Jason Kenney's moral clarity on antisemitism and the Canadian Arab Federation

GayandRight: Jason Kenney's Speech at the Anti-Semitism Conference....

Ladies and gentlemen, in November during a trip to Kiev I paid my respects at the Babi Yar Holocaust site where more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis over a two day period in 1941.

For me this brought to mind a new dimension of the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust. Babi Yar was not about the mechanised and perversely discreet killing of the gas chambers. Here men in uniform lined up and shot 33,000 individual human beings one by one non-stop over a period of two days. Even for those who were just following orders there had to be some deep blackness in their hearts, some hatred that allowed them to dehumanise the innocent individual human beings who they shot down one by one.

A few weeks ago I was in Mumbai, India, where I went to visit Chabad’s Nariman House. I was literally sickened walking through the debris, seeing the blood-splattered walls. To stand in the place where Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg and his wife Rivkah were tortured and slaughtered. As I later looked out on Mumbai from the rooftop of Chabad House I marvelled to think that in this huge, teeming city of 20 million the killers had meticulously, deliberately sought out to target this one rather obscure, peaceful place, and this particular man and his family.

Why did they do so? Because and only because they were Jews, and as such because they represented all the Jews. 68 years and thousands of miles separate the ravine of Babi Yar from the debris of Nariman House, but these places are connected by the same uniquely durable and pernicious evil of anti-Semitism. Even peaceful and pluralistic Canada sees signs that this evil is newly resurgent. The 2007 audit of anti-Semitic incidents by B’nai Brith, Canada’s league for human rights, recorded over 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents, up by 11% from the previous year and also reflecting a doubling of the number of reported incidents over the past five years.

Just a day, Friday, as I was boarding the flight for London, as a simple concrete example of this new environment, one page of one of our national newspapers, two articles. One about Jewish university students at one of our major universities being attacked by a mob shouting anti-Jewish slogans at them. And another article, man sentenced for firebombing Jewish institutions.

We in Canada are beginning to experience the same. Of course we’ve always had the old-school anti-Semitism, and it’s still present. The manifestations from the extreme right and their presence on the internet. In my assessment it’s marginal, small and a shrinking form of anti-Semitism, but one which we can never forget. We do have robust hate crimes laws to deal with those manifestations of anti-Semitism, but we do see the growth of a new anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism predicated on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland, the anti-Zionist version of anti-Semitism.
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[quoting Stephen Harper] "...we must resist the error of viewing the Holocaust as a strictly historical event. It’s not good enough for politicians to stand before you and say they remember and mourn what happened over six decades ago. They must stand up to those who advocate the destruction of Israel and its people today. And they must be unequivocal in their condemnation of anti-Semitic despots, terrorists and fanatics. That is the only way to honour the memory of those who were consumed by the Holocaust.”
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As minister responsible for our multi-culturalism programme we have adjusted our programme to move away from celebrating our differences to focusing on social cohesion and building bridges between communities, combating radicalisation of youth.

For instance, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to support an exciting new venture launched by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Canadian Somali Congress, which will provide young Canadians of Somalian origin, typically refugees, with an opportunity to find internships in Jewish-owned businesses and professions so they can meet and de-stigmatise people from other communities.

I follow with great interest your government’s programme to sponsor British high school kids, secondary school children, to be able to go and visit the death camps in Europe and to learn firsthand and report back to their peers the reality of the Holocaust. And I’m hopeful that we can find ways to participate in similar programmes.

Also very importantly, our government takes a zero tolerance approach to expressions of anti-Semitism in the public square. There are organisations in Canada, as in Britain, that receive their share of media attention and public notoriety, but who at the same time as expressing hateful sentiments expect to be treated as respectable interlocutors in the public discourse. I think, for example, of the president of an organisation called the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, who notoriously said three years ago on live television that all Israelis over the age of 18 can legitimately be killed. They are combatants, and therefore legitimate targets for elimination.

