Canadian Islam

Whenever I criticize some aspects of traditional and contemporary Islam in public, the reactions are boringly uniform. The leaders of national Islamic organizations come out with harsh denunciations of my views, while individuals within the community write to congratulate me. Some do question my motives, advising that my harsh words might add to rampant Islamophobia.

My answer is always the same: I do what I do because I see myself, especially in my role as a scholar, as being so commanded by my God, "O you who believe, be upholders of justice, bearing witness for God alone, even against yourselves or your parents and relatives" (Koran 4:135).

 

When the Feb. 6 edition of the Citizen put my comments on its front page, the reaction was predictable. It was no less different when in March 2004, at a conference in Montreal, I made the statement that many mosques preach anti-Jewish and anti-Christian rhetoric. I was, the leaders of some Muslim organizations declared, destroying the bridges of rapprochement that had been built between communities. On these occasions I point to translations of the very first chapter of the Koran that have interpolations that preach hatred against Jews and Christians. I can quote exegete after exegete. The truth cannot be overcome.

 

I write not only as an academic scholar of religion, but also in my role as a father, troubled by the pervasive anti-Jewish, anti-western teachings that I know exist in some mosques. Just a few summers before the Montreal conference, I had re-established contact with one of my sons after a rather acrimonious divorce. I had last seen him when he was but five years old, and now, here he was, 14 years old, trying to show me, his learned dad, that he too could joke the way I do: "How do you kill a Jew, dad? -- You throw a quarter on the highway!"

 

I knew that neither his mother nor stepfather would express these ideas, and I probed further. I learned that his teacher at a licensed private school in Edmonton had given him that piece of wisdom. It is true that this may have been an isolated incident -- but my interactions with children at large, and with parents too, indicate a similar Muslim view of the religious other.

 

Even now, in blogs among my fellow Guyanese, a people who have always been known for their pluralism and liberal "calypso" Islam, the discussion often leads to the condemnation of the religious other. Certainly, in Judaism, Christianity and other religions, there are groups that similarly offend. But at least in those religions, we don't see an institutional defence of hate.

 

My statements to the Citizen about the backwardness of my faith community were meant to prod my co-religionists into thinking about themselves and their harsh views of the other. I don't deny for a minute that as a body of people, Muslims in Canada are among the most sophisticated citizens, the holders of degrees and some of the most demandingly intellectual professions. That, however, does not erase the pervasive religious illiteracy that, like a malignant cancer, threatens to destroy the entire corpus of what was once, and still can remain, a great religion.

 

Scholar Scott Appleby of Notre Dame describes "religious illiteracy" as the low-level or virtual absence of moral reflection and basic theological knowledge among faith followers that could lead to violence against perceived threats. In Islam, this is particularly applicable.

 

The evidence is blindingly clear: Throughout the world, Muslim intellectuals are punished for daring to criticize. Muhammad Said al-Ashmawy in Egypt is under house arrest for his own protection; Abdel Karim Soroush is beaten in Iran for daring to raise the voice of inquiry, Mahmoud Taha is killed in Sudan. Scholars Rifat Hassan, Fatima Mernissi, Abdallah an-Na'im, Mohammed Arkoun and Amina Wadud are all vilified by the imams for asking Muslims to use their intellects.

 

Some claim that trained imams are like priests and rabbis. This is certainly a possibility -- and in Bosnia and Turkey, I do know that imams are trained. But the fact is that most imams in Canada are not trained. The fact is, too, that even trained imams base their worldview on medieval constructs of Islamic law that are not only obviously backward, but also downright threatening to national security.

 

Another point raised in the follow-up coverage to my interview was that an imam might be fired for preaching something wrong. My question is, how is the flock going to know when the imam is wrong? After all, he is the leader, the supposed exegete, the scholar who may have suddenly been imbued with Islamic scholarship by some miracle because he happens to be a medical doctor.

 

Islamic law was developed largely from the eighth through the 10th centuries, a period when the Muslim polity in the Middle East was at the zenith of its power. In such a situation, the Muslim was the superior to everyone else, and the law was to empower him. Islam was there to rule, not to talk about co-existence in terms of equality.

