In late February the province of Ontario’s legislature issued a denunciation of IAW. Progressive Conservative party legislator Peter Shurman, its promoter, stated:Call me cynical, but I'll be confident about Canada's political health only when the politicians start pointing out the Islamists and antisemites in their own parties and making it clear they are not welcome. I'll also be impressed when they start talking about reducing funding for places like York University (for reasons discussed in that part of Kay's article I didn't link).The term Israeli Apartheid Week incites hatred against Israel, a democratic state that respects the rule of law and human rights, and the use of the word “apartheid” in this context diminishes the suffering of those who were victims of a true apartheid regime in South Africa.The motion received unanimous support from all sitting members of the provincial parliament (MPPs), including — and this surprised many Canadians — members of the staunchly socialist New Democratic Party (NDP), perennial scourge of the powerful and unconditionally supportive shoulder to the “oppressed,” including well-known terror-dealing grievance collectors.
The NDP’s elected members’ views on the Middle East range from merely hostile to virulently anti-Israel. So if provincial NDPers felt free to join in this motion, then the denunciation was not an aberration, but an indicator that the times they are a-changin’ in Ontario, Canada’s bellwether province.
In May, the Liberal premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, will lead a trade mission to Israel, the first Ontario leader to do so since 1998, a move that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago for any politician in that ultra-liberal province.
Not to be outdone, Michael Ignatieff, leader of the federal Liberal Party, the official government opposition, declared that IAW “should be condemned unequivocally and absolutely.”
Perhaps all these gestures reflect a cascade phenomenon rolling down from the summit. Last week in Ottawa, the nation’s capitol, Conservative MP Tim Uppal affirmed that he would be introducing a motion declaring “that this House considers itself to be a friend of the State of Israel; that this House is concerned about expressions of anti-Semitism under the guise of ‘Israel Apartheid Week’; and that this House explicitly condemns any action in Canada as well as internationally that would equate the rejected and racist policy of apartheid.”
To cap it all, on February 12, in connection with the ominous approach of Iran’s nuclear weaponization, Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Kent stated: “Prime Minister Harper has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.” In terms of support for Israel, it doesn’t get friendlier than that.
Perhaps I am over-optimistic in extrapolating a verdant spring from these elegantly swooping swallows, but I don’t think so. There are pendulum swings in all historical trends, and I believe we are witnessing one here in Canada.
Apart from rabid anti-Semites and true politicopaths, there would be a natural limit to how many times even the most “progressive” amongst our left-leaning elites can listen to the same frothing-at-the-mouth diatribes against Israel, the same demonstrably odious canards of “apartheid,” “terror state,” and “Nazis” leveled against a demonstrably democratic state, without feeling intellectually soiled by their complicity with the evil of anti-Semitism demonstrably fueling the IAW phenomenon.
One senses an air of the general public being fed up, causing a trickle-down of self-doubt to circulate among the reflexively Israel-bashing herd of political correctniks. One feels a turning in the zeitgeist, the dawning realization even among the dullest-witted sympathizers of the Palestinians that their so-called anti-Zionist militants in the IAW movement, who have never been at pains to disguise the anti-Semitism driving their political campaign, are finally becoming an embarrassment to their rank-and-file leftist shills.
Clinging to their tattered rags of political dignity, IAW’s erstwhile useful idiots are beginning to tire of dancing like trained monkeys to their zealous organ-grinder’s grotesque polka: “It’s about Israel, not Jews.” Fewer and fewer passers-by are attentive to that superannuated jingle, or throwing even small change into that rusty tin cup.
As a conservative Canadian of a certain age, I am habituated to a longstanding tradition of Canadian political reticence, even timidity, where support for Israel is concerned, and equally accustomed to witnessing frequent American boldness in beating against the current of political correctness in openly standing by Israel through tough times.
Today, a little confused, I must confess I am having difficulty adjusting to the new reality of Canadian leadership eclipsing America’s on the Israel file. I have rubbed my eyes a few times, but there they are: Canadian political leaders at the podium, wearing the gold medal for courage, integrity, and good judgment, and for this brief, shining moment at least, history is playing the Canadian national anthem.
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Barbara Kay is feeling optimistic about Judeophobia in Canada
Pajamas Media » Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week:
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Messiah has landed in Canada, but I'm still praying for Obama
J.L. Granatstein: It's all about Canada
What is striking, however, is that the public debate in the U.S., viciously partisan as it always is, ordinarily seems to hinge around great issues, around national interests. Americans know their nation has interests, and they can and do discuss how best to achieve them.
That does not seem to be the case in Canada.
None of our political parties talk of national interests, not even the Bloc Québécois, which purports to advance what it imagines to be Quebec's national interests. (We'll fight them on the Plains of Abraham or in the Elysée!)
