With a Canadian federal election rumored for next month, the nation’s myriad ethnic voting blocks are preparing to wield their well-known power. Politicians of all parties pander shamelessly to these groups in the name of “multiculturalism,” and Canada’s self-appointed Muslim representatives know this all too well.
For now, they make up less than 3% of Canada’s population, but since 9/11, Muslims have leveraged political correctness and imaginary “Islamophobia” to position themselves as a victim group worth courting – or else.
One Canadian political blog uncovered an article in a recent newsletter for the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), the same group suing author Mark Steyn for “flagrant Islamophobia” and which supported the abortive attempt to introduce Sharia law to Canada.
The article advised Muslim voters that the “proper approach to selecting the best candidate is through conducting an ‘issue-based evaluation’ rooted in Muslim values” like peace and tolerance.
However, the blog found the rest of the article troubling, explaining:
...they don’t care about the ordinary Canadian or what is best for the country, they only care about increasing their power in the name of Islam.
If this seems harsh, this blog may have reason to be concerned. Recently, one of its regular contributors went “undercover” to a meeting about “fighting Islamophobia” at a British Columbia mosque that brought together CIC President Mohammed Elmasry (who famously opined on national television that all Israeli citizens over age 18 were legitimate targets for terrorism), his protégé (and chief Mark Steyn persecutor) Khurram Awan, plus an author notorious for his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
The speakers detailed their plans to intimidate Canada’s supposedly “Jewish” owned and operated media, using, among other tools, the country’s broken and corrupt Human Rights Commissions.
By now, people around the world have heard about how radical Muslims are already using these Human Rights Commissions to harass the likes of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant (who reprinted the so-called Danish Mohammed cartoons and spent over $100,000 defending himself in these “kangaroo courts.”)
Other similar stories don’t get the same attention, however. One in particular has passed completely below the radar, and that’s unfortunate because it demonstrates admirable anti-dhimmitude by, of all people, the administration at a left wing Quebec university.
According to a little-known Christian news blog:
A group of Muslim students at McGill University in Montreal has filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, because they don’t have a designated “prayer space” on the university campus. McGill’s Deputy Provost for Student Life and Learning, Morton Mendelson, says religious groups are welcome to use unoccupied classrooms or set up in buildings adjacent to campus, but because it is a secular institution, the University will not provide permanent rooms for something like this.
Likewise, news of Halifax, Nova Scotia Muslims’ demands for “reasonable accommodation” in the construction of a new public swimming pool was reported by U.S. and European outlets, but in Canada, it only garnered a single story in a local paper.
(Perhaps radical Muslims will have to cancel their campaign to intimidate the nation’s “Jewish” owned media. It’s possible that the media has already gotten the message, loud and clear.)
The new Mainland Common Center’s pool area is set to feature large windows, but Muslim women object on the grounds that the design offends Islamic rules about modesty.
A city councilor talked to Islamist Watch about the proposed solutions to the “problem":
“To cover the pool windows with this type of automatic blind will be costly, probably in the thousands of dollars. I have asked for an estimate and [I’m] hoping we will be able to get a sponsor who will consider providing funds for these blinds, in lieu of an acknowledgment of their contribution.”
Some Canadian Muslims, like conservative columnist Salim Mansur and liberal writer Tarek Fatah, are belatedly (and bravely) speaking out against this strategy of bullying and blackmail, and receiving threats from some of their fellow Muslims for their efforts.
Only a few days before three more Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, author Raheel Raza condemned the Taliban’s new threats to target Canadian soldiers and aid workers. She also chastised domestic extremists who “have found a home in Canada because they know they can get away with it.”
“Canadian institutions seem unwilling and unable to take action,” she added, “bungling so often that it has become a bad joke.
For example, why do we allow an Imam in Scarborough to openly flout Canadian law by performing polygamous marriages? He’s also known to recruit youth to fight a jihad in Afghanistan against our Canadian soldiers.
In Mississauga, an ultra-orthodox schoolteacher is encouraging young Muslim girls not to work, cover themselves till their eyeballs and accept polygamy. It seems that the very ideology we’re battling in Afghanistan has taken root in our back yard.
Why, others ask, are hundreds of Muslim men in Toronto allowed to collect welfare to support their polygamous “harems”? What about the sharia-approved “Dial-a-Marriages” used to get around Canadian immigration sponsorship regulations?
Why do so many Canadian Muslims feel emboldened to harass newspaper columnists, magazine publishers and, most recently, editorial cartoonists?
Part of the answer seems absurd, yet provides a perfect illustration of the law of unintended consequences. For decades, leaders in Canada’s Jewish communities used Human Rights Commissions to silence neo-Nazi groups. Now, however, the commissions are being used to intimidate Canadian Jews like Ezra Levant – whose recent criticisms of the nation’s “Professional Jews” as obsessed with the last Holocaust while ignoring the next one, must have struck a nerve.
Now even one of these groups, and one of the HRC’s most rigorous defenders, B’nai Brith Canada, is taking note. In a scathing submission to a special commission reviewing the nation’s increasingly bizarre “hate speech” prosecutions, B’nai Brith declared that these Commissions are now vulnerable abuse by “political Islam, the same ideology that has hijacked the United Nations human rights council.”
“When it comes to this particular threat to human rights, human rights commissions just don’t get it,” the B’nai Brith report reads. “Human rights commissions, like generals, are fighting the last war.”
Tarek Fatah agreed, and explained the current Islamist strategy to the National Post. Non-Muslim critics of Islam are duly condemned as “Islamophobes,” while Muslims like himself are labeled “apostates,” which he calls a “hidden death threat.”
Fatah added:
“Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have any interest in this. Their effort is to appease these Islamist groups. They don’t wish to offend, and therefore the Islamists can walk over and literally blackmail politicians and the liberal intelligentsia into not saying a word about it.”