Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Thursday, September 10, 2009
There is a chance for freedom of speach in Canada
Ezra Levant: It’s a great day for freedom of speech
Posted: September 03, 2009, 9:00 AM by NP Editor
Ezra Levant,
Yesterday, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal did something its never done in its 32-year history. It acquitted somebody of “hate speech” charges. Until now, the tribunal had a 100% conviction rate.
In a 107-page ruling, tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis didn’t just throw out the case against Marc Lemire, he threw out the law, too, calling it an infringement of the free speech guarantees of the Charter of Rights.
Hadjis is no wild-eyed civil libertarian. In the recent past, he himself has convicted people under this same law. And, before Jean Chretien appointed him to the tribunal, Hadjis was the boss of one of Montreal’s largest multicultural lobby groups, which thrived on ethnic identity politics. But even Hadjis has had enough of the human rights industry and their fetish for political correctness. He ruled that allowing Canadian citizens to express offensive ideas is preferable to living under a government that prosecutes people for expressing those ideas.
As of yesterday, it’s no longer illegal to write politically incorrect things on the Internet. Now it’s illegal to prosecute someone for it.
This will have an immediate impact on the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), which maintains a large censorship department and has other cases under investigation. If the CHRC were a real police force, and the tribunal were a real court, all existing censorship cases would be dropped, and anyone who was previously convicted would have their convictions voided. Dozens of lawsuits against the government for wrongful prosecution, and compensation for costs, wouldn’t be far behind.
But the tribunal isn’t a real court, and Hadjis acknowledged that he doesn’t have the power to strike down the law, only to declare it unconstitutional and to refuse to apply it. The CHRC has ignored the tribunal before: In this same case, Lemire was routinely denied his procedural rights by the CHRC, including its outrageous tactic of waiting until the trial was over before disclosing all of its documents to him. Even worse, some bizarre CHRC conduct came to light, including confessions by their staff that they joined neo-Nazi organizations and published bigoted comments on the Internet to entrap their targets. A real court would have thrown the case out years ago, and a real police force would have disciplined such rogue conduct.
Still, it’s a great day for Charter values like freedom of speech. But how long will it last? The human rights industry knew this was an important case, and over the past six years it spent millions of tax dollars fighting Lemire. The federal government had six lawyers on the case–four from the CHRC and two from the Justice Minister’s office. And there were five lawyers intervening on behalf of Canada’s tax-subsidized Jewish groups, the B’nai Brith, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC).
Yesterday, the CJC issued a bizarre press release in which it states that, despite the tribunal’s clear ruling, it believes the censorship law “remains constitutional.” In the next few weeks, the CJC and the rest of the human rights litigation industry will clamour for the government to appeal this decision.
It was one thing for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson to defend the constitutionality of a government law that was under attack — that’s standard operating procedure. But now that the law has been found to be illegal, it would be quite another thing for Nicholson to positively act to revive such an illiberal law. Nicholson must also put a leash on the disgraced CHRC, and order it not to appeal either. They’ve already done more than enough damage to Canada’s civil liberties, at great expense to taxpayers.
In fact, just leaving Hadjis’s ruling intact isn’t enough–his ruling illustrates a deeper rot in the CHRC. Hadjis found that the CHRC has become much more aggressive and confrontational in recent years, and at the same time it started applying punitive sanctions — such as issuing fines of tens of thousands of dollars. That toxic mix of abusive conduct with criminal-style punishments was specifically forbidden by the Supreme Court when it last reviewed the censorship laws in 1990.
It’s that bullying corporate culture that Nicholson needs to address. Nicholson should start by ordering Jennifer Lynch, the CHRC’s chief commissioner, to stop her expensive campaign of demonization against the commission’s critics. And then he should call in a retired judge — or the auditor-general — to do a thorough biopsy to find out how Canada’s human rights agency became such a threat to our human rights.
National Post
Ezra Levant blogs at ezralevant.com
Check all videos from Ezras youtube channel www.youtube.com/EzraILevant
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Report from the Northern Front: Montreal Redux
by David B. Harris
Special to IPT News
October 14, 2008
Canada's awakening to radical-Islamist penetration of its political, bureaucratic and social infrastructure, reached a watershed moment this month.
Quebec's new French-language anti-Islamist website, Point de Bascule – "tipping point" – sponsored a dramatic press conference in Montreal Oct. 2 on the dangers of hard-line Islamist penetration of Canada. But this was consciousness-raising with a powerful difference.
All three panelists were moderate Canadian Muslims. All three face death fatwas. And all three spoke unsparingly – some giving names and startling specifics – of the Sharia surge and stealth jihad in Quebec and the rest of Canada. Indeed, detailed allegations were heard about Islamist inroads into the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's social democratic party, and about infiltration of a government commission with power to define and silence "hate" speech. These were momentous claims in the context of Canada's national election campaign – the national vote takes place today. As evidenced by the number of journalists in attendance, the Quebec media were galvanized.
India-born Dr. Salim Mansur of the University of Western Ontario opened by calling on Canadians to end the political correctness and self-censorship that has muffled efforts to debate the stealth jihad – the gradual radical-Islamicizing of Canadian society. Like other speakers, he distinguished between moderate Muslims and Islamists, and warned of accelerating fundamentalist efforts "to establish a parallel society within Quebec and within Canada, as they are doing in Europe, that will be administered on the basis of Sharia."