 

In the medieval mind the non-Muslim had few rights, and specious argumentation could be used to even further reduce those rights. Contemporary Muslim colleges still use the same texts to function in modern society, hence the backwardness of the average imam, trained or not.

 

Is this the sophisticated group that -- but for the efforts of good people like Tarek Fateh -- wanted to have Shariah in Canada? Is this the group that, in Montreal, relegated women to pray in the basement of a mosque? Is this the group that still produces some followers who, when asked "Are you Canadian?" respond, "No, I am a Muslim."

 

And herein lies the problem of cultural identity. There is no one Islam. The Guyanese Muslim is different from the Bosnian Muslim who is different from the Pakistani Muslim who is different from the Saudi Muslim etc. To talk about Canadian culture as being inherently un-Islamic is to create an imagined geography that, at least, creates disharmony and, at worst, threatens subversion.

 

Muslim apologists point out that Arabs are only about 20 per cent of the Muslim world community. That means that -- at best -- the ratio of people who can read the Koran in its original language is one in every five. And even for those who do speak Arabic, the Koran, from the 10th century onwards, has ceased to speak for itself. Instead, a Muslim scholar will quote the Koran and define his citation by saying, "Tabari explains it thus ..." or "Zamakhshari explains it thus ..." In both cases of reference, the exegetes are medieval men.

 

The Koran harshly admonishes against tyranny and oppression. Islam's holy text uses many Biblical motifs to illustrate its message, among them, the example of Moses and Pharaoh. Sometimes the Guyanese in me comes out when I see the horrible condition of my fellow Muslims, and I want to sing out, "Let my people go!" And then I look around and realize that Pharaoh is one of us -- in the form of leaders and pervasive ignorance that have usurped the place of reason.

I say this not as an outsider, but as an observant Muslim, buoyed in my confrontational view by the Koranic advice:

"God will not change the condition of a people until they change it themselves (Koran 13:11)."

 

In such a state of affairs, it would seem that there is a need for jihad -- not against outsiders, but against ourselves.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur, "Hear No Evil," Western Standard [Calgary], April 23, 2007

http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=2452 

Hear No Evil  

Salim Mansur - April 23, 2007, Western Standard (Calgary) [registration required] 

Four years after Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), the operational commander for the al Qaeda terror network, was captured in March 2003 outside of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, the world heard from him again. His taped confession, made during military hearings at Guantanamo Bay, was a grim reminder of the sort of enemy the West has been engaged with in the war against terror since September 2001. 

The U.S. 9/11 Commission Report released in July 2004 stated, “No one exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” The Commission never got to question KSM directly, and his portrait provided in the report, while extensive, remained incomplete until the public heard directly from him. His recent confession fills in the blanks, offering a glimpse into the mind of a calculating and cold-blooded killer, unrepentant, even boastful of his hideous crimes. 

KSM claimed responsibility for the “9/11 operation from A to Z.” He also claimed responsibility for some 28 other terrorist attacks, including the Bali bombing in October 2002 that killed 202 and injured another 200, the Kenya hotel bombings in November 2002 in which 13 Israelis and Kenyans perished, and the Istanbul bombings of British and Jewish targets in November 2003 that took 57 lives and wounded 700.  

KSM boasted about his role in decapitating Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, in January 2002. KSM’s confession to being at the centre of extensive terror operations in the war against the United States in particular, and the West, including Israel, in general, reveals how costly has been the result of underestimating al Qaeda’s threat and its avowed aim of driving Americans and their allies out of the Middle East.  

Osama bin Laden’s August 1996 epistle containing the declaration of war (jihad) against the United States went unheeded. More than a decade later, and with terrorism unabated, a likely majority in the West, including Canada, continue to disbelieve the gravity of that declaration and al Qaeda’s intent to wage war by any means available.  

The vote last February by Stéphane Dion’s Liberals – joined by the Bloc and the NDP –against renewing two measures of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 is indicative of this disbelief in a war, unlike any wars of the past, unleashed against the West by folks indistinguishable from the ethno-religious mix of the population in the greater Middle East and its diaspora in Europe and North America.  

