Can blogs save Europe?

One of the hopes we have for Covenant Zone is to seek ways of harnessing the potential of the internet to affect public debates on the important issues of the day.
The 2004 US elections as well as the recent Canadian national election offered us tantalizing previews of what awaits us in future electoral campaigns, across the globe, as alternative streams of information serve to reveal a fourth dimension to the three-dimensional world we’d grown accustomed to: a new dimension of interactivity and communication.

A new study being discussed in European media this week, suggests that the effects of this revolution may take some time to spread from North America to Europe, as More than one European in three knows nothing about computers:

[translated from a Belgian french media website; any corrections or precisions to my translation are welcomed and appreciated]

June 20, 2006
More than one European in three knows nothing about computers

In 2005, 37% of Europeans between 16 and 74 years of age did not have any basic understanding of computers, according to statistics delivered Tuesday by Eurostat, the european office for statistics.

This unawareness is more noteworthy in women (39%) than with men (34%). The proportion of people who know nothing about computers, however, differs greatly from country to country, varying from 65% in Greece to 59% in Italy to 10% in Denmark or almost 11% in Switzerland...

Unsurprisingly, it is older persons who know the least about computers (65% of Europeans from ages 55 to 74). Within the 25 to 54 age-group, 29% of Europeans have no basic understanding of computers whatsoever, against 17% who possess a weak level of competence, and 29% [having] a medium level. Only 25% command a high level of understanding.

10% of Europeans from 16 to 24 years of age absolutely do not know how to use a computer, a number particularly high in Hungary (34%), in Greece (32%) and in Italy (28%). The study also shows that 39% of unemployed people in the EU have no computer knowledge whatsoever, more than the average for the european population as a whole.

This is a startling and distressing study, if accurate. With little chance of having their voices heard or their worldview reflected in their national media, pro-western Europeans should be turning to the internet and to blogs in particular, as alternative opportunities for communication. (I admit I am jumping to the conclusion that computer illiteracy = little to no internet access, but it seems a safe assumption to my mind.)

Does the paucity of computer literacy grant a minority of people more power, or less, I wonder? "In the Country Of The Blind, The One-Eyed Man is King", said H.G. Wells in an amusing short story, where a mountaineer stumbles upon an isolated community of blind people, but finds that his sight is an ability that it is inconceivable to the blind tribesmen he attempts to rule, thereby giving him no advantage whatsoever, and he finds himself treated not as the village tyrant but as the village idiot. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with someone who forms their opinion on current events through suckling at the teat of the CBC can imagine what this study of european computer-savviness means for political discourse on that continent; how can one win converts to a conservative, pro-west cause when one is using a different set of facts than one's opponent?

Reason and the Philistines

Yes but, yes but, yes but....

The great shame of some of our own is that they are philistines. I had two encounters last day with men from opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum, one a mindless Communist raging on about Bush and the oil companies, another from a brilliant fool who is extremely lucky I didn't meet him face-to-face. In the case of both reason is not a possible alternative action to outright force. Neither is capable of grasping the fine details of thought from person to person, regardless of the level of intellect they work from. Both philistines need the lesson taught from the blows of a hammer. That is good reason. Violence is good. Beating people to the ground and smashing their bones is a nice thing under the curcumstances. It halts their behaviour and teaches them valuable lessons. If they're caught in time it might prevent them from being killed outright. Sometimes it's too late and the right thing is to kill anyway. See below.
****

There was an awful inevitability to what happened to those two American soldiers.

Did anyone believe for one moment that they would be treated with respect according to the Geneva Convention?

Only the fact that these fanatics have been on the run prevented a more spectacular staging of their deaths.

This brutal murder brings revulsion but not surprise.

This is the routine evil of those worse than beasts.

This is the routine evil that beheaded Daniel Pearl, and Nick Berg; that left Van Gogh dead on a street in Holland.

This is the routine evil that still wraps itself in the garb of a religion while leaving young students bound and shot beside their bus and innocent women and children blown to bits in the market place.

The routine evil that draws comfort from the ignorant maunderings of a Murtha or a Sheehan; that somehow escapes the diligent moral radar of Human Rights Watch.

The routine evil that finds shelter in partisan "talking points" about the war and the shameless babble of armchair thumbsuckers about "reciprocity" with Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

The routine evil of men with a vision of a world of subjugated women and mindless children, ignorant of all but blood and suicide and revenge.

This is the routine evil that dreams of cyanide gas in subways and thirsts for a nuclear weapon.

This is the routine evil that some still think can be embraced into civility, "brought into government," tamed away from its loathsome imperatives.

This is the routine evil that will not be ignored and must be exterminated.

Ralph Kinney Bennett is a TCS contributing editor.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=062106D
****

Our own are our problem. The savages of Islam are mere proxies. Our own make them possible. Our own make them possible and our own destruction inevitable. Our reasonable option is to attack our own with zeal and force.

We meet at the Vancouver Public Library each Thursday evening to discuss our future as citizens and residents of our nations and how we might transform those nations into civil lands. We meet in the atrium. Break out of your routine. We invite you to join us. Come from 7-9:00 pm.

Covenant Zone Welcomes the new GABlog

Much of the inspiration for my approach to the Covenant Zone comes from a now sadly discontinued blog. I am very glad to hear that the blogger in question has found a new home at the GABlog. He has taken the name "Scenic Politics" (until he can think of something better he writes - which is what I thought when, attempting paradox, I became "truepeers"... and now I feel a little prim and stuck). Scenic's first post (he is "adam" in comments) appears here. Let me say a word or two about our common interest - originary thinking - hopefully better to introduce what Scenic/adam is saying about politics today. (See also here and here.)

Originary thinking is a way of hypothesizing how human language, and hence human beings as a self-conscious species, could have first emerged in this world. Our hypothesis is that this emergence of consciousness would have required that the first humans become humans by their collectively inventing (i.e. someone mysteriously discovering and then somehow sharing with the others) a way to signify, as sacred, the centre or focus of what could become a memorable and re-presentable communal, i.e. human, scene. Unlike the animal pecking order - where one-on-one relationships of dominance and submission are iterated to construct a group hierarchy in which the alpha animal need not address the pack as a whole (thus the pack's origins and history cannot be imagined in communal myths or rituals) but need only be concerned with his immediate rivals and potential mates - the creation of a specifically human scene would have ordered all of the newly human beings in a new way, according to the ways of culture and not simply of nature. (By the way, this is not to imply that our primate cousins have nothing remotely cultural about them, but only that, unlike humans, they have not had the need to leap fully into a world defined by culture as a basis for both social order and freedom.)

The new human community would have been first constituted as periphery around a sacred centre, a human periphery alienated from the centrality that everyone desired - and a sense of alienation would always remain a fundamental quality of human being. The new community took its first steps by exchanging its first sign of language around the central thing or place made sacred or untouchable by this same sign. In other words, the exchange of language emerged as a way to defer conflict over something, maybe meat, that everyone wanted to get their hands on at a moment of disorder when the pecking order was breaking down. Once the first people could all equally share in language, then they could develop new ways of dividing up and exchanging things - on the model of shared language - moving beyond the pecking order to develop a new kind of economy and society.

While this hypothetical original scene would not determine the form or content of all the countless human scenes that have followed it in a historical process of re-discovering and re-presenting the human, all the scenes that have followed share in what is minimal, original, or universal to all human scenes. I believe the goal of our blogging friend, Scenic Politics, is to better understand what is necessary to bring any such scene into existence, the better for us to renew the religious and the political scenes in which we presently take part. (The political scene, as a seculized form of the religious, is of especial interest to our friend.)

Thus Scenic Politics begins his post by reflecting on the universal sense of alienation from the sacred centre that constitutes one key element of our common or original humanity. While we are all alienated to some degree, many political actors today (mis)interpret this reality in order to reduce all human relationships to a terminology of victims (of central authority) and putative victimizers (those deemed `privileged', i.e. closer to the centre than the rest of us). Scenic Politics asks us to throw off this way of thinking, namely "white guilt", and to renew our love and respect for the centre without which we would have no human community, no politics, no exchange, and no way to represent and renew our nations:

Within the originary configuration, we are all located on the margin, sharing our love and resentment toward the center. The effect of the history of de-ritualization, grounded in the Judaic and then Christian revelations, with its unremitting resentment toward the “Big Man” who seizes the ritual center has, in modern democracy, accentuated the resentment at the expense of the love. There is a kind of “center” in contemporary politics, regulated (or perhaps fantasized) by insipid, inoffensive figures like David Gergen and David Broder, or, really, anyone in possession of the latest polling results. And doesn’t every political figure want to be there? The problem, of course, is that such a center is a mirage: sitting down with two dozen polls, and choosing all of those positions claiming majority support will yield nothing but incoherence; and any attempt to put such a “center” into practice will see it instantly evaporate. As with the second term Bill Clinton’s focus on “initiatives” like school uniforms, you hedge more and more, do less and less, and hope nothing real ever happens. But some real things have happened since then.