No party even thinks of national interests. Programs always take priority, and special interests inevitably prevail. This is not healthy, and Canadians, especially Canadian leaders, need to face up to the reality that Canada's most important long-term needs are not being considered seriously.
And those realities?
We are not a great power and we will not become one. We cannot pretend any longer that we are even a moral superpower. We are a First World nation-state that makes its living by trading with the United States.
We truly cannot play any longer at petulant, childish anti-Americanism, something that seems even more foolish with Mr. Obama in office.
We are protected by Washington now and will be in the future (in the U.S. interest, not because we are such pleasant fellows), and we must stop our strong tendency to yearn for blue beret peacekeeping as the automatic and only role for our military. Simply because the U.S. goes to war does not mean the Americans are wrong. They sometimes are, but they might also be correct, and our government needs to shape our course carefully.
Those who see only American decline may be right, but they are far more likely to be wrong. What needs to be said loudly and clearly is that, if the U.S. falls into the pit, we will be one of the nations dragged down with it. It will take decades to diversify our trade, our economy and our security will be in serious jeopardy, and Canada will be forced to assume vast new financial burdens to re-establish its economic welfare and military security.
We had better pray for Mr. Obama to get America's act together – in our own national interests.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Dancing with the Lady in blue and white
Watching the elections results come in tonight, one couldn't but be struck by the essential fact that a strong majority of Quebec seats went to the Bloc Quebecois, now our perennial third party, effectively denying a Conservative, or for that matter any, majority government in Canada today and probably for some time to come. It seems to me this may not be a bad thing, if Quebec's politicians can somehow be made to take on greater responsibility for this fact and grow beyond the banal opposition party the Bloc have been. I have no great qualms about recognizing what I see as a clear reality: that there does exist a French Canadian nation, largely in Quebec, with a distinctive high culture, institutions, and political traditions (though Quebec is also home to part of the English-Canadian nation). And if that Quebecois nation wishes to continue within Canada, but without giving up some sense of independence and self-interested conduct at voting time, we English-speaking Canadians need to think more seriously how to dance with her, becoming more frank about our own national self-interests and giving up on our more unrealistic visions of transcending this difficult national question in some kind of post-national, "multicultural" nirvana.
There can be no Trudeau-style nirvana, if you believe, as I do, that free and democratic societies positively require not only a great deal of personal freedom in the more or less multicultural (i.e. globalized) consumer and civil society, but also a strong common political culture, a single political culture of people building national covenants to guarantee we will be responsible to each other in fighting to maintain a common, shared freedom.
A state like Canada that is home to two high cultures, with all the media, educational, and other institutions necessary to sustaining them, has no obvious cultural project for the future that can somehow transcend the present duality in some new unity. National high cultures, with all their artistic and educational traditions, are already in conversation, in distinctive ways, with human universals; there is no reason to think some new culture-building project, akin to the modernization processes that created high national cultures with modern languages over the last few centuries, is about to unfold on some new level.
We are stuck here. But it seems to me that a federation of two nations with strong provincial governments is not an unrealistic vision for Canada. We need not always fear the divisions that come from the expression of local or provincial self-interests and governments, if we can learn that true respect for political differences need not lead us to stalemates, based on rituals of offended identity politics, but to a more mature political culture that relishes in an ever open and shifting trade in our differences. If we give up the post-World War II dream of a post-national world led by a UN-NGO-global media-and academic class, Canada can become in its own way a model of nations growing stronger through transparent, self-interested, interaction in a truly inter-national political culture.
This quick thought brings me to a little reconsideration of the founding "sin" of English Canada. Americans often talk about slavery as their nation's "original sin". French Canadians often used to imply that our founding sin was General Wolfe's Conquest of Quebec.
For some reason, as I watched the election results on tv, the words to the first verse of English Canada's first, if unofficial, national anthem came to mind: Alexander Muir's, The Maple Leaf Forever:
But the Conquest of Quebec occurred in 1759-60 and its meaning for history would have been quite different if not for the real founding and traumatic event of English Canada: the civil war known as the American Revolution (1775-1783).
We English-Canadians are still living in the shadow of that event, struggling to realize a national compact that can unite a land of disparate refugees and loyalists from an old imperial order. Newer immigrants may not literally come from the old British empire, but they often learn to see Canada as something of a multicultural empire, with reason. Quebeckers were orphaned from their old French empire earlier; this, along with the founding division of English-speaking North America into two political regions, insured that French Canada would not be lost in a much larger state, and it developed its nationhood and distinct high culture accordingly.