I think as well of the leader of the Canadian Arab Federation, who notoriously circulated an e-mail when my colleague, our shadow Foreign Minister, Bob Rae, was running for the leadership of his party, calling on people to vote against Mr. Rae because of Arlene Perly Rae’s involvement in Canada’s Jewish community. The same individual, the same organisation, the Canadian Arab Federation, just last week circulated - including to all parliamentarians - videos which include propaganda, including the inculcation to hatred, of children by organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

These and other organisations are free within the confines of our law and consistent with our traditions of freedom of expression, to speak their mind, but they should not expect to receive resources from the state, support from taxpayers or any other form of official respect from the government or the organs of our State. And I would encourage all other governments to take a similar approach to organisations that either excuse violence against Jews or express essentially anti-Semitic sentiments.
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my proudest moment as minister was a year ago this month when I announced on behalf of our government that Canada would withdraw, and has withdrawn, from the Durban 2 process. We did so deliberately. We did so after having participated in the initial preparatory meetings. We did so being fully conscious of Canada’s tradition as an international champion of tolerance, pluralism and mutual respect. And that’s precisely why we withdrew from the Durban process.

We withdrew from a process that sees Iran sitting on the organising committee, a country whose president has repeatedly engaged in inciting genocide against the Jewish nation, a conference in which Libya plays a central role on the organising committee, a conference where many of the key organising meetings were set, no doubt coincidentally, on Jewish high holidays to diminish the participation of Israeli and Jewish delegates, a process which re-invited to participate all of the NGOs that turned the original Durban conference into the notorious hate-fest, including those responsible for circulating copies of the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion and organisations which outside the conference venue held up portraits of Adolf Hitler, and a conference which as well re-invited those NGOs made it difficult or impossible for Jewish NGOs to come as observers, including the Canadian Council on Israeli and Jewish Affairs.

Now, I understand and appreciate the position of some governments to continue to wait and see how this process develops. I think many of us made the wrong decision several years ago to unwittingly legitimise the process. And I understand the position of some European governments that they want to watch and wait and see what Washington does. I find that a bit surprising. I always thought Europe prided itself as having its own independent foreign policy aligned with its own values and interests. That’s certainly the position of the government of Canada. We would encourage our friends elsewhere to remember that the Trans-Atlantic relationship includes Canada, and that we have taken what we believe to be a principled position on the Durban process.

The recent news that the Obama government will be sending officials to Durban II naturally revolts us. Let's be thankful that some in Canada are not so immersed in ideas of moral and cultural relativism that they would defend the right of hate-mongering groups to receive government monies as if they were just any other special interest ethnic group. The defense of free speech must include a criticism of any government that would fund hate and build a state on top of an exchange among group, and not individual, identities. A multicultural empire where self-appointed elites claim to represent one or another group and to negotiate on behalf of said group in the backrooms of the byzantine state is not compatible with a truly free society where people can be free as individuals to speak their minds. But let us not be quick to write off those who agree with this while still calling themselves, as free individuals, Muslim, even if their idea of Islam, or their own business with the state, is yet somewhat incoherent to us:

The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) has welcomed the move by Minister Jason Kenney to cut funding of groups that spread hate and promote division.

In a statement, Salma Siddiqui, senior vice president of the MCC said, for too long successive Conservative and Liberal governments have been funding groups who, under the guise of multiculturalism, have been promoting an overseas agenda to the detriment of Canada

Earlier this week Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced a review of all federal funding of the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) after Hamas and Hezbollah flags were raised at a CAF backed rally. Reacting to the criticism, the president of CAF labeled Minister Jason Kenney a "professional whore."

Ms. Siddiqui said she was not only shocked at the language used by the CAF president, but was surprised to learn that the Arab federation was being generously funded by the very government it was lashing out at. It was revealed that CAF receives nearly $500,000 from just one government department.

The MCC demands that all future funding of CAF should be made conditional to a guarantee that the Arab organization will not behave as a mouthpiece of Hamas and Hezbollah in Canada and that it will embrace Canadian values, not those of Iran.

She said this condition should apply to all multicultural organizations. “I echo the words of Minister Kenney who said, ‘We should not be rewarding those who express views that are contrary to Canada's best liberal values of tolerance and mutual respect,’ added Ms. Siddiqui.

Rob Breakenridge has a record of the CAF's dirty deeds.