The prevalence of white guilt as our de facto governing philosophy aggravates this situation. For white guilt, the center is the source of pollution, not sacrality; sacrality is to be found in defending the victims of the center; and the most exemplary victims of the center are precisely those driven to extremes by the extreme violence of the center. It is in confronting white guilt that we will discover what we really need: a genuine resentment on behalf of the center. For white guilt, the center is guilty until proven innocent; and, moreover, the standard of proof is so high that it can never be met: ultimately the center’s very centrality is what is most incriminating. The fact that we can’t prove all we “know” about the center is itself the most irrefutable proof of the center’s insidious and pervasive power.
[...]

A genuine resentment on behalf of the center! That strikes me as a pretty damned good summary of what we are trying lovingly to build here at Covenant Zone! Read the whole thing...

How Does a Nation Die?

Mark Steyn, reviewing Melanie Phillips' Londonistan, raises this question in some reflections on Canadian reactions to the recent arrest of the 17 Jihadists in Toronto:

The other day, listening to an interview on America's National Public Radio with the mayor of Toronto, I was laughing so much I drove off the road. David Miller warmed up with a bit of boilerplate Islamoschmoozing: "You know, in Islam, if you kill one person, you kill everybody. It's a very peaceful religion. And they're as shocked as Torontonians are. And . . ."

Renee Montagne, the anchorette, instantly spotted the ghastly breach of PC etiquette and leapt in: "Well, they sort of are Torontonians," she pointed out.

"Sorry," gulped the mayor, hastily re-smothering Muslims within the great diversity quilt. "They're shocked as every Torontonian is . . ."

Thereafter, Ms. Montagne expressed bafflement that these allegedly alleged fellows would have wanted to commit a terrorist atrocity in what was, compared to the Great Satan next door, "a very open society, very liberal immigration policy, very good social services."

Mayor Miller agreed: "More than half of the people who live in Toronto, including myself, were not born in Canada. And I think that's why Canada works."

"Although it didn't work in this case," Ms. Montagne pointed out, somewhat maliciously.

"Well, we don't expect these kinds of occurrences, exactly because of our public services, because of diversity," blah, blah. Insofar as there's any relation between jihadists and "good social services," the latter seem to attract the former -- at least in the sense that Ahmed Ressam, Zac Moussaoui, the shoe-bomber, the tube bombers, etc., were all products of the Euro-Canadian welfare system. But go ahead, pretend that these guys were upset about insufficient "social services," that they wanted to behead Stephen Harper to highlight the fact that wait times for the beheaded at the Toronto General are now up to 18 months, and they don't always reattach the right head. It's easy to scoff that a chap who can be bothered blowing up the Canadian Parliament must be insane, but, if you were a jihadist sitting in the cave back in the Hindu Kush listening to Renee Montagne and David Miller, wouldn't you conclude that they're the ones who are nuts?
[...]
Melanie Phillips makes a point that applies to Britain, Canada and beyond: "With few exceptions, politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people's heads that drives them to such acts." These are not Pushtun yak herders straight off the boat blowing up trains and buses. They're young men, most of whom were born and all of whom were bred in London, Toronto and other Western cities. And offered the nullity of a contemporary multicultural identity they looked elsewhere -- and found the jihad.
[...]
One final thought: Miss Phillips is one of Britain's best-known newspaper columnists. She appears constantly on national TV and radio. No publisher has lost money on her. Yet Londonistan wound up being published first in New York, and its subsequent appearance in Britain is thanks not to Little, Brown (who published her last big book) but to a small independent imprint called Gibson Square. I don't know Miss Phillips's agent, but it's hard not to suspect that glamorous literary London decided it would prefer to keep a safe distance from this incendiary subject.

That's how nations die -- not by war or conquest, but by a thousand trivial concessions, until one day you wake up and you don't need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal. How many Muslims in Toronto sympathize with the aims of those arrested last week? Maybe we could use a book on the subject. But which Canadian house would publish it? And would the faint-hearts at Indigo-Chapters carry it?

So Toronto is blessed with a mayor who mimics former Prime Minister Paul Martin in declaring Canada a country of immigrants that has no particular or normative culture and that only works because the elites are happy to deny the existence of the common national culture, with deep roots in this country, in their self-serving and anti-democratic war to pit immigrant voters against the ostensibly reactionary (i.e. too white) normative culture of Canada. This is the same mayor who talks tough every time some young gang "of colour" fire off their guns, but who has no ideas about how to address the cultural morass that makes it impossible to seriously discuss such violence and identify the cultural and social failures in certain communities that engender it. Our politicians all think the road to respect for universal human rights and knowledge of universal values is through some nihilist, self-denying, embrace of "multiculturalism". They are simply too poorly educated to know the paradox that one can only approach or know the universal through first having a solid grounding in a particular historical tradition. To deny Canadians such a tradition of their own is to sentence them to a decadence into some kind of pre-universal, polytheistic world view, where hysterical sacrificial rituals will prevail.

But the mayor is indeed a fair representative of many like minds in Toronto. Not talking about certain things (like the basis for true(r) knowledge of human realities) is the civic pasttime. Today, we hear news of some PC hysteria at Ryerson University. The school, after having decided to award the noted biomedical ethicist, Margaret Somerville, with an honourary degree, went into crisis mode when they later discovered that Prof. Somerville is not a supporter of same-sex "marriage" (her position on this question was known to me and I am only a moderate reader of newspapers). Cries came from all over to rescind the award. Homophobia they charged. (I always thought the charge of homophobia imputed an irrational denial of one's own homosexual desires, and would not apply to a reasoned opinion on the proper nature of marriage, but this is evidently not so in Toronto the good.) The university awards comittee met again and declared that if they had known about Somerville's questionable position, they probably would not have given the award, but now they are stuck... since they have to grudgingly admit Somerville a right to her opinion.

And this from an institution that calls itself a university and that wanted to award a learned woman for her work which has little to do with the same-sex "marriage" debate, an award that is now tarnished, and thus may not be accepted. It seems that if you hold one un-pc position, you are persona non grata, your right, nay responsibility, to freely speak your mind be damned.

It is such denial of free speech in the face of various pc denials of reality, such as the incompatibility of traditional Canadian freedoms with much of the historically-documented realities of Islam and Jihad, that could end up killing a lot of people, not to mention our national culture. Once again (and a little less jokingly each time) I raise the question, if Canada is to survive must it first separate from Toronto?

Multiculturalism

This week, the National Post has published a series of essays on the question of how the approach to multiculturalism, that has recently become a fundamental part of the Canadian identity, can survive its encounter with Jihadist violence. Since this is a theme this blog will regularly explore, I commend these essays to you, with the note that the writers chosen by the National Post have little to offer by way of a solution, or vision of a renewed Canadian Covenant, to replace the variety of multiculturalism they have come to denounce. Thus our task here is evident. I have only read the four of the five essays that do not require a subscription to the Post. I recommend especially the Tuesday essay by Gordon Nickel, for its lucid account of the question of whether Islam is usually and reasonably interpreted by its followers as compelling violence in the name of Jihad. The other essays by Robert Fulford, George Jonas, and Melanie Phillips are more focussed on the question of multiculturalism policy. All four essays encourage dicussion, which I am happy to engage in comments here. Here are the links:
Robert Fulford; Gordon Nickel; Wednesday essay by subscription only; George Jonas; Melanie
Phillips.

Media forgets to report implied threat of al-Sistani to Canada

Thanks to a heads up from Jihad Watch (see also here), I've been reading news reports on yesterday's announcement of a fatwa in Montreal. In the words of the CBC:

Iraq's top Shia cleric sent a message Wednesday to Muslims in Western nations, urging them to obey the laws of the countries in which they live.

The fatwa, a non-binding directive, was delivered at a Montreal news conference of prominent Shia Muslims on behalf of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

"Muslims have undertaken to obey the laws of the country of their residence and thus they must be faithful to that undertaking," the statement read.

It condemned all acts of violence and encouraged imams to keep a watchful eye on what's going on inside their mosques.

However, in none of the English-language reports have I found what was reported by Radio Canada and noted by Robert Spencer:

Jihad Watch reader Marc has alerted me to a qualifying phrase that pops up in this French-language story about the fatwa:

L'ayatollah Al-Sistani ordonne aux musulmans canadiens de respecter les lois en vigueur dans leur pays d'accueil, « dans la mesure où les valeurs religieuses ne sont pas bafouées ».