Mansur cited Islamist demands, "in our multicultural society," "for gender exclusion ... for legal arbitration on the basis of Sharia in Ontario and Quebec, the promotion of Sharia finance." He pointed to demands for the right to have "veiled voting" in elections, complete with male-free zones in voting stations and female-only government cadres to verify veiled-voters' identity.
Professor Mansur warned stirringly of increasing radical penetration of Canada's political and social infrastructure. In the midst of the election, he turned his guns on Canada's social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP). The Party and its leader, he said,
"have gone to bed with Islamists, operatives of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and other organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations Canada, the Muslim Student Associations in our universities, ISNA – the Islamic Society of North America ... for reasons of sheer political opportunism at the expense of the security of our citizens, and defending the fundamental values of our democracy."
(For those unfamiliar with Canada's radical scene, the hard-line Canadian Islamic Congress was revealed to have given a media-excellence award to the founder of a Canadian-Islamic newspaper said to have had as its editorial line the assertion that 9/11 was a success, that Iranian-style theocracy should spread worldwide, and that Canada is a "fully paid-up member of the Anglo-Saxon mafia, which is responsible for most of the recorded genocides in the world." The Canadian Arab Federation (CAF), mentioned below, also recognized this individual with a special anniversary award.
During the first Gulf War, the CAF portrayed Canadian Arabs as victims of unnecessarily-aggressive interviewing by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), a portrayal that the independent, nonpartisan CSIS watchdog Security Intelligence Review Committee, found baseless. More recently, the CAF became notorious for campaigning against the outlawing of Hezbollah in Canada. For its part, the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR-CAN] is the Canadian chapter of the Washington, DC-based, Saudi-funded Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR], an unindicted co-conspirator in the US Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial. Like its American parent, CAIR-CAN engaged in unsuccessful lawsuits against media and other commentators who raised questions about its background and links; and, like its parent, CAIR-CAN is a defendant in the New York 9/11 lawsuit, Estate of John P. O'Neill, Sr. et al. vs. Al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation.)
Pakistani-Canadian Raheel Raza, a noted cross-cultural and interfaith facilitator and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad, rose to damn the radicals. She condemned Islamist grievance-mongering and attempts to alienate Muslims, particularly Muslim youth, from the mainstream. Noting that she was Number 5 on a radical-Islamist list of the world's most hated Muslims, she said she aspired to reach the Number 1 position.
But it was Pakistan-born pro-Palestinian socialist author, Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, who put a discernible chill through the assembly. A former senior official and candidate of the New Democratic Party (NDP), he declared that the NDP was the target of an Islamist takeover bid. This campaign was having success, he warned, and risked suborning the federalist party with the third largest number of seats in Canada's House of Commons.
Fatah highlighted the case of Dr. Samira Laouni, the NDP's veiled Moroccan-Canadian fundamentalist candidate for the Montreal constituency of Bourassa. A Canadian Islamic Congress Quebec operative, she had recently organized a visit to the city by British Taliban-apologist Yvonne Ridley. That event caused upset in Quebec, especially when it emerged that the federal NDP's Quebec "lieutenant," Thomas Mulcair, had rolled into the hardcore CIC session, yet continued to support Laouni despite her outlook. And all this came on top of the resignation of Laouni's Muslim campaign manager, when he was fixed with authorship of a published poem that contrasted the purity of veiled Muslim women with – as journalist Barbara Kay captured it – his idea of non-Muslim Quebec women as "promiscuous drunks."
But, according to Fatah, all this was only part of his concern about his former party. The 17-year veteran of the NDP, looked back with dismay on the Party's apparent unraveling by radicalism, and took careful aim:
"But slowly, I saw the Party open its doors to Islamists – first under [former NDP leader] Alexa McDonough, when supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah managed to join her personal legislative staff; and later, under [current leader] Jack Layton, when the doors were flung open. One Hezbollah supporter even managed to become the Ontario NDP's vice president."
Fatah claimed that "in the last NDP leadership campaign, I was witness to an attempt by a group of wealthy Islamists, to back one Member of Parliament for the leadership, with the stated objective of controlling the Party." He spoke of "six or seven" business people "who were advised that, of all the parties in Canada, the NDP was the easiest to take over and make to serve the Islamist agenda."
Fatah asserts that he "was present when this meeting took place," and would be prepared to "point out the people" who raised about $100,000 for the Islamist leadership campaign. The author of Chasing a Mirage and now a supporter of the Liberal Party, said he "informed Jack Layton of the scheme" including the radicals' attempts to portray Layton as "pro-Israel."
"But," Fatah added, "by 2006, I had come to the conclusion that the Party was up for grabs, and noticed a countrywide recruitment in the NDP by pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah activists," and withdrew from the NDP. "Today, the NDP is running Islamist candidates and its discourse is dominated by support of terror suspects in the guise of a defense of human rights."
Fatah expressed particular concern about certain Muslim NDP candidates' waging of a "relentless campaign to portray Canada as essentially anti-Muslim, and to instill a sense of forced victimhood among Muslim youth." He took to task one such candidate – a lawyer – for reportedly proclaiming that the judge who recently convicted the first of the alleged "Toronto 18" terrorists, did so because of anti-Muslim bias.
"Thia is a practicing lawyer accusing our judiciary of being anti-Muslim," Fatah declared. Practically demanding a professional-conduct investigation by the Ontario attorneys' governing Law Society of Upper Canada, he added, "Can you imagine what effect this [claim] is going to have on 10- or 12- or 15-year-old young men who are consistently told that this is a war against Islam?"