Were it not for KSM and his ilk – men of considerable intelligence, technical abilities, familiarity with the West and ferocity to do harm without any guilt – making common cause with Bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader would have remained a delusional warrior issuing worthless epistles. But men like KSM see themselves as alchemists of revolution, bringing down the world around them, heedless of the cost or the future. Such men can craft ideology from the disjointed scatterings of received wisdom, sacred or profane, as the Bolsheviks did, and hurl it against the civilized world.  

In an open and free society, those who underestimate the evil of such men become unwitting partners in crimes imagined and then perpetrated against the unwary and innocent citizens of that society. There is always some grievance around in any society that can be exploited against the established order. But men such as KSM are crafty tacticians who avoid the hammer of the brutal regimes that flourish in the greater Middle East, while probing the soft underbelly of western democracies laden with feelings of guilt over past wrongs and present inequities.  

The primary lesson of 9/11 is what happens when intelligence fails to connect the dots. Successful intelligence work means appreciating the intent of those who declared war on the West, as did Osama bin Laden, and apprehending the world’s KSMs before they commit crimes.  

Canada was among the countries Bin Laden warned for being allied with the U.S. against the Middle East envisioned by al Qaeda. Canadians must ask their political leaders, especially those of the liberal left, how their multicultural pieties will keep them secure from the evil of KSM and those who take the profanities of Bin Laden and associates as religious edicts to harm their fellow citizens, as did the homegrown jihadis in the London bombings of July 2005.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Ontario Conservative proposal for government-financed religious schools, Toronto Sun, September 29 and October 6, 2007

How stupid is this idea?

October 6, 2007
By SALIM MANSUR -- for the Toronto Sun

Public policy is generally judged on the basis of its intended effect.  

But not infrequently the public is left to contend with the unintended consequences of a policy -- for instance, the NEP of the Trudeau years or the Meech Lake Accord of the Mulroney years -- long after the intended effects would have been consummated.  

Politicians seek the glow of the intended effects of policies they initiate, and flee from the unintended consequences of those same policies that might leave the society worse off than the situation when a particular policy was proposed or enacted.  

An astute assessment, therefore, would be considering the likely unintended effects as the measure in judging the merits of a proposed policy.  

[Ontario Progressive Conservative leader] John Tory's proposal to extend public funding to "faith-based schools" in Ontario is flawed as its unintended consequences exceed disproportionately its intended effect.

The aim of Mr. Tory's proposal is for greater fairness and inclusiveness in Ontario's publicly funded school system than the present arrangement.  

The case for "fairness" was dismissed in the 1996 ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, and Mr. Tory has not advanced any substantive argument that would make one pause and reconsider the SCC ruling.  

Similarly, the case for inclusiveness was dealt with in the Supreme Court ruling when the justices pointed out the cost borne by parents for sending their children to private faith-based schools is one of choice.  

Choices come with costs, and Mr. Tory has not found any other credible explanation of why the public should bear the cost of those parents who choose to send their children outside of the already inclusive public school system.  

Instead the proposed remedy as an alternative to the exclusive funding of the Roman Catholic schools -- and this cannot be open to Charter-based attack as the Supreme Court ruled -- is to publicly fund faith-based schools.  

But the remedy offered only increases several times over the "problem" considered initially unfair of publicly funding one faith-based system by funding what will likely become a public system fragmented with proliferating faith-based schools.  

The reason for this being any time discretionary spending for a particular good or service is publicly subsidized, the demand for it quickly multiplies.  

Ontario is not only the most heavily populated province in Canada, it also annually receives the largest number of immigrants from other cultures.  

The existing school system has done well to be the one place where new immigrants and their children by necessity come together to learn about being Canadian, especially when the officially endorsed policy of multiculturalism encourages the same new immigrants to retain and grow with the cultures they entered Canada.  

Unintentionally fragmenting the existing school system, as Mr. Tory's proposal would do, weakens the one institution that pulls the divergent communities of Ontario together, and strengthens those elements in our society that pull us apart on ethno-religious grounds.  

And then there is the genuine concern of public funds going into Muslim faith-based schools -- the Canadian census figures show the Muslim community is growing most rapidly in numbers -- supervised by people whose like-minded brethren have brought ruin to most Arab-Muslim countries.  