That is, "The Ayatollah Al-Sistani orders Muslims of Canada to respect the laws of their host country, 'insofar as religious values are not ridiculed.'"

And if they are?

So here we have a scene in which all the major English-Canadian news organizations have reported on this story in glowing terms - Moslems are promising peace - all the while declining to note the underlying message of the street thug - "keep out of my way and you're cool; dis me and watch out!" - or to remind the clerics involved that criticism of religion is a fundamental and nation-defining right in Canada, and that asking us to restrain from its practice is itself a form of blasphemy in our books. (See also the CBC in-depth report; the Montreal Gazette; the Canadian Press; CTV news; and the Globe and Mail.)

At least the Globe and Mail has the conscience to report:

But Sheik Ali Sbeiti, imam at the Muslim Community Centre of Montreal, also cautioned that Canada has to realize that its foreign policies, including its commitment of troops in Afghanistan, have repercussions at home.

"Canada is shifting its policy to become more pro-American on international issues," he said in an interview. "This creates a kind of tension."

"Canada is involved in Afghanistan, and not as peacekeepers. Muslims would feel that Canada is in a country whose soldiers are fighting fellow Muslims.

"Every time Canada takes action in the international field, you have to consider that is has 800,000 Muslims in Canada watching."

So once again we are told that if a free and democratic country chooses a policy that the Umma (the worldwide "community" of Muslims) doesn't like, then watch out, there will be "tensions" at home. If we are so evil as to show sympathy with the Americans, watch out. This line of thought calls to mind our post from April, Canada and the Umma, where we reported on the new policy in the Department of Foreign Affairs, under which Canada sees fit to develop its foreign policy through consultation with representatives of the Umma in Canada, as if Moslems as a group were not simply a fact of our religious life, but also of our political life. The new policy, in viewing Muslims in Canada as a political lobby, might well entail erosion of our commitment to a world order that has been defined in terms of an international system whose legitimate political actors are primarily nations and states, and much less religions. That we might not support the Afghan state against the Taliban, because it offends some self-appointed representative of "Canadian Moslems" who figures a Canadian soldier killing devout Moslems is sacrilegious - somehow more evil, and less necessary, than other forms of war that our democratically-elected government justifies - should be an outrageous idea in this country. That such talk is in the air at present suggests we need do more work to get the Harper government to commit to breaking off conversations over foreign affairs with so-called representatives of the "Muslims in Canada". (Muslims who can speak to our relationships with nations and states should have a role, but not as representatives of the Umma.) Our interest and declared policy is in an international order of secular nation states, and we should consult with people accordingly; Muslim one worlders should have no voice in our councils, unless such imperialists may serve us in facilitating necessary conversations with unavoidable political actors whose politics we hope to marginalize.

One might note in concluding that the CBC report ends by quoting Tarek Fatah, the Toronto media's favorite liberal Muslim, the leader of an organization that proclaims anyone who identifies as a Muslim is a Muslim (whatever beliefs they may hold) and that also professes belief in the separation of church and state, even as it identifies as a Muslim organization which, when not criticizing Canada's febrile Imams, spends a lot of its time condemning America and Israel:

Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said it's encouraging that clerics would promote obedience to the rule of law, but disappointing that the message needs to come through a fatwa.

"It's so medieval to be thinking … religious dictates should govern how we live our lives," said Fatah.

He said he doesn't doubt the group's sincerity, but that Canadian Muslims shouldn't be governed from overseas.

"He should not be telling me how to behave," said Fatah, who said al-Sistani has issued earlier fatwas saying gays and lesbians should be killed.

So there you have it: whether you listen to the religious or the secular Muslims, you are sure to see the line between religion and politics blurred, precisely because the line that we enjoy in secular nations that have emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition does not exist in Islam. In this situation, surely Canada should make it clear that Muslims advocating Jihadist violence will be imprisoned or deported, and we should be paying little attention to fatwas that are inherently (if only the MSM would report the truth) anti-secular and supremacist in nature. Similarly, we should pay little attention to voices that are primarily identifying as "Muslim" and yet are all about politics and not about developing private and personal religious faith. Whatever the confused promises of "multiculturalism", we cannot be all things to all people. We either separate organized religion and state, or we do not.

Ideally, our government should be paying about as much attention to Muslim clerics as it pays to the ministers of the United Church of Canada. The fact that we presently pay much more attention to the imams suggests that we recognize Islamic integration (or lack thereof) in the west is a problem that must be discussed (even if we have yet to throw off the pc blinkers to discuss it properly); however, it may also be the case that we are making a mistake akin to over-indulging and giving too much attention to a problem youth who is acting out, having not yet been fully initiated into society, and who is refusing to play fully by Canadian rules. If so, perhaps tough love will serve better than endless therapy: we should make very clear that the law will be upheld and otherwise pay a religious group minimal political attention.

Found at last: a devout and moderate Public Muslim?

We need to do more research on this guy:

"Multiculturalism takes away our complete undivided loyalties to this country," explains [Dr. Mahfooz] Kanwar, a criminologist, and professor of sociology at Mount Royal College in Calgary.

"Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK. It is not," says Kanwar, a devout Muslim.
[...]
Kanwar also rejected the idea put forward on Thursday by members of Ontario's Muslim community who said Muslim youth are becoming radicalized because they are "marginalized" in Canadian society.

"They marginalize themselves," he said. "I came to Canada in 1966. I did not speak a word of English. I worked hard, furthered my education. No Canadian marginalized me ever. I don't see any country in the world better than Canada."
[...]
But what of Canadian society on the whole, which is expected to tolerate the wives, mothers and daughters of these accused terrorists wearing complete face masks all the time in public since they wear burqas that reveal only their eyes? Kanwar said covering one's face in Canada should be illegal.

"I'm sick and tired of political correctness," said Kanwar from his Calgary home.

"When I talk to other immigrants who complain about Canada I say, 'if you hate this country, why don't you go back to hell where you came from?' I tell them, 'nobody begged you to come here and no one will stop you if you want to go. So, go to hell and get the hell out of here.'"

Covenant Zone/Blue Scarf Meeting

Every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz coffee). Join us, have fun chatting about the new conservatism, and help make this blog into something...

"the resolution of the Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel"

Not to put too fine a point on it. This from Iranian Presidential advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin in conference with Iranian university students.

"'Historically, there are many accusations against the Jews. For example, it was said that they were the source for such deadly disease as the plague and typhus. This is because the Jews are very filthy people. For a time people also said that they poisoned water wells belonging to Christians and thus killed them,' Ramin said.
[...]
"While acknowledging not knowing the source of these events around the world, Ramin said, 'I only know that Jews have been accused of such conspiracies and sabotage throughout history and have not performed well.'
[...]
"Claiming that the Holocaust was the principal reason why Palestine was occupied while Israel was the main cause of crises and catastrophe in the Middle East. 'So long as Israel exists in the region there will never be peace and security in the Middle East,' he said adding, 'So the resolution of the Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel.'...

Who knows what is lost in the MEMRI translation, but perhaps what this noodlehead implies in that last paragraph is that the Palestinian situation is part of the Holocaust, that the Jews are the new Nazis, and thus they must be wiped out. While this is not perhaps the most evident meaning, why must there be a "resolution" of the Holocaust issue? Is it to justify the resentments that have been encouraged by the promoters of the postcolonial "white guilt" and victimary thinking that have spread from the west around the world in the wake of World War II (the promoters who have made every asymmetrical relationship into a question of Nazis and Jews)? What kind of people need a solution to the historical failures of those who pursue final solutions? Why do the kind of losers who like to cry "Bushitler" think that their resentment will be overcome if only they can, just once, win big? Why don't they know that the human condition and history will in any event continue and the spiritually rotten will remain losers, resentful like the rest of us, and still in need of more Jews to blame? Where does such religious naivete come from?

the trouble with islam is..... islam

A brief report on the Irshad Manji lecture at the Vancouver Public Library. I’m pretty tired so forgive the meandering. Here we go:

The meeting at the library was full to capacity, about 250 to 300 people.

Not very many muslims in evidence, mostly middle-aged white women attending as couples.

Piles of books hoping to be sold at various stalls along the entrace speak to who tonight's audience was; Michael Moore fans, Noam Chomsky readers, and 9/11 conspiracy faithful.

Irshad Manji started off with biographical material outlining the origins of her questioning the misogyny of islam. She mentioned the role model her mother provided her while she was growing up; her father was politely not mentioned, here or at any point in the evening’s entertainment. The audience respectfully kept mum about it (if you'll pardon the expression).

Over and over again the refrain, “it’s not just islam”, it’s the institutionalised patriarchy around the world. “Western colonialism” has much to answer for, we were told with authority.