See also:

Last year, the National Post editorial board hosted Mouammar and a CAF colleague for an editorial board meeting. To our collective shock, they laid blame for virtually every problem the world faces on Israel — including the alienation of Arab-Canadian children in Canada's public school system. (One explained that he had sent his daughter for education overseas — because the inclusion of Israel in Canadian textbooks was too traumatic for her to endure.)

It's a disgrace that this group ever got a cent from Ottawa. I hope Kenney doesn't stop at slashing the CAF's funding — he should eliminate it.

(HTs: Catfur)

What is Islam, Part ???

Thoughts on How the West was Lost, Jamie Glazov's interview of Hasan Mahmud, the Director of Sharia Law at the Muslim Canadian Congress:

I have argued here that our understanding of what Islam is should not be exhausted by orthodox interpretations of Islam's sacred texts, although it is very important that we know what orthodoxy and its power over people is. Not only is it a principle of religious studies in the West that we best understand a religion (and/or political ideology) by examining all the understandings, of both insiders and outsiders, that the reality of the religion's presence creates (a religion being understood as something paradoxical that generates much meaning, or meanings). But no matter how committed to following some orthodoxy a believer may be, he still has to interpret that desire for orthodoxy in relation to a larger reality that the religion cannot entirely block from sight, explain, or define away, no matter how much violence it is willing to do to people in trying.

For the thinking believer, this creates an inevitable conflict between the understandings of orthodoxy and the contrary realities of a world that the believer takes to be full of insight into the nature of God. This problem may be lessened in a religion like Christianity whose orthodoxy encourages followers to recognize that holy texts are "divinely inspired" but not the literal word of God, and to question worldly authority, such that successful clerics usually have to be leaders in thought and not mere dogmatists. But it is obviously a huge problem in Islam.

It is inevitable that thinking Muslims in the modern world are going to question much about Sharia orthodoxy. Will this lead them to reject Islam entirely or to develop a new modern form of Islam or "Islam" as some would prefer? I don't know what will be possible, what people will find a useful focus for their mental energy, what the core revelation of Mohammed actually is or can be reasonably interpreted to mean. But I think it important to pay attention to those who are trying to reconcile our God-given reality with their religious and humanistic faith in it. Their efforts may well turn out to be failures; yet this is how we will learn more of what our shared reality is.

I find it a little amazing that Hasan Mahmud, the Director of Sharia Law at the Muslim Canadian Congress can, essentially, 1) reject the entire tradition of Sharia law, explaining it away as the product of a conspiracy to corrupt the true faith as it must have once existed, and 2) still declare himself a faithful Muslim. But he simply cannot reconcile Sharia with the human reality he sees around him. So of what then does his Islam consist? He does not tell us in his interview at Frontpage Magazine and we have to imagine a largely privatized conversation between man and Allah.

Still, Mahmud shows the kind of thing that has to happen when one pays attention to our God-given reality. If the Creation that we can see working itself out all around us is indeed God's Creation, then the thinking believer has no choice but to question received understandings of the faith. But to some degree this must even be true of the minimally thinking person. Whether our instinct is to move towards orthodoxy or liberalization, no one can divorce himself entirely from the revelations that historical change forces on all of us. Eventually this will lead all of us to refine our understanding of the original revelations that found our religion, or our humanity more generally. I say all of us because even the most closed mind cannot be entirely closed to reality and still survive.

At the end of the day I am sympathetic to the thinking believer who recognizes that the truth of his religion cannot be at odds with the truth of human reality, and that study of the latter must be more of a guide to the proper or original nature of the former than any received orthodoxy. And if this questioner still says he is a Muslim, I am willing to respect his belief, even if that means we will have to rethink the various possibilities inherent in the word `submission'.

Of course, one might argue that this "Muslim" is so outside the meaning of Islamic tradition that he is mentally all askew in considering himself a Muslim. But ultimately the test of that is the historical laboratory itself. At present, we can only place bets on how he will be received. Will history judge him a nut, or not, or most likely just ignore him? But the question that tests our own faith in the nature and future of humanity is this: in what kind of marketplace do we want to make our bets?

Choose your quote; a question of emphasis

First (hat tip: halls of macadamia), check out this Globe and Mail/Report on Business piece:

The secular group Muslim Canadian Congress issued a letter Tuesday criticizing Islamic products as more expensive than mainstream financial ones.