Infiltrating and Silencing
Depicting the NDP travails as a reflection of the broader international jihad by "political Islam" against the liberal-pluralist values of the West, Fatah then turned to the campaign against free speech. He reminded the audience that the Organization of Islamic Conference is pushing at the UN and elsewhere for Sharia-oriented "blasphemy" laws that would silence efforts to define and describe the enemy. He pointed to the way that the Canadian Islamic Congress had used Canada's human-rights' commissions, and their complaint mechanisms, to lay siege to publications such as Maclean's, Canada's leading newsmagazine. Then his focus narrowed to one illustrative aspect of this campaign.
Earlier this year, Commission chief Barbara Hall, handed down a decision that dismissed a complaint against Maclean's for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's bestseller, America Alone. The CIC had complained that the publication was anti-Muslim hate literature.
Free speech advocates would have been satisfied with the dismissal, and this should have ended the matter. But Hall, in a virtually unprecedented departure from acceptable conduct, went on to proclaim that Maclean's had been guilty of anti-Muslim prejudice. Indeed, as though writing from the CIC's playbook, she even pelted Maclean's with that rather contrived construct, "Islamophobia." Few understood at the time, how such extraordinary and damaging conclusions could have been reached without benefit of hearings, evidence, or any opportunity for Maclean's to cross-examine or make a defense.
After the release of the Commission's statement, the middle-of-the-road Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), an organization originally founded by Mr. Fatah, spoke for many in its official April 2008 response:
"... in editorializing and coming out to bat for Canada's Islamists, the OHRC is sending a very dangerous message to moderate Muslims who reject Sharia and do not take inspiration from overseas Islamic countries or groups.
On the one hand the OHRC criticizes Macleans for "portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics," but then does the same thing by perpetuating the Islamist myth that Muslims in Canada are a persecuted group. Those of us Muslims who do not share this addiction of victimhood, seem to have no resonance with the OHRC.
....
The OHRC decision must be cause for celebration in Osama Bin Laden's cave and among the soldiers of the world Jihadi movement that love to spread the falsehood that Canada is at war with Islam and that Muslims in Canada live under a cloud of racism and persecution. Nothing can be further from the truth."
But how could a Commission of the Ontario Government have erred so seriously? At the Point de Bascule press conference, Mr. Fatah offered an answer:
"... if you're scratching your heads, reading the outrageous attacks on Maclean's magazine by Barbara Hall, ... let me share with you the news that the Ontario Human Rights Commission is itself infiltrated by Islamists, and I say that on the record. One of its commissioners ... is an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini and has close links to the Canadian Islamic Congress. This is the CIC that filed the complaint against Maclean's, and this man was sitting as judge and jury. Another Commissioner also has close links to the CIC and is a former President of the Canadian Arab Federation – again, closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress. But how many Canadians know this is happening?
And, [as] if that was not all, let me assure you that the senior policy advisor at the Ontario Human Rights Commission who wrote the document that Barbara Hall signed, is openly supportive of Sharia law – in fact, he comes to work dressed in Saudi attire."
At the Montreal gathering, a small handful of hard-liners eventually made itself known during the event's question period. One mature, head-scarfed woman challenged the speakers' portrayal of Samira Laouni's involvement with Taliban proxy Yvonne Ridley – until the questioner was forced to admit that she, herself, was implicated with Laouni as an organizer of the radical forum. Neither was her case helped by a journalist at the back of the hall, who, offended by the attempt to spin the audience, declared that she – the journalist – had personally witnessed the Ridley performance. A few days after this, and the NDP hierarchy's unappetizing connections seemed beyond doubt.
Days after the Montreal event, on October 6, several controversial Muslim groups – including the Quebec wings of the CIC and Canadian Arab Federation – convened a candidates' debate in an Islamic community center in the Montreal-area constituency of Brossard-La Prairie. Heeding the Islamist summons, the Liberal, NDP and Green parties' candidates reported for duty, as did the incumbent Member of Parliament, the separatist Bloc Québécois' Marcel Lussier. Only the candidate for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's governing Conservative Party failed to show up. The others were in a close, multi-party fight to the finish for the four percent of the vote that would be Muslim.
As though determined to prove the accuracy of the earlier Mansur, Fatah and Raza warnings about betrayal by political elites, the politicos turned the "debate" into a reverse auction. Desperate to win over radical voters, candidates out-pandered and outbid one another, going farther than some of their jihadi audience in condemning counterterrorism, humoring altogether undemonstrated victimhood claims, and generally feeding radicals' propagation of persecution fears.
In the face of this, none of the candidates came to the aid of their country. None of them have argued, like Fatah, that Muslims have more freedom, rights and prosperity in Canada than in virtually any "Muslim" country. No one reassured those who were unnecessarily worried or alienated. No one mentioned that the real victims of racial and religious abuse in Canada were statistically the same as always – black Canadians and Jews – or that American statistics suggested that the extent of abuse of Muslims in the United States, while unacceptable, was only marginally greater than the combined level of abused Protestants and Catholics.
Instead, the candidates accepted without demur questions from their audience incorporating counterfactual premises about rampaging racial profiling, immigration restrictions, persecution and – according to one spectator – the need for "special laws" against such things.
Racial profiling – "le profilage raciale" – was "inacceptable", thundered incumbent Bloc MP Lussier. "[U]ne tolerance zero" for "Islamophobie," exclaimed Liberal Alexandra Mendes.