Lots of anti-american, anti-conservative, anti-christian and anti-male rhetoric jovially sprinkled throughout the talk, much to the delight of the audience. Most of the questions from the audience at the end of the session dutifully picked up on the anti-west themes, especially from one "I'm not denying Bin Laden is an evil man BUT..." political statement.

Manji mentions the need to ask questions out loud, such as where is the proof of the jewish plot against islam. Methinks she should have asked the parasitic crackpots crouched at a free booth in the corner of the room peddling 9/11 conspiracy documentaries, they seemed to have special channels of information for all kinds of things.
(Later on, to prove their disapproval of the free enterprise system, the conspiracy theorists piggy-backed onto the free question and answer session to promote their website and the dvds and books one could purchase ("through donations") there. Too cheap to buy an ad, so they steal from someone else's space; that’s the left for you)

News that her book has been translated into farsi and purdu at her website and has been downloaded over a hundred thousand times, to be read "in privacy, and therefore in safety".

Saudi Arabia was referred to as “your friend and mine”. No mention of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s new conservative government, no mention of the Toronto terrorist plot, the only mention of Iran was to point out a few injustice cases of women being lashed for having been raped. No, I take that back, there was one mention of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it was from the aforementioned parasitic leftists who claimed that Uncle Sam was inventing an excuse to invade Iran, “another Reichstag Fire”, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfield are plotting to get all the Iranian oil and so on. Interestingly, Manji did nothing to dispell the group’s 9/11 (and beyond) conspiracy theories; I guess she knows what her regular audiences are. She instead posited one of her own (“speaking of consparicies…” she said as a finesse away from the moonbat using the microphone as a soapbox), concerning the recent mo-cartoons from Denmark, and how certain islamic nations used the cartoons to distract citizens from their corrupt government’s repression and the poverty that this corruption condemned them to.

I was genuinely fascinated by what she had to say about islamic radicalism in Europe. From her travels she says that many muslims in Europe confess to her how they wish they could live in the USA (and Canada she quickly added when she remembered what city she was lecturing in). Manji says European muslims tell her that in North America, religious faith is a given, it’s so common it is almost expected of the citizens that they are religious, whereas in Europe faith is criticized, that if someone has faith in any religion it is treated as a sign of mental imbalance, or worse. She assures our crowd that “privately if not publicly, they believe that the US is still the Shining City On The Hill”. She said that the main difference perceived between north America and Europe, is that here the future is more important than the past. There’s no incentive to integrate, she said, into Europe’s “missionary atheism”, and that young muslims tell her this is driving them “into the arms of the fundamentalists”.

The bottom line from her talk was that islam is being manipulated and that it’s up to questioning individuals to have the audacity to speak because you can’t unthink a thought once it’s spoken.

Irshad Manji Speaks at VPL

The Trouble with Islam Today

Join Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today -- a wake-up call and demand for honest discussion and change in Islamic countries and in the West.

Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch

Monday, June 12, 7:30 p.m.

Free, 604-331-3602
****

We'll be there and we look forward to seeing you.

voice of the people

An interesting anecdote to share from my travels today.

Having a few minutes to wait for the bus this morning, a total stranger put down her newspaper with disgust, after reading the front page. She turns towards the formidable Mrs Charles Henry and myself to say, "have you read this morning's paper? Can you believe these people? Why are they always so much trouble?"
To protect the anonymity of those involved, we dress the scene in only the vaguest of details. Suffice to say that the stranger was the most gloriously average Canadian one can imagine, a working class middle age mother whose accent suggests some small town origin. The only thing special about her was the fact that there was nothing special about her.

And she is fed up with the denialism of Canada's muslim community.

She's so fed up she felt perfectly comfortable expressing her opinion in front of two total strangers, expecting that since we look so average ourselves, we of course would agree with her.
Which we do.
"It's as if they don't want to live in the modern world", the formidable Mrs Charles Henry suggests helpfully. Our average canadian could only nod in agreement. "You're so right!", she said.
The conversation continued for a few memorable minutes, as three working class people, never having been subjected to university brainwashing, and having long ago cut the CBC umbilical cord, feel that the truth is so obvious it can be taken for granted that others will see it as clearly, thought police or no thought police.

Meanwhile the same newspaper contains the understatement of the 21st century tucked away in another related story:

"Canadian Muslims must share some blame for not doing more to stop the misleading of our youth in the name of Islam," Imam Syed B. Soharwardy said at a news conference at the Al Madinah Calgary Islamic Centre Friday.

At last week’s Blue Revolution meeting, with reports from the somnambulant CBC television newsteam and university-trained journalists from the Globe and Mail newspaper still ringing in our ears, we were unable to conclude whether or not Canada had remained unaffected by the discovery of Toronto’s terrorist nests. A few days have passed, and there is much more room for optimism than at first appeared:

...It appears most Canadians agree with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government when it says there is no relationship between the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan and extremist targeting.

Opposition to the mission has been gaining steam as Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents boost attacks against troops based in Kandahar. Some experts [does he mean imam Aly "I always say the No. 1 recruiter of al-Qaeda is George W. Bush" Hindy?] argue the deployment of approximately 2,200 Canadian forces personnel is fuelling extremist hatred at home and abroad.

However, the poll found 61 per cent of respondents believe Canada is a target simply because it is a Western democracy. A minority -- 31 per cent -- argued "terrorist threats . . . have everything to do with Canada's troops in Afghanistan."

"People believe this is more of an ideological stance made by individuals against what we are about, as opposed to where our troops are," Wright said.

This 61% is a welcome change from the recent national mood, where it would have been far more common to see these two numbers in reverse.
While we would be crazy to read too much into one individual poll, it is through the increasing accumulation of similar singular incidents, whether they may be an impromptu conversation with a total stranger at a bus stop, or a snapshot poll taken on the fly, that allow us to hope Canada's middle class is finally riding the same bus that many others have been aboard since September 11.

Back from the meeting

Vancouver's persevering allies of France's Blue Revolution continued their weekly tradition this evening. Neither rain nor Toronto muslim terrorists, alleged or otherwise, managed to keep us away.

This week's imponderable question: has Canada been changed by the dismantling of the terror cell of muslim terrorists plotting in Toronto. From accumulated anecdotal evidence, the answer seems to be "yes, somewhat, but how many will really admit they've changed their point of view". Some newspaper stories that were mentioned, however, remind us that some canadians will simply continue to keep their anti-american/anti-israel/anti-western civilization mindsets no matter what contradictory evidence is placed before them.

Much speculation about what might be in store for us Monday night at the Vancouver Public Library, as the library hosts a guest appearance by "Irshad Manji... acclaimed journalist, lecturer and human rights advocate based in Toronto. "
What kind of greeting can the author of The Trouble with Islam Today expect from Vancouver's muslim community?
(with a title like that I was surprised to discover how short her book was)

It was emboldening, as always, to meet and talk and learn about what is happening in our country, and what we can do about it.

Facing Reality Face-to-Face

I was searching for a line from Rilke's novel when I came across this:

Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part II, where the former prince has shed his profligate lifestyle to become King Henry V. Visited by his erstwhile drinking companion, Falstaff, the new and mature king says:

Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away my former self (V,v).
****

People change by virtue of living, and that's an end to it. However, we change rapidly in times of crisis, some of us becoming different in ground rather than simply in colour or taste and such. The very ground of being heaves, and we are as we were not. For a number of us that personal upheaval happened on 9-11-01. For some the ground of being is still shifting. Others float along on the shifting sands. I will not presume that you are who you were. Nor will I presume that as you are you will remain. The upheavals have not ended, and they won't for us till our time is over. Today we assume new roles and duties. Old masks have fallen, and we assume new identities: being that was is now uncovered as being what is and unearthed as us. Like it or not, many of us are who were might never have been. Now you are discovered and you are called.

Rilke in The Journal of Malte Laurids Brigge, (p.71) writes:

"The mouleur, whose shop I pass every day, has hung two masks beside his door. The face of the young drowned woman, a cast of which was taken in the Morgue because it was beautiful, because it smiled, smiled so deceptively, as though it knew. And beneath it, his face, which knows."

That's not the quotation I sought. That's a quotation for those who do not know. Rilke wrote in the same work that "He" is the mask behind which the author lies as person, and the quotation is illustrative because we act so at our peril. We can look at ourselves and see a false image of our being as we are not but might wish were so. We cannot afford such sentimentality any longer. The masks are slipped. We have to accept our faces and face the world honestly as we now are. Our previous masks of over-sensitive poets hanging gently on our fronts is no longer worthy of us.

For most of us the newness of war is discomfiting and alienating. We have lived so long behind masks of Romance and false feeling that to see what we truly are is to look on horror when we do so. We are, from the deeps, now ourselves.