The question of "fairness" is why Ontarians, and Canadians, would subsidize "madrassa" (Muslim faith-based schools) culture when the evidence of its ill-effects is undeniable in our post-9/11 world.  

The answer is likely negative. And this is how it should be.  

Best beware of this elephant/span>

September 29, 2007
By SALIM MANSUR
Toronto Sun

Provincial elections in English Canada rarely have any national implication.

But as Ontarians prepare to vote Oct. 10, their decisions on public funding of faith-based private schools in the province and the referendum on adopting a modified proportional representation for electing members to the legislature in the future might well reverberate across the country.

It is John Tory and his Progressive Conservative party's policy to provide full public funding of faith-based private schools that has emerged as a hot, divisive issue and it might well decide the outcome of the upcoming election.

Ahead of Tory's mid-summer announcement of his party's education policy there was not much evidence of any demand being made openly by interested groups for faith-based private schools to receive public funding, and that such a demand needed to be adopted by a party hoping to form the next government in the province.

Those who have favoured such demand in the past were given a hearing on the matter going all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The SCC ruling of November 1996 -- on hearing appeal from the Court of Appeal for Ontario in the case known as Adler vs. Ontario -- was the authoritative settling of any dispute or misgiving arising from the claim of interested parties that since the Roman Catholic schools in the province received public funding, fairness demanded that other faith-based schools be equally treated.

CONSTITUTIONAL

The SCC ruled that the "distinction made between the Roman Catholic schools and other religious schools is constitutionally mandated and cannot be the subject of a Charter attack." The majority of justices also observed that not extending public funds to faith-based private schools Ontario was not in violation of the freedom clause of section 2(a), nor the equality clause of section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom.

Moreover, the SCC ruling declared that for parents "the cost of sending their children to private religious schools is a natural cost of the appellants' religion and does not, therefore, constitute an infringement of their freedom of religion protected by s. 2(a) of the Charter."

And yet John Tory has come back a decade later to push his policy on the basis of "fairness" when "fairness" cannot be an issue given the grounds of the SCC ruling, and claims of "fairness" cannot mask the deeply flawed nature of the policy itself with consequences for the society that many might well imagine but none would want to discuss in public.

The elephant in the room that gets deliberately ignored in media discussions of Tory's policy is public funds that would be made available to Muslim schools supervised mostly by people of fundamentalist persuasion or those tilting towards religious extremism. It is instructive to note most mosques in North America, as elsewhere, are controlled and administered by Muslims variously connected with Saudi Arabia or some other Gulf country from where funds are readily acquired.

These Muslim faith-based schools will grow in numbers if Tory's policy gets adopted, and children will be exposed to the sort of education soaked in bigotry that is a grave malady for the Arab-Muslim world.

Ours is a post-9/11 world requiring of Ontarians, and Canadians, to ask themselves if they can afford to adopt public policies whose unintended consequences could bring much social unpleasantness and strife in the future.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Palestinian state project, Toronto Sun, October 20, 2007

October 20, 2007

Time to end the charade

By SALIM MANSUR -- for the Toronto Sun

Every American president, beginning with Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, has been tempted with the idea of an international conference on the Middle East for negotiating the final comprehensive settlement of the long festering conflict between Arabs and Jews.  

Now entering the last year of his two terms in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush also has been similarly tempted.  

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced the United States will hold an international conference next month in Annapolis, Maryland, with the purpose of establishing a Palestinian state.  

The history of such conferences is contrary to the promise of bringing an end to the Arab-Israeli dispute in the Middle East.  

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, recognizing the futility of such gatherings, nixed President Jimmy Carter's idea of an international Middle East conference in Geneva by going to Jerusalem in November 1977. There he engaged directly with prime minister Menachem Begin of Israel to reach an accord between their two states.  

It is apparent that calling for an international conference on the Middle East to broker final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians is a default position of the American administrations when all the antecedent efforts have failed.  

American administrations unfailingly have felt the obligation of being fair brokers between Arabs and Jews since William Rogers, the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, floated the idea of a comprehensive peace plan in 1969.  

President Bill Clinton fruitlessly invested a great amount of his time -- even into the last weeks of his term in office -- to broker the final agreement between Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister.  