On the no-panderer-left-behind principle, the NDP's entrant, Hoang Mai, declared that Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, the country's fundamental counterterrorism measure, should simply be "abolished." Sniffing the wind, Member of Parliament Lussier flashed his trump: the Hamas movement, he said triumphantly, is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people.
Canada is in trouble.
David B. Harris is a Canadian lawyer, Director of INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc's International and Terrorist Intelligence Program, and former Chief of Strategic Planning of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Original article at http://www.investigativeproject.org
Special to IPT News
October 14, 2008
Canada's awakening to radical-Islamist penetration of its political, bureaucratic and social infrastructure, reached a watershed moment this month.
Quebec's new French-language anti-Islamist website, Point de Bascule – "tipping point" – sponsored a dramatic press conference in Montreal Oct. 2 on the dangers of hard-line Islamist penetration of Canada. But this was consciousness-raising with a powerful difference.
All three panelists were moderate Canadian Muslims. All three face death fatwas. And all three spoke unsparingly – some giving names and startling specifics – of the Sharia surge and stealth jihad in Quebec and the rest of Canada. Indeed, detailed allegations were heard about Islamist inroads into the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's social democratic party, and about infiltration of a government commission with power to define and silence "hate" speech. These were momentous claims in the context of Canada's national election campaign – the national vote takes place today. As evidenced by the number of journalists in attendance, the Quebec media were galvanized.
India-born Dr. Salim Mansur of the University of Western Ontario opened by calling on Canadians to end the political correctness and self-censorship that has muffled efforts to debate the stealth jihad – the gradual radical-Islamicizing of Canadian society. Like other speakers, he distinguished between moderate Muslims and Islamists, and warned of accelerating fundamentalist efforts "to establish a parallel society within Quebec and within Canada, as they are doing in Europe, that will be administered on the basis of Sharia."
Mansur cited Islamist demands, "in our multicultural society," "for gender exclusion ... for legal arbitration on the basis of Sharia in Ontario and Quebec, the promotion of Sharia finance." He pointed to demands for the right to have "veiled voting" in elections, complete with male-free zones in voting stations and female-only government cadres to verify veiled-voters' identity.
Professor Mansur warned stirringly of increasing radical penetration of Canada's political and social infrastructure. In the midst of the election, he turned his guns on Canada's social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP). The Party and its leader, he said,
"have gone to bed with Islamists, operatives of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and other organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations Canada, the Muslim Student Associations in our universities, ISNA – the Islamic Society of North America ... for reasons of sheer political opportunism at the expense of the security of our citizens, and defending the fundamental values of our democracy."
(For those unfamiliar with Canada's radical scene, the hard-line Canadian Islamic Congress was revealed to have given a media-excellence award to the founder of a Canadian-Islamic newspaper said to have had as its editorial line the assertion that 9/11 was a success, that Iranian-style theocracy should spread worldwide, and that Canada is a "fully paid-up member of the Anglo-Saxon mafia, which is responsible for most of the recorded genocides in the world." The Canadian Arab Federation (CAF), mentioned below, also recognized this individual with a special anniversary award.
During the first Gulf War, the CAF portrayed Canadian Arabs as victims of unnecessarily-aggressive interviewing by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), a portrayal that the independent, nonpartisan CSIS watchdog Security Intelligence Review Committee, found baseless. More recently, the CAF became notorious for campaigning against the outlawing of Hezbollah in Canada. For its part, the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR-CAN] is the Canadian chapter of the Washington, DC-based, Saudi-funded Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR], an unindicted co-conspirator in the US Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial. Like its American parent, CAIR-CAN engaged in unsuccessful lawsuits against media and other commentators who raised questions about its background and links; and, like its parent, CAIR-CAN is a defendant in the New York 9/11 lawsuit, Estate of John P. O'Neill, Sr. et al. vs. Al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation.)
Pakistani-Canadian Raheel Raza, a noted cross-cultural and interfaith facilitator and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad, rose to damn the radicals. She condemned Islamist grievance-mongering and attempts to alienate Muslims, particularly Muslim youth, from the mainstream. Noting that she was Number 5 on a radical-Islamist list of the world's most hated Muslims, she said she aspired to reach the Number 1 position.
But it was Pakistan-born pro-Palestinian socialist author, Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, who put a discernible chill through the assembly. A former senior official and candidate of the New Democratic Party (NDP), he declared that the NDP was the target of an Islamist takeover bid. This campaign was having success, he warned, and risked suborning the federalist party with the third largest number of seats in Canada's House of Commons.
Fatah highlighted the case of Dr. Samira Laouni, the NDP's veiled Moroccan-Canadian fundamentalist candidate for the Montreal constituency of Bourassa. A Canadian Islamic Congress Quebec operative, she had recently organized a visit to the city by British Taliban-apologist Yvonne Ridley. That event caused upset in Quebec, especially when it emerged that the federal NDP's Quebec "lieutenant," Thomas Mulcair, had rolled into the hardcore CIC session, yet continued to support Laouni despite her outlook. And all this came on top of the resignation of Laouni's Muslim campaign manager, when he was fixed with authorship of a published poem that contrasted the purity of veiled Muslim women with – as journalist Barbara Kay captured it – his idea of non-Muslim Quebec women as "promiscuous drunks."
But, according to Fatah, all this was only part of his concern about his former party. The 17-year veteran of the NDP, looked back with dismay on the Party's apparent unraveling by radicalism, and took careful aim:
"But slowly, I saw the Party open its doors to Islamists – first under [former NDP leader] Alexa McDonough, when supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah managed to join her personal legislative staff; and later, under [current leader] Jack Layton, when the doors were flung open. One Hezbollah supporter even managed to become the Ontario NDP's vice president."