It is now time for that nation to start playing a role in Ottawa without feigning, in the impeccable manner of Gilles Duceppe, the role of the insecure younger sibling. Quebec is really the elder child. But for the rest of us to accept the reality of this self-interested nation that has long played well the federal political game to maximize the flow to Quebec of federal dollars and benefits, we in turn will have to move further towards seeing ourselves as a self-interested, English-speaking nation and provinces in productive conflict and partnership with our sister nation and/or province. Maybe we need the and/ors, provinces/nations, to remind us of our freedom to frame our politics in more than one way, to find productive solutions to different problems.
If the Quebecois are not going to separate, they're also not going to go away: we can't hope to bury Quebec nationhood in some kind of Trudeaupian fantasy nation, as if French-English bilingualism will ever be an important fact of Canadian life in many places outside of Montreal, Ottawa, and parts of New Brunswick. It's time for English-speaking Canadians to learn to play ball on Quebec's level, moving beyond the fantasy that our political culture can be "multicultural". We do indeed live our lives today, in families, as consumers, as religious people, by drawing on diverse cultural histories. But when it comes to our politics, whatever the many backgrounds of the people involved, ours is clearly a single, if conflict-ridden, conversation about shared promises and hoped-for covenants. That is, with the exception of Quebec, where a quite different conversation is often going on.
Part of the reason this was such an uninspiring election with no party having a great vision is because we continue to have trouble articulating the reality of Canada. We can say that Harper failed to win a majority in part because he failed to articulate and defend a clear conservative vision. He played to the centre in a wishy-washy liberal nation. And when you don't take risks you don't create new possibilities. But I think this is really a way of saying we are still in part an imperial culture, often more interested in what a distant government promises to do for us than what we can do with our governments.
And yet the Harper conservatives did grow outside of Quebec, perhaps especially so here in BC where both the Liberals and the NDP lost ground. I take the relative weakness, the lack of ideas, of all the parties to be a sign of a need for some kind of new paradigm in Canadian politics, whether or not the intuitions expressed above are anywhere near the mark we should be aiming for.
There can be no Trudeau-style nirvana, if you believe, as I do, that free and democratic societies positively require not only a great deal of personal freedom in the more or less multicultural (i.e. globalized) consumer and civil society, but also a strong common political culture, a single political culture of people building national covenants to guarantee we will be responsible to each other in fighting to maintain a common, shared freedom.
A state like Canada that is home to two high cultures, with all the media, educational, and other institutions necessary to sustaining them, has no obvious cultural project for the future that can somehow transcend the present duality in some new unity. National high cultures, with all their artistic and educational traditions, are already in conversation, in distinctive ways, with human universals; there is no reason to think some new culture-building project, akin to the modernization processes that created high national cultures with modern languages over the last few centuries, is about to unfold on some new level.
We are stuck here. But it seems to me that a federation of two nations with strong provincial governments is not an unrealistic vision for Canada. We need not always fear the divisions that come from the expression of local or provincial self-interests and governments, if we can learn that true respect for political differences need not lead us to stalemates, based on rituals of offended identity politics, but to a more mature political culture that relishes in an ever open and shifting trade in our differences. If we give up the post-World War II dream of a post-national world led by a UN-NGO-global media-and academic class, Canada can become in its own way a model of nations growing stronger through transparent, self-interested, interaction in a truly inter-national political culture.
This quick thought brings me to a little reconsideration of the founding "sin" of English Canada. Americans often talk about slavery as their nation's "original sin". French Canadians often used to imply that our founding sin was General Wolfe's Conquest of Quebec.
For some reason, as I watched the election results on tv, the words to the first verse of English Canada's first, if unofficial, national anthem came to mind: Alexander Muir's, The Maple Leaf Forever:
In Days of yore,...thistle, shamrock, rose: Scots, Irish, and English united on the field of conquest. The great imperial artist, Benjamin Wolfe, added some aboriginal and American elements to his monumental picture (which every visitor to Ottawa should see):
From Britain's shore,
Wolfe the dauntless hero came
And planted firm Britannia's flag
On Canada's fair domain.
Here may it wave,
Our boast, our pride,
And join in love together,
The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined,
The Maple Leaf Forever
But the Conquest of Quebec occurred in 1759-60 and its meaning for history would have been quite different if not for the real founding and traumatic event of English Canada: the civil war known as the American Revolution (1775-1783).
We English-Canadians are still living in the shadow of that event, struggling to realize a national compact that can unite a land of disparate refugees and loyalists from an old imperial order. Newer immigrants may not literally come from the old British empire, but they often learn to see Canada as something of a multicultural empire, with reason. Quebeckers were orphaned from their old French empire earlier; this, along with the founding division of English-speaking North America into two political regions, insured that French Canada would not be lost in a much larger state, and it developed its nationhood and distinct high culture accordingly.