President Bush became the first American leader to openly call for a Palestinian state when he presented a timetable and clearly stated plan for Palestinians to follow in reaching their goal.  

But the truth of the matter is that there is nothing to broker when one party, the Palestinians and their Arab-Muslim financiers and supporters, remains committed to the destruction of the other party, the Israelis.  

Instead of another international conference the Americans would do better in accepting the obvious -- that a Palestinian state exists, and it is called Jordan with its population being overwhelmingly Palestinian.  

Another Arab state squeezed on American insistence between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean -- its population hostile to the West and readily embracing every passing totalitarian ideology in its declared aim of harming Jews and destroying Israel -- instead of being a recipe for any final settlement, will be the source of unremitting conflict in the region and terrorism beyond.  

Moreover, Palestinians killing each other while continuing to be supportive of terrorism -- in addition to the appalling record of Arab-Muslim regimes disregarding human rights and respect for minorities -- make them undeserving of the amount of attention provided by American administrations in contrast to the level of American support extended to the equal, if not more deserving, claims of the people suffering in Darfur, Burma, Tibet and Zimbabwe.

Diplomacy not infrequently is trading politely in falsehood.  

It is time for Americans to politely tell the truth and end the charade of demanding Israeli concessions for Arab-Muslim doublespeak where "peace" means, as Arafat explained to his people, temporary truce in the war for "liberating" all of Palestine which includes Israel.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Pakistan, Toronto Sun, October 27, 2007

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2007/10/27/4609502-sun.php 

Toronto Sun

October 27, 2007

Pakistan's crisis global concern

By SALIM MANSUR

With Pakistan, people are holding their breath to see if the predictable train wreck in the making is by some prayer and luck averted for a nuclear weapon state.  

The failed bid of the suicide bomber -- belonging likely to one of the many Islamist groups in Pakistan -- to eliminate Benazir Bhutto on her return home from exile is an omen of much worse to come.  

The much worse could be the already ruinous failed state imploding as another Somalia or former Yugoslavia.  

The present crisis -- the bid to kill Bhutto merely being the early intimation of the fight ahead -- has been a long time in the making and is loaded with irony.

General Pervez Musharraf as the army chief deposed an elected government and its leader, Nawaz Sharif, in 1999. This coup was a replay of previous army chiefs removing Bhutto twice elected as prime minister. Her father, Ali Bhutto, also was deposed then hanged by the military dictator General Zia ul Haq.  

Moreover, this is the army or its shadowy branch, the Inter-Service Intelligence, that sowed the dragon seeds to sprout as the legions of jihadis (holy warriors) joined in a common cause to make war against the enemies of Islam preached by Taliban's chieftain Mullah Omar and al Qaida's Osama bin Laden.  

SEPT. 11  

But 9/11 confronted Pakistan and its military ruler with an existential choice of being branded by the U.S. as a rogue state sheltering terrorists, or taken as an ally in the war against Islamist terror.  

The much postponed yet unavoidable and necessary test of will between the army and the jihadis looms large. The fight over the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, in July was merely the prologue of this test to come.  

This fight will more or less determine if Pakistan can avert the train wreck and make a fresh beginning with the military restoring politics back to the people, thereby mobilizing the people in sufficient numbers to eliminate the jihadis and their wild politics bringing ruin to the country.  

Pakistan is terribly divided by ethnicity, class and sectarian loyalties.  

There is insurgency in the province of Baluchistan, Taliban-al Qaida warriors with local allies in the border lands of Afghanistan, political disquiet in the heartland of Punjab, and recurring sectarian strife in Karachi, the country's largest city in the southern province of Sind.  

The strategic public support needed by Pakistan's ruling elite to eliminate the jihadis will not be forthcoming if Musharraf makes selective deals with some politicians in his bid to fix the outcome of the forthcoming election ahead of the vote.  

This is what Musharraf has done by removing the bars against Bhutto to come back from exile abroad, while denying the same to Nawaz Sharif in defiance of the Supreme Court justices ruling in favour of the former deposed prime minister's fundamental right to return home.  

SEEN AS RIGGED  

An election in which Sharif, a native of Punjab, is denied participation will be seen by most Pakistanis as rigged.  