Recently 17 Muslims were arrested in Toronto, Canada on charges related to a conspiracy to murder at random a mass of innocent civilians. To suggest that people are in denial over this occasion is to mouth worthless cliches and to lapse into passivity and smugness. It's not enough to condemn the fools among us. You are not the person you were, and life will not allow you to pretend in good faith. You know the Muslims will kill you in time, and if not you your children. Pretty is a fashion out of date. Ugly is stylish in the season.

So shall the world perceive,
That you have turned away your former self.

We will meet on Thursday evening in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library from 7-9:00 p.m. to sit and drink coffee and talk about our new lives and our responses to them. It's time to hang up the old masks of denial and dhimmitude and pleasing the p.c. chorus with pretty noises. We talk about jihad, we talk about socialism, we talk about a new covenant for Canada and for free people in free nations. You'll know us because we wear blue kerchiefs and blue scarves. We are the ones you can sit with to discuss the nature of the new unmasked and possibly beautiful.

VPL, 7-9:00 p.m. In the Atrium usually at Blenz.

Attention Vancouverites

Please consider attending one of our weekly blue scarf/Covenant Zone meetings, every Thursday, 7-9pm, in the atrium of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee. Please refer to the post below, Covenanting Now... to better understand our mission.

Mujahideen Blood Rituals

Yesterday's news (here and here ) that the terrorist conspiracy in Canada included a plan to raid parliament, capture hostages, and either to behead or threaten to behead the Prime Minister if demands - gettting Canada out of Afghanistan - were not met, has naturally encountered a lot of incredulity in Canada. The fact that the news of the allegation was reported to the media by the lawyer for the accused would-be beheader, suggests that the lawyer wishes to highlight the fantastic nature of the alleged crime and thus raise doubts whether the conspirators really intended to carry out a dreamy plan that was surely likely to fail if attempted. (UPDATE: indeed the lawyer was playing games with the media as the police document he was commenting on only mentions that they had the idea to behead parliamentarians but abandoned it for more realistic targets.)

However, what may not be known to most Canadians is that beheading is a common form of ritual killing in the Islamic world - for example, in state executions - and it is one that appeals to many of today's youth, as the making and distribution on the internet and by al-Jazeera tv of execution videos by Jihadists demonsrates. For a committed Jihadist, beheading a western Prime Minister would perhaps be the symbolic equivalent of an ordinary Canadian youth's dream of winning the Stanley Cup by scoring the winning goal in triple overtime in game seven.

To help us better understand what we are facing today, I would like to quote from an excellent article that discusses Mujahideen Blood Rituals in detail. (It provides, among many other things, the best description I have seen of the murders of the Armanious family, the Coptic Christians killed by Jihadists in New Jersey, an incident that the authorities have consistently denied was Jihad-related.)

The author, Dawn Perlmutter, is an American scholar and investigator who has worked with police forces to solve crimes in which sacrificial blood rituals play a part, such as with Satanic cults. Because this is a relatively long academic article, I hope it will serve our readers if I quote several passages as a synopsis:

Beheadings, suicide bombings, and ritual mutilation are not just strategies of war but time-honored warrior traditions that are theologically sanctioned. To relegate these acts to mere terrorist tactics is not only strategically unwise but diminishes the true nature of the threat. Similarly, to designate enemies as religious fanatics, Islamic extremists, insurgents, or radical militants who have corrupted the peaceful religion of Islam is a politically correct fallacy that is undermining every aspect of the war on terrorism and resulting in the death of American soldiers... ritual beheadings have been prevalent throughout Islamic history and are theologically prescribed and communally sanctioned.... continuing to analyze the violence from a Western perspective, sugarcoating by the media of violent aspects of the Islamic religion, and failing to recognize that we are in the midst of a century-old Holy war will only serve to perpetuate a never-ending cycle of reciprocal violence.
[...]
the concept of mujahideen is a unifying ideal, a lifelong fraternity of soldiers, who when called upon by a charismatic religious leader such as Usama bin Laden or Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi will not only fight to the death but commit suicide for their ideals. In almost every statement made by various terrorist groups, they proudly identify themselves as mujahideen. They are viewed as more than just ideal soldiers; their actions are not only respected by family, community, and country but more significantly, deemed sacred.
[...]
Because it is difficult to fully comprehend suicide bombings, beheadings, and ritual mutilations from a Western perspective, they are generally reduced to acts of barbarism and psychological warfare. In any type of ritualistic crime every aspect of the act has symbolic meaning to the perpetrator, particularly when the violence is perpetrated in the cause of a religious ideology. Ritualizing violence is what makes it sacred, hence justifiable. With the exception of suicide bombings, the most obvious and prevalent examples of religiously sanctioned Islamist murders are beheadings. The symbolism of contemporary beheading is both political and religious; the political aspects are to instill fear, the religious aspects morally sanction murder.
[...]
Mujahideen fighting the coalition forces in Iraq have revived a long tradition of blood rituals, particularly Quranic verses that beckon holy warriors to smite the necks of unbelievers. The modern version of this mujahideen blood ritual is choreographed and videotaped. These videotaped beheadings are not just a form of psychological warfare but a method of validating the ideal that they are in the same war that the prophet and the first Muslims were fighting.
[...]
Beheadings in the Al Qaeda network videos meet all the criteria to be designated ritualistic crimes... Some reporters have claimed that the beheadings are a form of human sacrifice, hence the terrorists committing these crimes are not true Muslims but have returned to pagan pre-Islamic practices that are prohibited in the Quran (editorial in USA Today, "Nothing Islamic about human sacrifice,"). The practice of human sacrifice is a form of idolatry that is prohibited in all the monotheistic religions, specifically in reference to the worship of other gods; however, referring to these beheadings as human sacrifice is inaccurate. There are subtle and important distinctions between ritual murder and sacrifice. In its simplest terms, human sacrifice is ritually murdering someone as an offering to a god; ritual murder is ritually killing someone for other reasons. The mujahideen are not beheading victims as offerings to Allah; they are ritually murdering the enemies and apostates of Allah to preserve Islam as theologically proscribed in the Quran. The Mujahideen are not creating a cult of human sacrifice; they are returning to a pure form of Islam, as they consistently claim.
[...]
Interestingly, al-Zarqawi formally merged with Usama Bin Ladin’s al-Qaeda in October 2004, soon after several highly publicized beheadings. On the day that Al-Zarqawi announced his alliance, an Islamist website posted a message in which al-Zarqawi took credit for decapitating 11 Iraqi Police and National Guardsmen. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was successfully initiated and earned his status in the Al-Qaeda network with the heads of hostages and a high body count from suicide bombings.
[...]
The very fact that these executions are ritualized and that the executioners praise Allah throughout is what distinguishes them from common acts of barbarism. There would be no honor in simply cutting off someone’s head for the sake of terrorizing your enemies; the ritual characteristics have to be present to be theologically and communally sanctioned. To situate this in the realm of the sacred as opposed to a mob killing it is ritually required that each person participate in the religious ritual, hence, the communal chanting of Allah Akbar while the victim is being beheaded. Finally, all of the participants in the beheading ritual have to be authentic true believers, who will kill and die for their religion; this is the very reason they identify themselves as soldiers of God. These beheadings are nothing less than the sacred blood rituals of the Mujahideen.
[...]
The argument against the existence of ritual murder is based on a behavioral science theoretical perspective which claims that perpetrators of these crimes are suffering from some form of psychopathology. The argument that attempts to prove that ritual murder occurs is based on a religious cultural perspective that claims that the perpetrators are making rational choices to engage in a violent ritual that is religiously required of that group. I am the leading proponent of the latter argument, and throughout my career have witnessed a pervasive denial of the existence of premeditated group sanctioned ritual murder. That denial was also prevalent when the first beheading video became public... We do not want to acknowledge that in the civilized 21st century people are ritually murdered in the name of God or Satan.
[...]
Jihadists consistently claim that they are traditionalists who restrict themselves to literal and traditional interpretations of their sacred texts. The media have perpetuated an erroneous idea that Islamic terrorists have corrupted the peaceful religion of Islam, when in fact it is moderate Muslims who have altered the religion and actually practice a Westernized, watered-down version of Islam. Acknowledging the documented history of the Islamic religion should not be viewed as an insult to Modern Muslims or deemed slanderous of contemporary Islam. Every major religion has evolved and adapted to new technologies and cultural changes. The danger occurs when revisionist history promotes a fallacy that denies the violent origins of the Islamic faith and undermines the public’s perception of the seriousness of the threat.
[...]
These holy warriors are willingly blowing themselves up because they have faith. As a consequence of our Western view of the world and standard behavioral science analysis of crime, we fail to see the nature of these true believers. Al-Qaeda has already won the most important strategic battle; they know their enemy, but we are in denial of their religious imperative to annihilate us. Our worst opponent is not the Mujahideen, it is our refusal to acknowledge that we are fighting soldiers of God in a centuries-old holy war.