It is now time for that nation to start playing a role in Ottawa without feigning, in the impeccable manner of Gilles Duceppe, the role of the insecure younger sibling. Quebec is really the elder child. But for the rest of us to accept the reality of this self-interested nation that has long played well the federal political game to maximize the flow to Quebec of federal dollars and benefits, we in turn will have to move further towards seeing ourselves as a self-interested, English-speaking nation and provinces in productive conflict and partnership with our sister nation and/or province. Maybe we need the and/ors, provinces/nations, to remind us of our freedom to frame our politics in more than one way, to find productive solutions to different problems.
If the Quebecois are not going to separate, they're also not going to go away: we can't hope to bury Quebec nationhood in some kind of Trudeaupian fantasy nation, as if French-English bilingualism will ever be an important fact of Canadian life in many places outside of Montreal, Ottawa, and parts of New Brunswick. It's time for English-speaking Canadians to learn to play ball on Quebec's level, moving beyond the fantasy that our political culture can be "multicultural". We do indeed live our lives today, in families, as consumers, as religious people, by drawing on diverse cultural histories. But when it comes to our politics, whatever the many backgrounds of the people involved, ours is clearly a single, if conflict-ridden, conversation about shared promises and hoped-for covenants. That is, with the exception of Quebec, where a quite different conversation is often going on.
Part of the reason this was such an uninspiring election with no party having a great vision is because we continue to have trouble articulating the reality of Canada. We can say that Harper failed to win a majority in part because he failed to articulate and defend a clear conservative vision. He played to the centre in a wishy-washy liberal nation. And when you don't take risks you don't create new possibilities. But I think this is really a way of saying we are still in part an imperial culture, often more interested in what a distant government promises to do for us than what we can do with our governments.
And yet the Harper conservatives did grow outside of Quebec, perhaps especially so here in BC where both the Liberals and the NDP lost ground. I take the relative weakness, the lack of ideas, of all the parties to be a sign of a need for some kind of new paradigm in Canadian politics, whether or not the intuitions expressed above are anywhere near the mark we should be aiming for.
Election Day Blogburst: Sign off for Freedom
I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledege to uphold for myself and for all mankind.-Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, from the House of Commons, Debates (on the Canadian Bill of Rights), July 1, 1960.
Today is Election Day in Canada. To mark the occasion, some bloggers, led by Nick and Kathy, are doing a blogburst featuring the above quotation. See:
FiveFeetOfFury
Small Dead Animals
Right Girl
Time Immortal
Ghost of a Flea
Halls of Macadamia
Chris Reid
Dust My Broom
Blazing Cat Fur
Wonder Woman
Political Staples
Uncommon Sense
Jack of Hearts
Deborah Gyapong
At Home in Hespeler
Because No One Asked
Free Canuckistan (formerly Free Mark Steyn)
Sleepy Old Bear
Daimnation
Big Blue Wave
The Great Pumpkin
No Libs
Cruel But Fair
The Screaming Pages
Nice Comfy Fur
Right to know Coalition of Nova Scotia
Just Right
The Daily Bayonet
Alice The Camel
Denyse O'Leary
Nova Scotia Scott
Island Breezes
Scaramouche
The Black Kettle
Stubble Jumping Redneck
POETENCY & APOETASY
Alice the Camel
The Sheep Cat
The Nexus of Assholery
J.D. Carriere
A Dog Named Kyoto
Ephemeris
Hello Birdy
The Phantom Observer
Blue Like You
It seems to me that the preamble to the 1960 Bill of Rights is also worth remembering these days amidst confusion as to the nature or origin of human rights:
The Parliament of Canada, affirming that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions;To fill out this post I thought I would offer some further quotations on freedom, collected in Robert M. Hamilton and Dorothy Shields, eds. The Dictionary of Canadian Quotations and Phrases (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979):
Affirming also that men and institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law;
And being desirous of enshrining these principles and the human rights and fundamental freedoms derived from them, in a Bill of Rights which shall reflect the respect of Parliament for its constitutional authority and which shall ensure the protection of these rights and freedoms in Canada:
We will enjoy here that which is the great test of constitutional freedom - we will have the rights of the minority respected- Sir John A. Macdonald, Confederation Debates, Feb. 6, 1865
I believe you realize the value in the interests of true liberty of a free utterance before his fellow countrymen, of the distinctive opinions held by a public man.- Edward Blake, speech at Aurora, Ont., Oct. 3, 1874
It is to our own convictions, right or wrong, that we must after all be true. To put forward opinions we do not hold, or ignore difficulties we cannot solve, or deny or conceal the tendencies and results of policies we undertake to propound, would be dishonest and unworthy.- Edward Blake, to the Members of the West Durham Reform Convention, Feb. 9, 1891
Parliament itself could not abrogate this right of discussion and debate.- Justice Douglas Abbott, Dominion Law Reports (2d), 1957, Vol. 7, 371.