The letter comes as Ottawa is considering its first applications to start up Canadian banks operating within the strictures of Islamic religious law. Sharia-compliant products, such as mortgages and mutual funds, have sprouted up across the country in recent years and are gaining in popularity around the world.

The MCC said the move puts undue pressure on Canadian Muslims to sign on to more costly products.

“Islamic banking is nothing more than an attempt by Islamists, with backing from Middle Eastern financial institutions and their Western partners, to scare Muslim Canadians into believing that they should pay more to the banks and demand less in return, as an act of religiosity,” said MCC president Farzana Hassan in an open letter to CMHC.

It asked the Canadian housing agency to abandon its study into the issue, which will cost about $65,000, and said a better approach would be a banking system that seeks to integrate Canadians.

“What we need is a better deal from the banks for all Canadians, rather than dividing us up into religious groups and placing obstacles in the way of better integration of all Canadians,” Ms. Hassan said.

“Religion has no place in the banking or mortgage industry.”

CMHC said it merely wants to understand the issue better, and stressed that it has no plans to start offering such products itself.

Then check out the Muslim Canadian Congress take on their own letter

The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) has asked the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to abandon its $100,000 study to introduce so-called Islamic Banking in Canada, saying there should be no room in Canada for Saudi inspired Islamist political doctrines dressed up as innocuous religious requirements.

In a letter to Karen Kinsley, Chief Executive Officer of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the president of the Muslim Canadian Congress Farzana Hassan said, "Islamic Banking is nothing more than an attempt by Islamists, with backing from Middle Eastern Financial Institutions and their Western partners, to scare Muslim Canadians into believing that they should pay more to the banks and demand less in return as an act of religiosity. "

"Sharia Banking is an obscene attempt to fleece an already marginalized Muslim community while promising them the exact opposite. On the one hand Imams are warning Muslims of hellfire if they deal with the existing banking systems, and on the other the same clerics are being paid by banks to herd Muslims towards a system that is based on lies and deception.

What we need is a better deal from the banks for all Canadians, rather than dividing us up into religious groups and pacing obstacles in the way of better integration of all Canadians. Our banking system has developed in Canada over the last 200 years, and there is no need to adapt it to the failed economies and medieval systems modeled on Saudi Arabia and Iran," added Ms. Hassan.
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In the letter, Ms Hassan said it was unfortunate that some Canadian Banks are succumbing to the lure of easy money that comes from supposed interest-free banking where customers receive zero interest on their deposits while paying more to the banks. "While the banks and their paid Imams and sheiks will make handsome returns, Muslim Canadians will end up as losers, with promises of rewards in the afterlife," she wrote.

"Religion has no place in the banking or mortgage industry and banks should desist from employing imams or sheikhs who sanctify so called Islamic bank products and mortgages. We are not living in the middle ages to get our financial cues from clerics claiming guidance from the divine," she added.

Explaining the deceptive workings of interest-free Sharia banking, as practised by Saudi and other Islamic banks, Ms Hassan said: "Muslim bankers and their hired clerics claim they indulge in interest-free banking, but in reality they hide this interest. So-called Islamic banking institutions claim they operate on "zero interest." However, the fundamental characteristic of charging interest is never truly eliminated in Islamic banking, but rather is hidden.

The MCC president referred the CMHC president to Muhammad Saleem, a former president and CEO of Park Avenue Bank in New York, who has written a book, Islamic Banking — A $300 Billion Deception. Mr. Saleem, who was a senior banker with Bankers Trust where, among other responsibilities, he headed the Middle East division and served as adviser to a prominent Islamic bank based in Bahrain, dismisses the founding premise of Islamic banking, saying, "Islamic banks do not practise what they preach: they all charge interest, but disguised in Islamic garb. Thus they engage in deceptive and dishonest banking practises."