Fatah claimed that "in the last NDP leadership campaign, I was witness to an attempt by a group of wealthy Islamists, to back one Member of Parliament for the leadership, with the stated objective of controlling the Party." He spoke of "six or seven" business people "who were advised that, of all the parties in Canada, the NDP was the easiest to take over and make to serve the Islamist agenda."
Fatah asserts that he "was present when this meeting took place," and would be prepared to "point out the people" who raised about $100,000 for the Islamist leadership campaign. The author of Chasing a Mirage and now a supporter of the Liberal Party, said he "informed Jack Layton of the scheme" including the radicals' attempts to portray Layton as "pro-Israel."
"But," Fatah added, "by 2006, I had come to the conclusion that the Party was up for grabs, and noticed a countrywide recruitment in the NDP by pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah activists," and withdrew from the NDP. "Today, the NDP is running Islamist candidates and its discourse is dominated by support of terror suspects in the guise of a defense of human rights."
Fatah expressed particular concern about certain Muslim NDP candidates' waging of a "relentless campaign to portray Canada as essentially anti-Muslim, and to instill a sense of forced victimhood among Muslim youth." He took to task one such candidate – a lawyer – for reportedly proclaiming that the judge who recently convicted the first of the alleged "Toronto 18" terrorists, did so because of anti-Muslim bias.
"Thia is a practicing lawyer accusing our judiciary of being anti-Muslim," Fatah declared. Practically demanding a professional-conduct investigation by the Ontario attorneys' governing Law Society of Upper Canada, he added, "Can you imagine what effect this [claim] is going to have on 10- or 12- or 15-year-old young men who are consistently told that this is a war against Islam?"
Infiltrating and Silencing
Depicting the NDP travails as a reflection of the broader international jihad by "political Islam" against the liberal-pluralist values of the West, Fatah then turned to the campaign against free speech. He reminded the audience that the Organization of Islamic Conference is pushing at the UN and elsewhere for Sharia-oriented "blasphemy" laws that would silence efforts to define and describe the enemy. He pointed to the way that the Canadian Islamic Congress had used Canada's human-rights' commissions, and their complaint mechanisms, to lay siege to publications such as Maclean's, Canada's leading newsmagazine. Then his focus narrowed to one illustrative aspect of this campaign.
Earlier this year, Commission chief Barbara Hall, handed down a decision that dismissed a complaint against Maclean's for publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's bestseller, America Alone. The CIC had complained that the publication was anti-Muslim hate literature.
Free speech advocates would have been satisfied with the dismissal, and this should have ended the matter. But Hall, in a virtually unprecedented departure from acceptable conduct, went on to proclaim that Maclean's had been guilty of anti-Muslim prejudice. Indeed, as though writing from the CIC's playbook, she even pelted Maclean's with that rather contrived construct, "Islamophobia." Few understood at the time, how such extraordinary and damaging conclusions could have been reached without benefit of hearings, evidence, or any opportunity for Maclean's to cross-examine or make a defense.
After the release of the Commission's statement, the middle-of-the-road Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), an organization originally founded by Mr. Fatah, spoke for many in its official April 2008 response:
"... in editorializing and coming out to bat for Canada's Islamists, the OHRC is sending a very dangerous message to moderate Muslims who reject Sharia and do not take inspiration from overseas Islamic countries or groups.
On the one hand the OHRC criticizes Macleans for "portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics," but then does the same thing by perpetuating the Islamist myth that Muslims in Canada are a persecuted group. Those of us Muslims who do not share this addiction of victimhood, seem to have no resonance with the OHRC.
....
The OHRC decision must be cause for celebration in Osama Bin Laden's cave and among the soldiers of the world Jihadi movement that love to spread the falsehood that Canada is at war with Islam and that Muslims in Canada live under a cloud of racism and persecution. Nothing can be further from the truth."
But how could a Commission of the Ontario Government have erred so seriously? At the Point de Bascule press conference, Mr. Fatah offered an answer:
"... if you're scratching your heads, reading the outrageous attacks on Maclean's magazine by Barbara Hall, ... let me share with you the news that the Ontario Human Rights Commission is itself infiltrated by Islamists, and I say that on the record. One of its commissioners ... is an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini and has close links to the Canadian Islamic Congress. This is the CIC that filed the complaint against Maclean's, and this man was sitting as judge and jury. Another Commissioner also has close links to the CIC and is a former President of the Canadian Arab Federation – again, closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress. But how many Canadians know this is happening?
And, [as] if that was not all, let me assure you that the senior policy advisor at the Ontario Human Rights Commission who wrote the document that Barbara Hall signed, is openly supportive of Sharia law – in fact, he comes to work dressed in Saudi attire."
At the Montreal gathering, a small handful of hard-liners eventually made itself known during the event's question period. One mature, head-scarfed woman challenged the speakers' portrayal of Samira Laouni's involvement with Taliban proxy Yvonne Ridley – until the questioner was forced to admit that she, herself, was implicated with Laouni as an organizer of the radical forum. Neither was her case helped by a journalist at the back of the hall, who, offended by the attempt to spin the audience, declared that she – the journalist – had personally witnessed the Ridley performance. A few days after this, and the NDP hierarchy's unappetizing connections seemed beyond doubt.