Free institutions will not make free natures, and small is the number of those who are by nature free. Most of us crave for a sheepfold and a shibboleth.- Goldwin Smith, The Bystander, N.S., Jan., 1890
Who wooed the west to win the east,/ And named the stars of North and South,/ And felt the zest of Freedom's feast/ Familiar in his mouth- Charles G.D. Roberts, "Epitaph for a sailor buried ashore", 1893
Freedom breeds loyalty. Coercion always was the mother of rebellion- Sir Wilfid Laurier; attributed
It is our proud boast that Canada is the freest country in the world. It is our boast that in this country liberty of all kinds, civil and religious liberty, flourish to the highest degree- Sir Wilfrid Laurier, addess at Tercentenary Celebration, Quebec, 1908
Praise for faith in freedom/ Our fighting fathers' stay,/ Born of dreams and daring,/ Bred above dismay- Bliss Carman, "In the day of battle", 1916
Since you who walked in freedom/ And the ways of reason fought on our front,/ We foresee the plot is solvable, the duel worthy.- Earle Birney, "For Steve", 1945
To be indifferent to one's own fate and to be absorbed in another's, to forget the shrinking of the body of flesh and nerves as completely as if that body were already in the grave and as if the ghost that had driven and been driven by it were already free of it - this was to know freedom- Philip Child, Day of Wrath, 1945
Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practice. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such a knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.- Northrop Frye, The educated imagination (1962)
Only the tiniest fraction of mankind wants freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them they are free.- Irving Layton, "Some observations and aphorisms", Tamarack rev., (1968)
Freedom and justice do not depend on the goodness of the people up top, but on the courage of the people down below.- Richard J. Needham, A friend in Needham (1969)
Men are entitled to as much freedom as they can get - no more and no less.- Irving Layton, "Aphs", The whole bloody bird, 1969
Vote for those who promise reasonably to help institutionalize a greater degree of freedom for our nation...- Covenant Zone, Oct. 14, 2008
Or who will help set the scene for a greater degree of human self-understanding in our nation...
That we citizens may better recognize the shared necessity and responsibility from which our performance of new freedoms will emerge...
Monday, October 06, 2008
Let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark
The other day, Blazing Cat Fur linked to this post: Denmark: Street war between Hells Angels and immigrant gangs spreading » Balder Blog
This is the kind of news from Europe that you can these days usually only find in blogs. Today, Pamela Geller has more:
It is enough at this moment that we recognize and vote for the politicians that, despite their many faults, are at least somewhat aware of the Global Intifada being waged by the left-Islamist alliance:
This is the kind of news from Europe that you can these days usually only find in blogs. Today, Pamela Geller has more:
When the situation became hopeless in 1945 Germany, Hitler and his monsters retreated to his fuhrerbunker[; it is said] that in their last days any semblance of decency and morality was recklessly abandoned. Europe's political elites remind me of these desperate, bankrupt zombies, naked and screwing everybody. Strange metaphor I know but it came to mind when reading an email I received from Tomas Kierstein describing the disastrous disintegration of the basic fabric of Danish society (and many European countries). Tomas Kierstein is vice-chairman of The Danish Association (in Danish: Den Danske Forening - introduction in English) He wrote me after viewing my video interviews with Lars Hedegaard parts I(here) and II (here).At this point in time, it seems to me we don't have to wait for the perfect account of just how bad things are in Europe, or what hope there is for Western nations to renew themselves to face down the ethical chaos sown by those whose fear of national cultures, and the individual freedom that grows out of them, has encouraged them to foster, in the name of multiculturalism, all the conditions for a collapse of self-ruling democracies and a movement towards rule of the streets by tribal gangsters and warlords.
His account is frightening but less so than Hedegaard's mystification with America's inexplicable and almost deliberate denial, willful ignorance of the creeping sharia and stealth jihad descending over our great nation. At least, Hedegaard insisted, "we know what is happening in our country".[paraphrasing
[...]
[Kierstein writes:] On the other hand, if Europe becomes a failed Continent, you don’t have to consider whether or not to intervene. At that point you will simply not have the money to support your military efforts anymore, as both the Chinese and your domestic economies, which are heavily tied to each other and the European market, will probably collapse – as more than half a billion of what used to be among the wealthiest consumers in the World will leave the World economy and enter the abyss of perpetual hostilities.
It is enough at this moment that we recognize and vote for the politicians that, despite their many faults, are at least somewhat aware of the Global Intifada being waged by the left-Islamist alliance:
Having lived 30 years in Pakistan and 10 in Saudi Arabia, Fatah knows intimately what constitutes "soft jihad" when he sees it. He expressed his sorrow, as a lifetime social democrat that after 17 years of engaged support for the NDP, he could no longer be affiliated with that party. He saw the doors opening to Islamists under Alexa McDonough and now, under Layton, he has seen them "flood" into the party.