The MCC president also referred the CMHC CEO to another critic of Islamic banking, professor Timur Kuran, who taught Islamic Thought at the University of Southern California, and who has authored, Islam and Mam-mon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism, Prof. Kuran writes that the effort to introduce sharia banking "has promoted the spread of anti-modern currents of thought all across the Islamic world. It has also fostered an environment conducive to Islamist militancy."
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In the letter the MCC president said, an additional and related byproduct of Islamic finance is the legitimization and financial support by Western institutions for the type of radical Islamic scholarship and indoctrination. The need to certify shari’a-compliance of their Islamic products by "qualified shari’a scholars" has created demand for the services of experts that more often than not are the indoctrinated products of radical Wahhabi/Salafi shari’a faculties in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, who generally hold views fundamentally inimical to the most basic values of Western civilization.

Even a cursory look at the names, affiliations and views of popular shari’a scholars, such as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, Sheikh Mohamed Ali Elgari, Faysal Mawlawi, Sheikh Nizam Yaquby, Suleyman al-Maniya and others , many of whom sit on the shari’a advisory boards of dozens of Islamic banks and get paid princely sums from each, would make it clear that most are hard line Islamists and, in at least some cases, open supporters of terrorism. She informed the CMHC CEO that Mr. Qaradawi, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, for instance, is chairman of the shari’a boards of the two Qatari Islamic banks owned by the ruling families among many others.

In another example, Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a radical Deobandi cleric and a former shari’a court member from Pakistan, who sits on dozens of shari’a boards in the West, is a key executive in the Karachi Deobandi ma-drassa Darul Uloom, which has trained and continues to train thousands of Taliban and jihadist cadres. He was also instrumental in the Pakistani government decision to declare the Ahmadi Muslims apostates and thus com-plicit in the murder and suffering of countless innocent Muslims. He is further on record preaching that Muslims living in the West "must live in peace until strong enough to wage Jihad’ against their fellow-citizens in order "to establish the supremacy of Islam."

The same is true about many of the trustees of various Islamic banking insti-tutions. The Dow Jones Islamic Fund (IMANX), for example, is owned by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) - a Saudi-controlled non-profit institution that holds title to hundreds of American mosques – which was recently listed by the US Dept of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing trial in Dal-las, Texas.

"We urge the CMHC to not proceed any further with their ill advised initiative to promote Islamic banking in Canada. A crown corporation should not be a party to any venture that strengthens the jihadi movement and leads to the segregation of Muslims from the mainstream," Ms. Hassan added.

Note the difference in emphasis, and see how the Globe's mainstream media attitude of "neutrality" leads it to misrepresent the group, the Muslim Canadian Congress, about which it is reporting.

Getting the MCC right is a tough job, however. Laugh at the idea of "moderate Muslims" if you must take the Koran as literally as bin Laden. But be thankful that we have some of these "apostates" in Canada as a voice of common sense. I have made fun of the MCC, at this blog, for 1) calling for the separation of church/mosque and state; and 2) actively engaging in Canadian politics as a "Muslim" organization, instead of say a Pakistani-Canadian organization, or an ex-Muslim organization; 3) engaging in anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric.
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Now, I'm not sure if my earlier criticism is entirely on the money. I think in some sense they are moderate Muslims and they are doing what all Muslims should be doing: seeking to reform the faith, and to marginalize the orthodox hate mongers, fighting a civil war within the Islamic world, a war in which the rest of us should participate and take sides. Since Islam is itself an inherently political ideology, so must be any opposition, including "religious" opposition, to this "religion".

At the end of the day, what matters is that we preserve the freedoms of Canadian society, where the state (including agencies like the CMHC) does nothing to perform or enforce the dictates of any religion, like the Sharia proscriptions against charging "interest" or publishing Mohammed cartoons, or the Sharia licensing of polygamy. I would not want to suggest, however, that religious groups can't lobby the state on particular issues. But their freedom to do that really depends on the rest of us acting appropriately to guarantee their and our freedom. We must engage them, drawing and enforcing lines. It's all a question of knowing when to laugh religious lobbyists out of the water, or knowing when to label primitive sacrificial violence for what it is, instead of being afraid to unveil the promoters of "Islamic banking" for what they are: according to the MCC, they're religious barbarians. That's the only way that Muslims can find a free and decent place in Canada without helping turn this country much more totalitarian. I don't think the Globe and Mail yet gets it, in its desire to selectively quote and sanitize the letter of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

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