Days after the Montreal event, on October 6, several controversial Muslim groups – including the Quebec wings of the CIC and Canadian Arab Federation – convened a candidates' debate in an Islamic community center in the Montreal-area constituency of Brossard-La Prairie. Heeding the Islamist summons, the Liberal, NDP and Green parties' candidates reported for duty, as did the incumbent Member of Parliament, the separatist Bloc Québécois' Marcel Lussier. Only the candidate for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's governing Conservative Party failed to show up. The others were in a close, multi-party fight to the finish for the four percent of the vote that would be Muslim.
As though determined to prove the accuracy of the earlier Mansur, Fatah and Raza warnings about betrayal by political elites, the politicos turned the "debate" into a reverse auction. Desperate to win over radical voters, candidates out-pandered and outbid one another, going farther than some of their jihadi audience in condemning counterterrorism, humoring altogether undemonstrated victimhood claims, and generally feeding radicals' propagation of persecution fears.
In the face of this, none of the candidates came to the aid of their country. None of them have argued, like Fatah, that Muslims have more freedom, rights and prosperity in Canada than in virtually any "Muslim" country. No one reassured those who were unnecessarily worried or alienated. No one mentioned that the real victims of racial and religious abuse in Canada were statistically the same as always – black Canadians and Jews – or that American statistics suggested that the extent of abuse of Muslims in the United States, while unacceptable, was only marginally greater than the combined level of abused Protestants and Catholics.
Instead, the candidates accepted without demur questions from their audience incorporating counterfactual premises about rampaging racial profiling, immigration restrictions, persecution and – according to one spectator – the need for "special laws" against such things.
Racial profiling – "le profilage raciale" – was "inacceptable", thundered incumbent Bloc MP Lussier. "[U]ne tolerance zero" for "Islamophobie," exclaimed Liberal Alexandra Mendes.
On the no-panderer-left-behind principle, the NDP's entrant, Hoang Mai, declared that Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, the country's fundamental counterterrorism measure, should simply be "abolished." Sniffing the wind, Member of Parliament Lussier flashed his trump: the Hamas movement, he said triumphantly, is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people.
Canada is in trouble.
David B. Harris is a Canadian lawyer, Director of INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc's International and Terrorist Intelligence Program, and former Chief of Strategic Planning of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Canadian Islamic Congress blames the victim
Reluctance to wear hijab linked to teen's slaying?
TORONTO 12/12/07 -- A slain Muslim teen whose father has been charged with murder apparently chafed at the prospect of wearing traditional religious garb, but members of the Islamic community warn against anyone using the tragedy to vilify the headscarf known as the hijab.
Aqsa Parvez, 16, of Mississauga, Ont., was rushed to hospital Monday in critical condition after a man made a 911 call in which he claimed to have killed his daughter. Parvez died late Monday night in hospital.
Friends have said Parvez clashed with her family about her reluctance to wear the hijab, a traditional garment for all devout Muslim women. Police have not commented on a possible motive in the case and experts caution against jumping to conclusions about the source of any conflict in the family.
"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."
You could find this article at Winnipeg Free Press
TORONTO 12/12/07 -- A slain Muslim teen whose father has been charged with murder apparently chafed at the prospect of wearing traditional religious garb, but members of the Islamic community warn against anyone using the tragedy to vilify the headscarf known as the hijab.
Aqsa Parvez, 16, of Mississauga, Ont., was rushed to hospital Monday in critical condition after a man made a 911 call in which he claimed to have killed his daughter. Parvez died late Monday night in hospital.
Friends have said Parvez clashed with her family about her reluctance to wear the hijab, a traditional garment for all devout Muslim women. Police have not commented on a possible motive in the case and experts caution against jumping to conclusions about the source of any conflict in the family.
"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."
You could find this article at Winnipeg Free Press
Monday, June 16, 2008
There was some hope for Canada
Original Article posted three years ago by Christopher Orlet on 9.26.05
Sharia Shocks
More bad news for Muslims who dream of making their new Canadian homeland a little more like the backward, repressive nations they once fled. The other week Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a ban on Islamic or Sharia law in the province. McGuinty's pronouncement means the end of government sanction for the province's rabbinical and Christian tribunals too, and has the justices of Ontario's Rastafarian Supreme Court sitting around smoking ganja and saying, "Ah, mon, what a drag, mon."
McGuinty told the Associated Press that religious arbitrations "threaten the common ground" on which stands Canada's most populous province. "There will be no Sharia law in Ontario," he said. "There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians." Religious courts may continue to operate in private, though without government backing.
The Ontario government's return to sanity came after weeks of dogged protests by Canadian women's groups that have uncharacteristically decided that giving in to each and every hare-brained multiculturalist demand may not be such an enlightened idea after all. Even Muslim Canadian Congress founder Tarek Fatah called the proposal "multiculturalism run amok."
Using faith-based tribunals to mediate family law disputes for Jews and Christians had been lawful since the Ontario government passed the 1991 Arbitration Act. The Act, it was said, would be cheaper than building more courthouses and paying new judges. Then last year, under pressure from Muslim leaders, former Attorney General Marion Boyd concluded that Muslims should have the same rights to faith-based arbitration as their Jewish and Christian brethren.
Ms. Boyd's recommendation was welcomed by radical Muslim leaders who have long sought to impose Sharia law in Ontario as part of their ongoing efforts to isolate and further control Canada's Muslims. Supporters of the ban now argue that when the Arbitration Act was first passed Ontarian legislators had no idea what a primitive, misogynistic code of law Sharia really was. This is not unusual, they say. They seldom know anything about the laws they pass. It took 9-11 and the London bombings to open their eyes.