The time for Covenanting is now...

The newspaper of choice of Canada's bureaucratic elites is The Globe and Mail. Today, there are a lot of interesting juxtapositions and contradictions on the editorial page, pointing to a crisis of identity that this blog has come into being to address.

The lead editorial (no link: subscription only) is titled: "Tackling the dangerous ideology of victimhood"...

"Muslims are not oppressed worldwide. Forty leading Arab and Muslim intellectuals, including Canadian economicist Atif Kubursi, have come out and said so in the past few years in the Arab Human Development Reports done for the United Nations... [note: apparently, the bureaucratic elite - e.g. those who still take the UN seriously - are no longer worshipping victimhood]

"The notion that Canadian Muslims are victims is nonsense. Their parents left behind constrained lives in countries such as Algeria and Somalia for the educational and economic opportunities of this country. They worship freely. They are very much part of the mainstream of Canadian life.

"In Canada, Muslims do not find themselves living in separate communities as in Britain, where in 17 primary schools, 90 percent of students are Bangladeshi. They are not living in sprawling suburban ghettos, as in France. Female Muslims are not forbidden to wear the traditional head scarf in public schools, as in France. Schools make enormous accomodations - barring male lifeguards, for instance, to permit special swimming periods for Muslim girls... [so much for employment equity, or the right of all girls to admire male lifeguards... if they ever instigate a single sex swimming schedule at my pool, I will explode] But the ideology of victimhood is attractive to some young people because it explains everything."

Then we read letters to the editor (subscription only) on the recent plot:

(from a historian): "Your newspaper's narrow focus on police efforts to prevent a terrorist attack has obscured a more fundamental issue: the fact that the suspected terrorists are essentially the products of Canadian schools. The public education system is our first line of defense agains homegrown terrorism. Arguably, this incident shows that it has failed to deliver the required ounce of prevention"

Another letter: "Drop into just about any classroom in Toronto and ask the kids about Canada. Surprised that they can't name the Prime Minister? They will probably just say, "Who cares?.. As an educator, I have always believed that our curriculum should be infused with Canadian content. We must teach kids what it means to be Canadian."

Another letter: "You [the Globe] say, "Some will even leap to the conclusion that our experiment with mass immigration and multiculturalism is failing, that our very tolerance and openness have become a weakness." Yes, and some will be right. Only in Toronto where political correctness has replaced logic and careful observation, would a major newspaper argue the opposite."

Another letter: "Canada is the most tolerant, inclusive and multicultural nation on Earth. Even our enemies are Canadian."

Then there are many letters both lauding and criticizing Christie Blatchford for her column (subscription only) saying she was fed up with Muslim leaders after attending a meeting where she said Muslims appeared more concerned to portray themselves as victims and in need of police protection, given their fear of a backlash, than people willing to take responsibility for the "radicals" in their midst (not to mention, I might add, for the all anti-Infidel talk in the Koran - cursing the unbeliever on almost every page - and Sunnah. But don't take my word for it: read the sacred texts yourself.)

All in all, I get the distinct impression that many Canadians, including many Muslims who want to be Canadians first, are desirous of rejecting multiculturalism, or some aspects of it, e.g. the cult of victimhood. On the other hand, no one knows what would replace it - there can be no going back now to a solely white, British and French, identity, not that we should forget to champion all the great things we have acquired from the western, Judeo-Christian past - so people continue to defend certain multicultural precepts, lacking any other vision of what a majoritarian Canadian culture is or could be. This is a problem we hope to address in depth over the days and years to come, here, where visions of a new and continuing Canadian covenant will hopefully be developed. All are welcome and encouraged to join us.

Sensitivity Training in the Peaceable Kingdom

Kate at SDA has two blood-curdling posts up on political correctness in Canada. First we learn (via CBC Watch) of a 2005 memo from CBC News editor-in-chief Tony Burman to his minions and colleagues in liberal elitism:

'Terrorism'? Who's to say?: Informed sources
National Post
July 19, 2005

What follows is a memo distributed to CBC staff describing the CBC policy on use of the word 'terrorism.'

'Terrorist' and 'terrorism': Exercise extreme caution before using either word.

Avoid labelling any specific bombing or other assault as a "terrorist act" unless it's attributed (in a TV or Radio clip, or in a direct quote on the Web). For instance, we should refer to the deadly blast at that nightclub in Bali in October 2002 as an "attack," not as a "terrorist attack." The same applies to the Madrid train attacks in March 2004, the London bombings in July 2005 and the attacks against the United States in 2001, which the CBC prefers to call "the Sept. 11 attacks" or some similar expression. (The BBC, Reuters and many others follow similar policies.)

Terrorism generally implies attacks against unarmed civilians for political, religious or some other ideological reason. But it's a highly controversial term that can leave journalists taking sides in a conflict.

By restricting ourselves to neutral language, we aren't faced with the problem of calling one incident a "terrorist act" (e.g., the destruction of the World Trade Center) while classifying another as, say, a mere "bombing" (e.g., the destruction of a crowded shopping mall in the Middle East).
[...]

Then we learn of the preparations the RCMP made for the recent alleged terrorists:

Before the raids came the sensitivity training: Tactical-squad Mounties learned how to properly handle Korans prior to arresting 17 terrorism suspects on the weekend.

And that's not all. The RCMP also made sure there were clean prayer mats on hand for their suspects when they were sent to jail cells.

Then, after everything wrapped up, authorities met with a number of Muslim leaders to impress upon them that officers were going after specific individuals, not the community as a whole.

"Our officers need to be respectful," said RCMP spokeswoman Corporal Michele Paradis.

"We want to make sure the investigation is pristine."

Isn't it interesting how the Muslim fanatics' (or do I mean all real Muslims?, fifty percent? five?) deep concern with purification rituals and all things haram must now rub off on Canadian officialdom? I wonder if we will ever get to the point when terrorists have the right not to be arrested and handled by infidels. Without thinking like terrorists, I think we may however permit ourselves one wry smile at the news that one of the targets that the terrorists considered was CBC's Toronto broadcasting centre. (I will get a bit more reflective on issues of blood ritualism and post more here later in the day on the lead item in that story: the claim that another of the intended targets was the Prime Minister's head.)

Muslims: who ya gonna believe?

In response to the trauma suffered by the Canadian multiculti empire by the recent uncovering of a terrorist cell with plans to blow up something big time, the CBC is pleased to report:

Islam not violent, Toronto Muslims say

Muslim leaders and police took pains Sunday to distinguish between the religion of Islam and the 17 people accused of plotting bomb attacks in Ontario.

"Canadian Muslims absolutely condemn an act of violence or threat of violence," Muhammad Alam, president of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, told a crowded hall where many Muslims expressed concern about the arrests.

"This is not about religion or faith," but about political and social situations around the world, he said.

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair agreed, saying the accused were motivated by an ideology based on politics and violence, not by faith. "This is not the action of the Muslim community."

The Muslim leaders thanked Blair for his assurances that the police would try to protect Muslims from angry responses to the arrests. Vandals who damaged a Toronto mosque overnight may have been motivated by hatred after the arrests earlier in the weekend, Blair said.

Not violent? Not about religion or faith... but about political and social situations? One might wonder then, how, when cruising the web, one can come across this page from the Muslim Students Association at the University of Southern California. The page is devoted to clearing up misconceptions about Islam.

Misconception 1

Islam is `the religion of peace' because:

the Arabic word Islam is derived from the Arabic word "Al-Salaam" which means peace.

It might seem strange to think of this as a misconception, but in fact it is. The root word of Islam is "al-silm" which means "submission" or "surrender." It is understood to mean "submission to Allah." In spite of whatever noble intention has caused many a Muslim to claim that Islam is derived primarily from peace, this is not true. Allah says in the Qur'an (translated):

[2:136] Say (O Muslims): We believe in Allah and that which is revealed to us and that which was revealed to Abraham, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and that which Moses and Jesus received, and that which the prophets received from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and to Him we have surrendered. [Arabic "Muslimoon"]

A secondary root of Islam may be "Al-Salaam" (peace), however the text of the Qur'an makes it clear that Allah has clearly intended the focus of this way of life to be submission to Him. This entails submission to Him at all times, in times of peace, war, ease, or difficulty.

This page also tells us that:

Islam is the name of a way of life which the Creator wants us to follow. We avoid the word religion because in many non-Islamic societies, there is a separation of "religion and state." This separation is not recognized at all in Islam: the Creator is very much concerned with all that we do, including the political, social, economic, and other aspects of our society. Hence, Islam is a complete way of life.

