way, are we really saying that all Muslims support these terrorist acts, tacitly if not openly -- only then would it make sense to try to pretend they are something they are not. Otherwise, one can assume that right-minded Muslims (those who see only Islam as a religion -- a spiritual fountainhead) would want no part of these actions by the extremists and would want them identified as Islamic ideologues to distinguish them from the right-minded Muslims.

Post Script: I should have included Canada, where Muslim university students demand to take over editorial control of general newsmagazines. This is Islam the ideology at work. Macleans magazine has just published a comprehensive statement of its defense to charges of promulgating Islamophobia. See here.