It soon became apparent that the particular political focus of all three of the speakers is the NDP, which has shamelessly courted and integrated into its inner circles Islamist Muslims with views that are antithetical and even dangerous to the continued health of Canadian values. Fatah has watched in frustration as Islamists in the NDP pursue a relentless campaign to instill a sense of victimhood in Muslim youth. Yesterday an NDP candidate in Toronto Centre - an immigration lawyer, Farouk El-Khaki - accused the judiciary of being anti-Islam. He was not chastised by Jack Layton, and even more worrying, he was not held to account by any other party candidate. It is clear that no party leader wants Islamism raised as an election issue.
Jack Layton, Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists." He is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law, which, all the panelists made clear is the litmus test for dividing real moderate Muslims from Islamists. Fatah also expressed his contempt for the Ontario Human Rights Commission which, he asserted is "infiltrated by Islamists": There are commissioners in the OHCR closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canada-Arab federation, both of which, according to Fatah, have "contempt for Canadian values." Anyone, he says, "who brings religion into politics should be suspect" because they "are a threat to western civilization." The NDP's failure to interrogate their Muslim supporters for fear of revealing their Islamism is the "racism of lower expectations."
Raheel Raza introduced herself as "the proud recipient of a fatwa" for having the gall to try to lead prayers. She shared her joy in having the freedom in Canada to be spiritually religious without fear of political coercion, something she could never have in a Muslim country: "No Muslim country would allow me the rights I have here." She knows she is being monitored from abroad, since she received her fatwa by e-mail from Saudi Arabia. How would they have known about her if she were not being informed on by Islamists here? She cannot fathom why politicians pander to the Islamists. Actually she can fathom it. "Political correctness" will not allow politicians to raise the question of allegiance in their Muslim supporters.
As for feminists, where are they? Also pandering. They have not spoken up about the Talibanist woman in Mississauga who teaches the virtues of polygamy to her female students, nor have they criticized a cleric who openly admits to performing polygamous marriages. Feminists seem to have lower expectations for Muslim women than for themselves: what Tarek Fatah calls "left wing racism." Ms Raza is, according to an Islamist website, #5 of the "most hated Muslims in the world." "My aim," she chuckles, "is to become #1."
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Finding the issue...
I thought I should put up something to mark the start of Canada's national election campaign.
But I have to admit that finding a passion for any party right now has been tough, given our recent focus on our despicable "human rights" codes and commissions, especially as they pertain to the regulation of speech and writing, and the apparent unwillingness of even the Conservative Party to make an issue of this restraint on free expression, and this politicization and cheapening of Canadian justice, this institutionalization in law of the victimary left.
Admittedly there are rumours that Harper and the Conservatives have given a warm reception to Ezra Levant when he has pleaded our case, but we would like to see more of Harper speaking out on what should be an ethical no-brainer. Maybe there is already some understanding, among various players, about what a Harper majority government will do. But the voter has yet little reason to believe it; and if politicians' public promises are often not kept, one should not fall for the conspiracy theorist's fanciful idea that private promises about political direction are more likely to be kept by leaders in opinion poll-driven democracies. In any case, Harper remains cautious and quiet as, unconscionably, the list of HRC victims grows.
Yesterday I felt I was with David Warren who wrote:
Our essentially three- or four-party, "first-past-the-post", system insures that all parties do a lot of hedging, in the quest to maximize the number of MPs they can elect, lest one party finds a way successfully to outflank the other two.
Consequently, we don't have well polarized or refined debates. In a mature democracy, in a mature economy, as one would like to think Canada is, most issues would be discussed and refined to the point where there is a somewhat conservative and somewhat liberal position to be advocated. When political choices are well considered, there are rarely three distinct positions; and pretending there are only muddles the picture and makes harder the building of coalitions that can engage sufficient people to make clear what are the national preferences, i.e. the politically well-refined choices, and compromises, and to act on them.
In a large, sparsely populated country, national political parties have, at times, played an important role in bringing disparate Canadians together and getting them in conversation and in common cause. Again, this work is unnecessarily fractured by a three- or four-party system.
So, while I think Jay may be indulging in some wishful thinking when he declares this an election over the future of the Liberal Party - there remains a sizeable chunk of the Canadian electorate who will think themselves constitutionally incapable of voting for the Conservative party (being indebted to their long-stoked fears of the "right") and many of these will also think it below them to vote for the unworldly true believers in the NDP's age-old "progressive" rituals - I am nonetheless thinking this is an issue to truly get excited about: the mere possibility that this election will clarify the need for Canadians to solidify a two-party system.
Either the Liberals or the NDP has to go. At least I would like that idea to become commonplace. I hope many of those who won't vote for the Conservatives will come to a certain understanding, and will not let minds wander into fanciful Green fields.