And Bhutto will discredit herself as a willing stooge of Musharraf if she contests the election from which Sharif is absent.  

The stakes for Pakistan, the region and the world beyond are unforgivably high in the twin outcome of an election accepted as legitimate, and the battle against the local jihadis with their foreign cohorts.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur, "Get Tough on Suicide Bombings," Toronto Sun, November 3, 2007

Gets tough on suicide bombings 

By SALIM MANSUR 

Toronto Sun, November 3, 2007

A recent story in The Times of London reveals how utterly despicable are the folks who plan and execute suicide bombings. 

Two 17-year-old peasant boys from the wilds of northwest Pakistan failed in their mission to kill the pro-West governor of Jalalabad, an Afghan border town. Farman Ullah, the suicide bomber, and his accomplice, Abdul Quboshi, instead were captured.  

Times writer Robert Baer got to interview both captives. The peasant boys told their captors they believed virgins would be waiting for them at the site of the explosion and escort them to Paradise. 

These captives -- their illiterate minds twisted by handlers recruiting them -- were programmed human bombs.  

PROMISE OF VIRGINS  

Baer writes: "But Farman's fanatic certainty about his scheduled appointment with the virgins of Paradise was not enough for his Taliban trainers. Attached to Farman's suicide bomb vest was a radio transmitter. If Farman's nerve failed or something went wrong, Abdul Quboshi's job was to press the detonator. As Farman told me: 'The Taliban said God himself would ignite the vest. I did not have to do anything.'"  

Western democracies are confounded by the evil of suicide bombing. There seems to be no proportionate measure available at hand, or devised, to eradicate the plague of suicide bombings that result in disproportionate casualties and widespread fear.  

One practical response is to have democratic governments make suicide bombing a criminal offence, then prosecute with the state's full resources those who belong to, or associate with, the network of Islamist terror (and any other network of terror) that provides ideological training, material and logistic support to recruits like Farman Ullah.  

It is to this purpose that [Canadian] Liberal Senator Jerry Grafstein recently moved, for the third time, a private member's bill -- Parliament being dissolved and then prorogued required the bill to be submitted again -- in the upper chamber to amend section 83.01 of the Criminal Code to include, for greater certainty, suicide bombing in the definition of terrorist activity.

In introducing the Senate bill S-210 Grafstein observed, "Reverence for life is a lynchpin of all religions and the keystone of the rule of law. All our laws are wrapped around this central idea."  

Criminal law provides for the prosecution of those who engage in misconduct. But Grafstein also reminds us of criminal law being a deterrent, making it known that "if you do this, you will have the full power of the state brought against you."  

To those who argue that a suicide bomber in consummating his mission is unavailable for prosecution, Grafstein responds: "A successful suicide bomber cannot be prosecuted. However, one can certainly prosecute those who would aid and conspire with him or her, those who taught and applaud the action."  

RECOURSE IN LAW  

It is necessary for democracies to possess recourse in criminal law, as Grafstein proposes, among the state's arsenal of weapons, legal and military, necessary to defeat international terrorism and eradicate suicide bombing as an instrument of Islamist terror.  

Liberal democracies have defeated their enemies in the past as they must at present, and might have to in the future.
To prevail while protecting their values of rights and freedoms, liberal democracies must be adequately armed and to this purpose Grafstein's bill is an urgently needed measure that hopefully will be enacted soon.

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Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Slaying of Aqsa Parvez, Toronto Sun, December 15, 2007

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2007/12/15/4725862.php

Bigotry, terror masked as faith

 By SALIM MANSUR –

Toronto Sun, December 15, 2007 

News stories of Muslims -- and from the Muslim world -- continue to be deplorable and to reveal how terribly the malady of a broken civilization is consuming its own people, while threatening the freedom and security of others.  

In the Greater Toronto Area a Muslim father, in a rage over his teenage daughter not complying with his fundamentalist belief -- the wearing of prescribed garments for women in public -- allegedly strangled her to death.  

This is the latest of seemingly endless atrocities committed by Muslims, and from the Muslim world, with the most vulnerable victims being women and children.  

The cold-blooded murder of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was not like any other crime that cuts across ethnic and faith boundaries, as Muslim apologists in Canada will do their best to characterize it.  