But if the idea of separating church and state is specifically western, how do Islamic groups in say, Canada, adapt? Well, let's look at one organization, the Muslim Canadian Congress, that claims to be leading the integration of Muslims and Canadian society (though I see no evidence that many Canadian Muslims follow the MCC). After all, this is an organization that the Canadian media have recently shown themselves keen to call on to explain Islam. The MCC mission statement claims:

As Muslim Canadians we believe in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Canadian constitution as our guiding principles.
[...]
We define a Muslim as any person who identifies himself or herself as a Muslim.
[...]
We believe in the separation of religion and state in all matters of public policy. We feel such a separation is a necessary pre-requisite to building democratic societies, where religious, ethnic, and racial minorities are accepted as equal citizens enjoying full dignity and human rights enunciated in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I wonder, then, how the MCC explains its obvious desire to address both questions of religion and state. In fact, the greater part of its website is devoted to the typical leftist post-colonial issues. For example, MCC Communications Director, Tarek Fatah, recently wrote a letter lauding the Canadian Union of Public Employees for joining the movement to boycott and divest from Israel, the only highly democratic state in the Middle East, the only state in that part of the world where Muslims and others have anything like the kind of human rights the MCC website so boastfully claims to defend. Of course, the MCC doesn't see things this way. To them, Israel is an "apartheid" state, a statement made with no apparent consideration for the continuous Arab attempts to eliminate the state of Israel, attempts that preceded the founding of modern Israel and that have never stopped since.

Fatah is the kind of antisemitic (or is it anti-Zionist? I'm never sure) loser who is now a Canadian media "go to guy". But what gives his organization which, as best I can tell, represents no more than a handful of anti-American, "anti-Zionist" leftist "Muslims", the right to speak for Islam? There is perhaps a clue in their mission statement, already quoted: "We define a Muslim as any person who identifies himself or herself as a Muslim."

Perhaps Islam, the religion with no central authority, is up for grabs. It can be whatever "Muslims" say it can be. Perhaps all I need to do, to save Israel, is to become a "Muslim" and get enough of my friends to do the same. Then we can go on the CBC and assure Canadians that they should be fighting to defend Israel, because that is what "Muslims" want.

By the way, in Dec. 2001, the Court of Appeal for Ontario affirmed the conviction of Mark Harding for

communicating statements, other than in private conversation, [wilfully promoting] hatred against an identifiable group, namely Muslims in Canada.

So, be aware, that Muslims in Canada are an identifiable group, at least for purposes of our hate speech law.

While this legal fact may or may not seem hard to square with the claim of the MCC (which wasn't yet on scene in 2001) that anyone who says he is a Muslim is a Muslim, perhaps we are now getting lost in Gnostic territory where we can change reality, if only we know the right word, say, abracadabra, and Islam is the Religion of Peace!

A clue to how the mystical power of the word works to transform reality comes to us from the recent post of my colleague, Charles. It discusses the radical Scarborough imam, Aly Hindy, who has been in the media defending the "honor" of the recently-arrested, alleged terrorists in Toronto, and who has previously refused to condemn the London 7/7 bombings (because, he claims, "Muslims" did not carry out those attacks). We learn that Hindy "[devoted] the better part of his professional life [to] designing safety measures to protect vulnerable nuclear facilities in Ontario as well as the U.S." So it is not surprising to also learn - and this is the point that concerns us now - that:

Mr. Hindy's lack of formal training is no impediment to being an imam. Islam has no formal process of ordaining imams and there are many examples of people who studied outside the formal structures, but became respected scholars.

Obviously, the imam has to possess some knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence in order to answer questions properly and adjudicate matters correctly. But in the end, it all comes down to community acceptance.

"If he gains recognition from the people he is serving as learned and religious-oriented, he can be imam," says the Ottawa Mosque's imam Gamal Solaiman.

So you see, Islam is really a free marketplace of ideas. No doubt there are some Muslims who believe that a Muslim must obey the Koran, Sharia law, and what have you, to the letter. Islam, after all, means submission to Allah. But then there are some today who believe a "Muslim" is anyone who says he is a "Muslim", and this is the angle to take if you want to get on the CBC, defend "gay marriage", protest colonialism and that sort of thing.

So who ya gonna believe? At the end of the day, I think it best to listen to all of the experts and then to forget them all and just look at your world and see it in all its variety for what it really is. Islam is what it is, in historical reality, and not what ideologues want it to be, or Imams say it is. And if we look at historical reality today, we can see that Islam is both a great religion of peace, and perhaps the greatest danger to civilized mankind on this planet. Confused?

Well, confusion is the starting point of all wisdom, and a natural reaction to all that is sacred. The sacred, or the Being - i.e. God - which guarantees worldly incarnations of the sacred (which, since they are worldly, can be profaned and rendered no longer sacred, requiring, if humanity is to go on, a renewal of the sacred in another form, a renewal that can only be guaranteed by our faith in God, or his secular, anthropological equivalent), is inherently paradoxical. Humans are the beings that worship paradox, which is why they need faith. So it might seem that a faith that would deny paradox, in as much as it has all the right answers, is not much of a faith at all, but rather a falsification of faith.

However, since none of us can unfold the paradox of the sacred to anywhere near its full extent (because it has no limit), we all live in some degree of falsification, and some degree of truth in our apprehension of the paradox of the love that is God (at least God is love in my faith). Nonetheless, history promises us the possibility of living with relatively more truth than those who have come before. A "religion" that offers us a uniquely correct ritual order, to which we may submit and thereby always know the right answer, may not be without its truths. But then, it would logically seem to me, it would have less potential for truth than those who live with a more open-ended faith, and a greater respect for paradox.

Canuckistan?

Jihad Watch asks an essential question:

How is it that a man who held obviously "extreme" sentiments could have gotten a place on a mosque Board? Is it possible that the majority in the mosque were and are "extremists" also? Why do authorities never consider this, but constantly pretend the contrary in the teeth of whatever evidence? A slightly better article than the one noted below from the New York Times:

MISSISSAUGA, Canada, June 4 — Several of the people arrested by Canadian authorities in a huge counterterrorism sweep over the weekend regularly attended the same storefront mosque in a middle-class neighborhood of modest brick rental townhouses and well-kept lawns.

The police announced the arrests yesterday in Toronto.

The eldest of the 17 Canadian residents arrested in the sweep, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was described by his lawyer as an active member of the mosque, the Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, though not its leader.

"He's on the board, he's there regularly, but he's not an imam," said Anser Farooq, the lawyer representing Mr. Jamal and three other people from this Toronto suburb who were arrested Friday night and who also attended the same mosque. "He's one of about a half dozen people who lead prayers at the mosque."...
[...]
"I do not think of him as an imam," Tareeq Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said. "People like him are freelancers. I don't fear imams. I fear freelancers who are creating a Islamacist, supremacist cult."...

It doesn't matter if he was an imam or a "freelancer." He was on the Board, which gave him a certain weight in the community. His views were, in other words, not held up as heretical and rejected by the mosque leaders. He was one of those leaders.

Wretchard looks into the propensity of the Main Stream Media to avoid identifying Jihadist terrorist cells as Muslim:

A National Post account of the Canadian arrests illustrates exactly how this process of trying to keep them below the fold works. The Canadian authorities described the suspects as follows:

With the exception of two men, who are aged 43 and 30, the alleged terrorists are all in their teens and early 20s. They include men of Somali, Egyptian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian origin. All are residents of Canada and “for the most part” all are Canadian citizens, police said. Charged are: Fahim Ahmad, 21, Zakaria Amara, 20, Asad Ansari, 21, Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, Mohammed Dirie, 22, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, Jahmaal James, 23, Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, Steven Vikash Chand, 25, and Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21. A twelfth man was a youth when some of the alleged offences took place and can’t be named, along with the other five youths arrested.

“For various reasons, they appear to have become adherents to a violent ideology inspired by al-Qaida,” said Luc Portelance, the CSIS assistant director of operations. ...“It is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethno-cultural group in Canada,” he added.

Really, what's a guy to do? Luc Portelance tried delivering a straight line and came off as comedian. The phrase "it is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethno-cultural group in Canada" will one day vie with that classic, "any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental."
[...]
From a purely academic point of view future historians will find this period an interesting example of how manipulated perceptions struggled obstinately with suppressed reality for the center stage of the policy debate. Some of the questions that will be asked fifty years from now are: what was Scooter Libby really charged with? Is that all? How come millions of people could die in Darfur without anyone noticing? Why were people obsessed with the possible criminal behavior of a handful of Marines in Iraq and uninterested in why their wonderful universities and high schools could produce kids who would be interested in blowing up buildings, spreading poison gas, or maybe shooting down airliners with surface to air missiles. And the most interesting thing about this period is that for a brief time, the manufactured perceptions almost looked like winning. Until reality weighed in.