Jay writes:
But I have to admit that finding a passion for any party right now has been tough, given our recent focus on our despicable "human rights" codes and commissions, especially as they pertain to the regulation of speech and writing, and the apparent unwillingness of even the Conservative Party to make an issue of this restraint on free expression, and this politicization and cheapening of Canadian justice, this institutionalization in law of the victimary left.
Admittedly there are rumours that Harper and the Conservatives have given a warm reception to Ezra Levant when he has pleaded our case, but we would like to see more of Harper speaking out on what should be an ethical no-brainer. Maybe there is already some understanding, among various players, about what a Harper majority government will do. But the voter has yet little reason to believe it; and if politicians' public promises are often not kept, one should not fall for the conspiracy theorist's fanciful idea that private promises about political direction are more likely to be kept by leaders in opinion poll-driven democracies. In any case, Harper remains cautious and quiet as, unconscionably, the list of HRC victims grows.
Yesterday I felt I was with David Warren who wrote:
Regardless of his political persuasions, I doubt any reader is himself in doubt about the views of McCain and Palin on, say, abortion, or same-sex marriage, or the ramifications of the U.S. First Amendment. Messrs Obama and Biden have more “nuanced” views -- i.e. more likely to say one thing and do another -- and yet their own positions are clear enough, when the lights are trained on them.Then today I was reminded by Jay Currie of one of the main reasons we have such meek, almost cowardly, political parties.
If I were a woman, and the most important issue to me were the preservation of my unfettered legal right to kill my unborn children, I would have no difficulty in choosing the Democrat ticket. Whereas, up here in Canada, it really wouldn’t matter if I voted Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat, Bloc, or Green.
That is an extreme case, but the same goes for every other issue I can think of, including all the routine ones touching our daily lives.
For instance, all parties are committed to preserving Canada’s dysfunctional socialist health care system. All are committed to the continued heavy regulation of private enterprise generally, and to choking small business in particular with red tape. All are committed to maintaining a crippling tax burden, and a tax collection system with arbitrary and unaccountable powers of search and seizure. Moreover, in the name of the “global warming” imposture, all are committed to significantly extending the leaden hand of government micro-mismanagement into every aspect of our daily lives that may touch even tangentially on “the environment.”
And to take a subject of special interest to me, none is prepared to defend our country’s common-law heritage, and due process in our courts (especially our family courts). None will vindicate the most elementary rights of free speech and free press. None will lift a finger when journalists and many others are hauled before “human rights” kangaroo courts, and put under star chamber inquisitions, as if Canada were exactly the sort of country our fathers fought in two World Wars.
Our essentially three- or four-party, "first-past-the-post", system insures that all parties do a lot of hedging, in the quest to maximize the number of MPs they can elect, lest one party finds a way successfully to outflank the other two.
Consequently, we don't have well polarized or refined debates. In a mature democracy, in a mature economy, as one would like to think Canada is, most issues would be discussed and refined to the point where there is a somewhat conservative and somewhat liberal position to be advocated. When political choices are well considered, there are rarely three distinct positions; and pretending there are only muddles the picture and makes harder the building of coalitions that can engage sufficient people to make clear what are the national preferences, i.e. the politically well-refined choices, and compromises, and to act on them.
In a large, sparsely populated country, national political parties have, at times, played an important role in bringing disparate Canadians together and getting them in conversation and in common cause. Again, this work is unnecessarily fractured by a three- or four-party system.
So, while I think Jay may be indulging in some wishful thinking when he declares this an election over the future of the Liberal Party - there remains a sizeable chunk of the Canadian electorate who will think themselves constitutionally incapable of voting for the Conservative party (being indebted to their long-stoked fears of the "right") and many of these will also think it below them to vote for the unworldly true believers in the NDP's age-old "progressive" rituals - I am nonetheless thinking this is an issue to truly get excited about: the mere possibility that this election will clarify the need for Canadians to solidify a two-party system.
Either the Liberals or the NDP has to go. At least I would like that idea to become commonplace. I hope many of those who won't vote for the Conservatives will come to a certain understanding, and will not let minds wander into fanciful Green fields.
Jay writes:
In reality this election will really be a referendum about whether or not the CPC under Harper deserves, or can be trusted, with a majority. I think they can and I think there is every reason to believe that a cross country consensus will give the CPC a thin majority.
This has, I am afraid, nothing to do with any endorsement of CPC policy; rather it is the reality that, a couple of years in, the Liberals have nothing at all on offer. The Green Shift is simply silly and a rather obvious tax grab. The idea that Harper is somehow George Bush in cunningly bad suits is a meme without wings.
To the converted, the Green Shift and Harper=Bush are truths as solid as the happy thought that 9/11 was an inside job. To the rest of us they are the last gasps of a party which has ceased to have a reason to exist.