The murder was prompted by an ideology of bigotry and terror masked as a faith-tradition -- an ideology of radical Islamism at war with the modern world of freedom and democracy.  

The fear of this perverted ideology and its fanatical promoters silences most Muslims, regardless of their numbers in society, for they fear that speaking out against this ideology might place them in greater jeopardy within their community and with those who claim its leadership. /span> 

Then there are Muslim organizations -- such as the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) -- in free societies such as Canada. Their deafening silence in condemning Muslim violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike is revealing of their true nature.  

These are front organizations for global radical Islamism making apologies for their ideological brethren, and directing polemics against the West for victimizing Muslims and undermining Islam.  

oreover, they are fraudulent in their claims of representing Muslims in general as the CIC does. The fact is, on the contrary, most Muslims in Canada and elsewhere in the West left their native lands to escape from unmitigated cruelty, heartlessness and hypocrisy of Muslim rulers and religious leaders.  

But these organizations are sinister in their objectives of taking full advantage of free societies and subverting their institutions for the purpose of undermining freedom and democracy.  

For instance, Canadians have never heard from or witnessed Muslim organizations such as the CIC publicly mobilizing Canadian Muslims in denouncing suicide-bombings, honour killings of hapless women, genocide on display in Darfur and persecution of dissident Muslims in the Arab-Muslim world.  

Instead, as fraudsters they have developed the swindler's art of blackmailing free societies as the CIC has done by filing complaints with the Human Rights Commissions (HRC) federally, and in Ontario and British Columbia, against Maclean's magazine and one of its contributors, Mark Steyn.  

The complaints are frivolous, claiming Maclean's defamed Canadian Muslims by publishing some writings of Steyn as excerpts from his best-selling book, America Alone.  

But the greater frivolity is the HRC's willingness to hear the complaint from an organization whose president, Mohamed Elmasry, is on public record in Canada for the suggestion -- though later retracted under duress -- that Israelis in general over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for Palestinian suicide-bombers.  

The murder of Aqsa Parvez and of countless other women among Muslims will continue not merely because Muslims cower in silence in their fear of radical Islamists, but also for the apathy of the Western public and politicians supinely appeasing and accommodating Muslim organizations such as the CIC.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur on free expression, Toronto Sun, January 26, 2008

www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2008/01/26/4795003.php

 

Sapping freedom inside job?

 

By SALIM MANSUR

Toronto Sun, January 26, 2008  

Last week I commented on the outrageousness of the Human Rights Commissions in Canada accepting frivolous complaints as is the one brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean’s magazine.

The greater shame than the HRC bureaucrats’ putting chill on free speech is, however, the lack of outrage in the mainstream media, and public apathy on an issue that strikes at the heart of Canadian democracy.  

In a free society it is not surprising that organizations and individuals occasionally take umbrage over discussions of a general nature on any subject surrounded with controversy, and complain they have been injured or victimized.  

For every Muslim the CIC and its head Mohamed Elmasry presume to represent in complaining to the HRC of offence caused by Maclean’s publishing of Mark Steyn’s essay on the future of Islam, there are countless Muslims dismissive of such a complaint as frivolous and false.  

Muslims are not monolithic in their views on any matter, including faith and politics. In treating Muslims as of having one mind on most issues most of the time would be for me, as a Muslim, more offensive than the complaint of the CIC against Maclean’s.  

It is proper to ask what is the pretext of Elmasry’s complaint and whether the HRCs are naively contributing to the advancement of the CIC’s political agenda?  

CIC is a political organization, and it pushes its agenda of being seen and accepted by the Canadian state as the dominant if not the only voice of Muslims in Canada.  

In this role the CIC sees itself as the main intermediary between the growing Muslim population and the representatives of the federal and provincial governments, organizing and delivering Muslims as a voting bloc or at least seen to be doing so, and by the public perception of possessing such electoral clout acquiring influence in directing Canadian politics when it comes to issues concerning Muslims domestically and in relations to the Arab-Muslim world.  

But the politics of the CIC is in large measure parallel to that of the Islamists at war (jihad) against the West, as it has pushed for introducing “sharia” (Islamic laws) in Ontario and opposes the U.S. led war against Islamist terror.  