Finally, for a fine account of elitist denial, see Melanie Phillips:

Islamist radicals have poured into Britain since the 1980s precisely because of Britain's tradition of free speech, reluctance to impose immigration controls and generous welfare state.

At the same time, British culture was steadily disintegrating. Unlike America, which still believes that its values are a beacon to the rest of the world, Britain has been consumed by a loss of cultural nerve that has all but destroyed its belief in itself as a nation with values of which it can be proud.

Instead, its governing class believes the nation is the source of all ills from prejudice to war, and that legitimacy resides instead in supranational institutions such as the United Nations and European Union and in 'universal' values like the European Convention on Human Rights, which must trump Britain's own.

In the past, the strategy was to integrate immigrants into the majority culture. No longer. The doctrine of multiculturalism holds that all groups have equal status. Except they are not in fact equal, because the majority is said to be inherently racist and illegitimate - so there can be no majority culture into which immigrants are encouraged to integrate.

Multiculturalism plus radical Islam is an explosive cocktail. Although the vast majority of British Muslims are opposed to violence, polls have shown that some 13 percent think further attacks on the United States would be justified, 40 percent to 60 percent want to be governed by Sharia law, and nearly two fifths believe that Jews in Britain are a 'legitimate target' as part of the 'ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East.'

And non-Muslim Britons do not rise up in horror at these attitudes - instead, they more or less agree. Widespread ignorance about the Middle East contributes to the belief that Israel is the persecutor of the Palestinians and that American foreign policy has been derailed by global Jewish influence.

The mainly left-wing media daily pumps out a highly distorted and inflammatory version of events in Iraq and the Middle East. In conservative circles, meanwhile, traditional isolationism and an obsession with stability have combined with a profound collapse of trust in Tony Blair to produce widespread hostility to the war in Iraq.

The British anti-war movement is today an enormous platform for Islamist extremism that has given rise to an open season of vilification against Israel and the Jews.

The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or 'Islamophobia.' They simply ignore the statements and signs which show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicize the west.

Read the whole thing, and let's hope that Canadians under Prime Minister Harper will refuse the road to Torontostan. But that's assuming this isn't already Canuckistan.

Terrorist Cell Arrested in Toronto area

Here are some links to news reports:
Canadian Press
canada.com
Stephen Harper's statement
Background story on Canada's home-grown terrorists
Pastorius speculates that a co-ordinated attack in several western countries may have been planned.

Breaking News: Terrorist Cell Arrested in Toronto

CTV reports:

In a sweeping raid, police arrested about a dozen men in the Toronto area on terrorism-related charges Friday night, the RCMP announced.

Intelligence sources allege the men were part of a terrorist cell, close to carrying out attacks on one or more Canadian targets.

Police seized chemicals used to make explosives and weapons.

"That's the tool of choice for anybody who wants to cause damage," a source who asked not to be named told The Canadian Press.

The suspects are either second-generation Canadians or recently immigrated to Canada with their families.

Sources claimed the men have no connection to al Qaeda, but were allegedly inspired by militant Islamic groups.

CBC

Heither Reisman: I did it to protect my employees from Muslims

In reply to an email I sent to Indigo, protesting their decision to remove a copy of Harper's from their stores, I have received the following (presumably form) letter from Heather Reisman (HReisman@indigo.ca):

June 2, 2006

Dear Mr.___,

I deeply appreciate your having taken the time to write and I fully understand your concern. I would like to provide some perspective on our decision.

First, I would like to state that Indigo as a company, and I personally, believe passionately in free speech. Free speech and freedom to write is the irrefutable cornerstone of democracy.

As a major bookseller in this country we recognize that we are seen and appreciated as a place which supports the free flow of ideas and writing. Mindful of this, we have always looked to carry the broadest possible selection of titles in our stores, and to make available at chapters.indigo.ca almost every title available in print. We make exceptions only under the following conditions which we have always been clear about:

1. We will not, to the best of our knowledge, sell child pornography.

2. We will not, to the best of our knowledge, sell material which provides detailed information on how to create weapons of mass destruction.

3. We will not, to the best of our knowledge, sell books which have as their sole intent the incitement toward the annihilation of whole groups within society.

Notwithstanding our policy, we would never, under any circumstance suggest that any book or magazine should be censored or banned in this country. Only governments can make this type of decision and if asked, we would always opt for a fully free and open society.

In February of this year, cartoons of Mohamed from the Danish newspaper Jullands-Posten were first published in Canada by The Western Standard publication. Our decision to not carry this issue of The Western Standard magazine was strictly one of safety for our customers and employees. At the time, there were incendiary incidents in many places in the world because of these cartoons. As you no doubt know, many people were badly hurt, a few were killed, and a great deal of physical destruction took place.

Some might say: “We simply can’t be intimidated…we must stand up for free speech…” However, such a decision must be a personal one. We did not want to take what we felt was a serious risk on a company-wide basis. During working hours we are responsible for the safety of 7,500 people who work with us. We made what I still believe was an appropriate and correct decision.

The situation with Harper’s magazine is different in that the conditions have changed. But although a great deal of the fervour has died down, we chose to err on the side of caution and remain consistent with our initial position.

Again, thank you for taking the time to write. I hope your feel this note provides a meaningful response.

Yours sincerely,

Heather Reisman

Yes it is meaningful, Heather, and as someone who posts anonymously, I have given your reply some consideration.

I conclude, as Charles said in the comments to our previous post on this issue, that what Heather Reisman is really saying is not that she respects Islam, but on the contrary that we cannot trust at least a certain number of Muslims in Canada to act like decent Candians and to respect freedom of speech, the physical security of (non-Muslim) persons, and private property.

She may be right that it must sometimes be a personal decision when to stand up to Islamic violence, and whom to endanger when doing so; on the other hand, unless we want to become a society living under Sharia law, at some point we must take Canadians' general opposition to imperialistic Islam for granted, as a precondition of living and working in a free Canada. One copy of Harper's is nothing much to give up (especially if you have no appetite for anti-American leftist swill). But Reisman's argument becomes dubious when we extend it to larger concerns. If the Islamic imperialists demanded, for example, that we shut down the hog industry, or the academic study and criticism of Islam, do we do so to protect all the employees in those industries? Of course not; at some point "we" (it is no longer a very "personal decision") have to tell our employees that we are at war and we'd all better get used to it. Or, we can all submit. Heather's personal decision is a fruit of western, not Islamic, history.

He Walks in Darkness

"Achilles absent was Achilles still."

We go into our 20th meeting this evening in Vancouver, Canada this evening at 7:00 pm at Vancouver Public Library to sit in the atrium and discuss our plans to defeat dhimmitude, jihad, and the fascist Left around the world. Where, we wonder, will you be?

Many have come a long way from the privacy of their daily lives and personal concerns to the point that today we spend much our own lives dealing with foreign concerns of religion and politics that we likely would not care to if life were to leave us to our own preferred pursuits. Islam? It bores me to tears. Fascism? I can't stand thinking about it. Socialism? I get frustrated and disgusted hearing the nonsense. Our privacy is invaded, and our publicity demands us to rise up to reclaim it. Our private lives are not our own anymore as they once were. We are drawn into war against our wishes, and now we sit on a far shore awaiting battle. We are actually waiting for you.

Where, Achilles, have you gone?

Ours, though we did not choose it, is a good fight. We are called to battle. Life itself calls us to battle. Our private lives are now part of the whole of our nations and our people. We are called upon.

"The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. Thou shalt multiply the nation, Thou shalt increase their gladness; They will be glad in Thy presence as with the gladness of harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For Thou shalt break the yoke of their shoulders and the staff of their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, as in the battle of Midian. For every boot of the booted warrior in the battle tumult, and the cloak rolled in blood, will be for burning, as fuel for the fire."

(Isaiah 9: 2-5).

We chatter in the darkness and squat down chewing our knuckles, waiting. We see the light as we sit in the caves of the mind, know it's shining for us, and we hold back. The hero lurks. He walks in dark places.

We have a great thing to do and we will pay a great price for victory. What a blessing we might have for the taking.

"At last is Hector stretch'd upon the plain,
Who fear'd no vengeance for Patroclus slain:
Then, Prince! You should have fear'd, what now you feel;
Achilles absent was Achilles still:
Yet a short space the great avenger stayed,
Then low in dust thy strength and glory laid."

Homer, The Iliad, Bk. 22.

Your absence disturbs us. We meet in public weekly, Thurdsday evenings, 7-9:00 pm in the library atrium. We assemble for battle. We await you. Call from your camps.

Go now. Go. Go do some great thing.