Ontario's Muslims have vowed to appeal the decision, and doubtless will not put their feet up until Muslim women are firmly put back in their place with help from the Holy Koran and the provincial government. This is all part of a larger political trend whereby Islamofascists seek to impose their cultural values on Western society. Back in Old Europe, Muslims have demanded Italy's greatest literary masterpiece The Divine Comedy be removed from classroom syllabus -- they find the depictions of Mohammed in hell offensive. Some have even demanded that medieval masterpieces like Michelangelo's The Last Judgment -- again with its depiction of Mohammed roasting in hellfire -- be obliterated.
In 2003, Muslims in Aubervilliers, France, demanded the city council close the municipal swimming pool to men at certain hours so that Muslim women could swim in private. The city agreed to curtain the pool's large bay windows. (Apparently suggesting that Muslims build their own facility if they did not like the rules was not an option.) Recently junior high students in Saint-Denis refused to tour the famous basilica where many of France's kings are buried because the church grounds were considered "impure." And more and more often Euro-Muslims are insisting on separate men's and women's wards, which will ultimately mean separate public hospitals for Muslim patients.
Not surprisingly, in the undeveloped world the fight is not over books and curtains, so much as life and liberty. In Nigeria, once predominantly Christian provinces are now forcibly made to accept Sharia law in place of the secular constitution. And in Indonesia, Islamic thugs have sought to impose Sharia on the majority Muslim population, threatening Indonesia's status as a secular state.
Several European governments have already adopted some of the most heinous aspects of Islamic law, even if they refuse to acknowledge it as such. The brilliant and outspoken Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci now lives in exile in the U.S. after publishing a book critical of Islam and falling afoul of Italy's religious hate-crime laws. And British Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to introduce similar legislation in Britain. Passage of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill would be a huge step back to medieval blasphemy laws. Even in the U.S., Muslim leaders, like the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America Muzammil Siddiqi, have called for a wider application of Sharia law.
What's the worst that can happen? For starters, under Islamic "family" law, after a couple divorces, the father automatically gets custody of the sons when they turn eight, and the daughters when they begin to menstruate. Imams can refuse to grant a woman a divorce unless her husband consents. Nor can she remarry without her ex-husband's approval. Sharia also prohibits Muslims from marrying or remaining married to non-Muslims. Women who wish to have their case mediated by an imam must negotiate through male relatives. At best Muslim women inherit half that of a male relative. And God help a woman if she is accused of adultery. Sharia authorizes the stoning of women for that offense. To make things more interesting, a women's testimony is worth half that of a man, though she may easily testify twice as long. If a woman accuses a Muslim man of rape, Sharia requires she have four male witnesses -- four male witnesses who just happened to observe the rape, but did nothing to prevent it -- therefore, the likelihood is that the rape victim will be found guilty of adultery or fornication and stoned to death. Canada doesn't have the death penalty -- not even for Muslims -- so this presents a bit of a problem. How to do away with the godless slut? Doubtless such legal quandaries would have taxed the brains of a Holmes or Brandeis.
Attorney General Boyd promised to appoint watchdogs to ensure that Muslim women's rights were not violated by Islamic law. As an additional safeguard any ruling by an imam could be appealed to the state court. It is almost as though the consulting firm of Rube Goldberg P.C. had been hired to streamline the overcrowded court system.
Outside the area of family law, Sharia gets even more absurd and barbaric. Islamic law authorizes amputations of hands and feet for petty theft, and the death sentence for apostates. Husbands are permitted to thrash disobedient wives, and women are forbidden to hold prominent jobs. Need it be said that badmouthing the prophet is punishable by death? Who will enforce the laws? In the Middle East at least the enforcers are not a metropolitan police force, but mutawa, or religious police, i.e. thugs. Such punishments were introduced thousands of years ago when nomadic Arab tribes could not afford prisons or prevent accused criminals from being killed by outraged victims and kinfolk. Times have changed, but the ideology hasn't.
Today Saudi Arabia and Iran maintain Islamic courts for all aspects of jurisprudence. Sharia is also used in Sudan, Libya, and until recently, in Afghanistan. Some states in northern Nigeria have reintroduced Sharia courts. And Ontario nearly joined this illustrious chorus.
A lot of us had our doubts about the Canucks. They've been known to do some fairly silly things. Same-sex marriage and the Canadian Football League come to mind. As does their lousy national healthcare plan. And who can forget how Ontario welcomed all those lousy hippie Vietnam war protesters, and worse, allowed them to come back? But this time, at least, cooler heads and common sense prevailed. Who knows if this isn't the beginning of a trend...
Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor and runs the Existential Journalist blog.
More bad news for Muslims who dream of making their new Canadian homeland a little more like the backward, repressive nations they once fled. The other week Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a ban on Islamic or Sharia law in the province. McGuinty's pronouncement means the end of government sanction for the province's rabbinical and Christian tribunals too, and has the justices of Ontario's Rastafarian Supreme Court sitting around smoking ganja and saying, "Ah, mon, what a drag, mon."
McGuinty told the Associated Press that religious arbitrations "threaten the common ground" on which stands Canada's most populous province. "There will be no Sharia law in Ontario," he said. "There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians." Religious courts may continue to operate in private, though without government backing.
The Ontario government's return to sanity came after weeks of dogged protests by Canadian women's groups that have uncharacteristically decided that giving in to each and every hare-brained multiculturalist demand may not be such an enlightened idea after all. Even Muslim Canadian Congress founder Tarek Fatah called the proposal "multiculturalism run amok."