It is essential for Canadians to understand that Islamism is a political ideology distinct from Islam as a religion, and most Muslims have nothing to do with Islamism, except they are not organized politically to effectively counter the Islamists.  

A crucial element of the Islamist jihad in the West is to intimidate Muslim opponents of Islamism and turn advantageously liberal institutions against their Western critics.

If the HRCs rule in favour of the complainant against Maclean’s, the political agenda of the CIC to silence critics of Islamism will be greatly advanced.  

The question then for HRCs would be can they distinguish between critical discussions of Islamism and Islam if some likely future complaint is brought against a publisher and an author such as Bernard Lewis, an eminent yet controversial scholar of the Middle East.  

The HRC bureaucrats have shown in accepting complaints such as the one brought by the CIC that they remain ignorant of the tactics used by Islamists since the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran notoriously demanded Salman Rushdie’s murder for publishing the novel, The Satanic Verses.  

It is time the mainstream media and the public vigorously defended free speech, while HRC bureaucrats displayed wisdom by turning down the CIC and Elmasry’s complaint, noting the best antidote to any harm from free speech is free speech itself.

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CIP Canadian Director Salim Mansur on Canadian commitment to Afghanistan, Toronto Sun, February 9, 2008

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2008/02/09/4836850-sun.php

Manley provides political cover

By SALIM MANSUR

Toronto Sun, February 9, 2008                        

The independent panel’s report on Canada’s role in Afghanistan is a quick read.

It should be widely read by Canadians as Parliament engages in debate over the question of either maintaining Canada’s military commitment to Afghanistan beyond February 2009, or changing the mission from a combat to non-combat role. 

The Manley report – named after its chair, John Manley, the former Liberal deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs in the government of Jean Chretien – recommends extending the mission “fully consistent with the UN mandate on Afghanistan, including its combat role”. 

Such an extension would be contingent on “the assignment of an additional battle group (of about 1,000 soldiers) to Kandahar by NATO and/or other allies before February 2009.” 

The report also notes “the panel found no operational justification for setting February 2009 as the date to end the military mission.” 

The panel’s recommendation provides political cover to the minority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for maintaining Canada’s present commitment to the UN-mandated and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, when the opposition parties are pushing for an end to it. 

The failure of the present Conservative and the former Liberal governments to educate the Canadian public on the Afghan mission – its strategic importance, the costs, and Canada’s responsibility as a prominent member of the UN and NATO to meet its obligations – is addressed by this independent panel of former politicians and respected public servants. 

“Afghanistan is at war,” the report states with admirable honesty at the outset, “and Canadians are combatants. It is a war fought between an elected, democratic government and a zealous insurgency of proven brutality.” 

The panel frankly addresses a subject that politicians, given their partisanship and political opportunism, have failed to do.  

The Afghan war of “ferocious complexity” is not the only issue of concern. Though the country is extremely poor and conflict-ridden, real progress is in evidence. 

Some five million refugees have returned home since 2002, some six million children, a third of them girls, are enrolled in schools. Infant mortality is declining, roads and power lines are being built, and Afghans genuinely are striving for a better future with international support such as Canada’s commitment in development assistance of $1.2 billion for the period 2002-11. 

“Warfare and reconstruction, bloodshed and progress,” the report states, “are the contrary and complicated realities of conflict and development in Afghanistan.”  It then emphasizes, “None need doubt that the future of Afghanistan matters to Canada.”  

The panel reminds Canadians that the international community abandoned Afghanistan after 1989 as a ruined state following the last bloody conflict of the Cold War waged there with devastating consequences.  

Afghanistan is the profile of post-9/11 global security concerns, and the failure there in defeating an insurgency labelled an enemy by the free world will have a multiplier effect in a volatile, yet strategically important region and beyond.  

Rich democracies, including Canada, have been slow in recognizing the need for intervention and peace-enforcement operations by deploying combat forces in failed states for human security, while assisting in state rebuilding.  

Those advocating change of mission for Canadian soldiers in Kandahar, or pullout, have a grave responsibility in explaining how they intend to meet the development and security challenges of this new century in places such as Afghanistan.

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