Using faith-based tribunals to mediate family law disputes for Jews and Christians had been lawful since the Ontario government passed the 1991 Arbitration Act. The Act, it was said, would be cheaper than building more courthouses and paying new judges. Then last year, under pressure from Muslim leaders, former Attorney General Marion Boyd concluded that Muslims should have the same rights to faith-based arbitration as their Jewish and Christian brethren.
Ms. Boyd's recommendation was welcomed by radical Muslim leaders who have long sought to impose Sharia law in Ontario as part of their ongoing efforts to isolate and further control Canada's Muslims. Supporters of the ban now argue that when the Arbitration Act was first passed Ontarian legislators had no idea what a primitive, misogynistic code of law Sharia really was. This is not unusual, they say. They seldom know anything about the laws they pass. It took 9-11 and the London bombings to open their eyes.
Ontario's Muslims have vowed to appeal the decision, and doubtless will not put their feet up until Muslim women are firmly put back in their place with help from the Holy Koran and the provincial government. This is all part of a larger political trend whereby Islamofascists seek to impose their cultural values on Western society. Back in Old Europe, Muslims have demanded Italy's greatest literary masterpiece The Divine Comedy be removed from classroom syllabus -- they find the depictions of Mohammed in hell offensive. Some have even demanded that medieval masterpieces like Michelangelo's The Last Judgment -- again with its depiction of Mohammed roasting in hellfire -- be obliterated.
In 2003, Muslims in Aubervilliers, France, demanded the city council close the municipal swimming pool to men at certain hours so that Muslim women could swim in private. The city agreed to curtain the pool's large bay windows. (Apparently suggesting that Muslims build their own facility if they did not like the rules was not an option.) Recently junior high students in Saint-Denis refused to tour the famous basilica where many of France's kings are buried because the church grounds were considered "impure." And more and more often Euro-Muslims are insisting on separate men's and women's wards, which will ultimately mean separate public hospitals for Muslim patients.
Not surprisingly, in the undeveloped world the fight is not over books and curtains, so much as life and liberty. In Nigeria, once predominantly Christian provinces are now forcibly made to accept Sharia law in place of the secular constitution. And in Indonesia, Islamic thugs have sought to impose Sharia on the majority Muslim population, threatening Indonesia's status as a secular state.
Several European governments have already adopted some of the most heinous aspects of Islamic law, even if they refuse to acknowledge it as such. The brilliant and outspoken Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci now lives in exile in the U.S. after publishing a book critical of Islam and falling afoul of Italy's religious hate-crime laws. And British Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to introduce similar legislation in Britain. Passage of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill would be a huge step back to medieval blasphemy laws. Even in the U.S., Muslim leaders, like the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America Muzammil Siddiqi, have called for a wider application of Sharia law.
What's the worst that can happen? For starters, under Islamic "family" law, after a couple divorces, the father automatically gets custody of the sons when they turn eight, and the daughters when they begin to menstruate. Imams can refuse to grant a woman a divorce unless her husband consents. Nor can she remarry without her ex-husband's approval. Sharia also prohibits Muslims from marrying or remaining married to non-Muslims. Women who wish to have their case mediated by an imam must negotiate through male relatives. At best Muslim women inherit half that of a male relative. And God help a woman if she is accused of adultery. Sharia authorizes the stoning of women for that offense. To make things more interesting, a women's testimony is worth half that of a man, though she may easily testify twice as long. If a woman accuses a Muslim man of rape, Sharia requires she have four male witnesses -- four male witnesses who just happened to observe the rape, but did nothing to prevent it -- therefore, the likelihood is that the rape victim will be found guilty of adultery or fornication and stoned to death. Canada doesn't have the death penalty -- not even for Muslims -- so this presents a bit of a problem. How to do away with the godless slut? Doubtless such legal quandaries would have taxed the brains of a Holmes or Brandeis.
Attorney General Boyd promised to appoint watchdogs to ensure that Muslim women's rights were not violated by Islamic law. As an additional safeguard any ruling by an imam could be appealed to the state court. It is almost as though the consulting firm of Rube Goldberg P.C. had been hired to streamline the overcrowded court system.
Outside the area of family law, Sharia gets even more absurd and barbaric. Islamic law authorizes amputations of hands and feet for petty theft, and the death sentence for apostates. Husbands are permitted to thrash disobedient wives, and women are forbidden to hold prominent jobs. Need it be said that badmouthing the prophet is punishable by death? Who will enforce the laws? In the Middle East at least the enforcers are not a metropolitan police force, but mutawa, or religious police, i.e. thugs. Such punishments were introduced thousands of years ago when nomadic Arab tribes could not afford prisons or prevent accused criminals from being killed by outraged victims and kinfolk. Times have changed, but the ideology hasn't.
Today Saudi Arabia and Iran maintain Islamic courts for all aspects of jurisprudence. Sharia is also used in Sudan, Libya, and until recently, in Afghanistan. Some states in northern Nigeria have reintroduced Sharia courts. And Ontario nearly joined this illustrious chorus.
A lot of us had our doubts about the Canucks. They've been known to do some fairly silly things. Same-sex marriage and the Canadian Football League come to mind. As does their lousy national healthcare plan. And who can forget how Ontario welcomed all those lousy hippie Vietnam war protesters, and worse, allowed them to come back? But this time, at least, cooler heads and common sense prevailed. Who knows if this isn't the beginning of a trend...
Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor and runs the Existential Journalist blog.
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