Cynics have suggested that this election is about financially bankrupting the Liberal Party. I would not be at all surprised if they are right. It is time for the Liberal Party to end. It is time for Canada to have a left party and a right one. The Liberal Party is simply in the way.
The Liberals climbed on board the dying Green/Kyoto trope and, finally, have found the issue which could finish them. They will make assorted noises about national unity and assorted women’s issues and just how very scary Harper and the CPC are; but I suspect those noises will be their death rattle.
Canada has changed. We are no longer obsessed with a seemingly resurgent Quebec, Women are who they are and don’t need the feds to define them. Harper is rather dull; but not in the least scary.
For many of us, a confederation which allows provinces to seek their own destiny is a confederation we can support. Lock step centralism is an idea whose time has passed.
Most of all, with a bit of prudent management and a world hungry for our resources, Canada is poised to become a resource rich Switzerland. Rich, capable and very much its own nation.
The Liberal Party has, I suspect, outlived its usefulness. It is mired in identity politics, an unstoppable urge to take from the successful and give to the losers, and a belief in its own righteousness. Canada used to be a nation of losers. Now it is not. Canada used to think multicult was the Grail, now it doesn’t. Canada used to think the Liberal Party was the natural party of government, now that view is pretty much exclusive to the Toronto Star.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
God Save the Queen, and BC Ferries
I am a little dismayed, but perhaps also strengthened, by the inability of both the Queen's defenders and opponents in this country to reflect seriously on what it means for Canadian culture to have a head of state who is a rather distant (non)presence. I never see anyone arguing whether it is good or not to have a relatively distant (non)presence at the centre of our culture, a centre to which Canadian politicians (or anyone else) cannot lay a claim, or give a figure. No, those who argue for or against the Monarchy always have to struggle to make the Queen into something else, something more, or something less. I rarely find these arguments, for or against, compelling; and I wonder if, perhaps, this is not the sign of the institution's great strength. The Monarchy only really creates a sense of great resentment among those who have to try really hard to be offended by this part of our Constitution, or so it seems to me.
Some might say the lack of compelling arguments, for or against the monarchy, is a sign of its irrelevance; but do we really want to be constantly fighting about what or who should be "relevant" to Canadians, like academics arguing that their study of the latest pop culture fad or personality is a mark of their intellectual "relevance"? Is it perhaps not best to leave some sacred centres relatively unfigured, that we actually might give serious thought to the deeper mysteries of what it is about our culture that works to bind us together?
Whatever the answer, it seems to me that a fundamental fact of Canadian culture and identity is that we are a people formed in a relative equality of alienation from the sacred centre of state and society, an equality guaranteed by the fact that our head of state does not represent some fashion or faction in our political popularity contests. And, we've never had a Prime Minister who acted like a would-be king or president. Whatever the powers of office, this makes the person of our leaders rather like you or me.
Were we to become a republic, we would be turning our backs on what we are, whatever the relative merits of republicanism, in the abstract. And turning one's back is always a risky business. Instead of coming across a great new creation, one is likely to find oneself lost.
The latest seemingly thoughtless crew to take the risk is BC Ferries, which is removing the long-in-place portrats of the Queen from its ships, on the grounds that this taxpayer-owned, but independently operated corporation is no longer controlled by the government, even though it is ultimately a creation of provincial legislation and of government subsidies and service contracts.
Andy Ivens, Canwest News ServiceIt seems that no one has told the MBAs at BC Ferries that the Queen, as head of state, is not merely one of the three houses of Parliament, and a symbol of government, but also the symbolic head of our (civil) society. This used to be well understood, in the days when private voluntary organizations would never forget to toast the Queen or King at their dinners and banquets, or when charitable and other organizations would solicit a symbolic patronage from members of the Royal Family. But today, we just make bad jokes about being not amused.
Published: Monday, February 11, 2008
VANCOUVER - The Monarchist League of Canada is not amused that portraits of the Queen are disappearing from the B.C. Ferries fleet.
"It is important that we assert Canadian sovereignty on the Pacific coastal waters, and there is no better way to do that than with a picture of Her Majesty," said Keith Roy, chairman of the group's Vancouver branch.
He called the removal of the portraits, which usually were displayed in general seating areas, "a stealth manoeuvre by B.C. Ferries" over the past few years.
Company spokeswoman Deborah Marshall says the decision to remove the pictures was made five years ago when the former Crown corporation evolved into "an independent commercial company" - albeit owned by the taxpayers of B.C.
"We certainly mean no disrespect to the Queen," Marshall said. "It's a symbol of us not being part of government anymore."
Since 2003, the portraits have been taken down from vessels as they have been brought into dock for refits. It's unclear how many remain and on which vessels, or what has become of the old portraits.
Roy, a Vancouver real estate agent who grew up in Powell River, said he was always inspired by the Queen's portrait on board the ferries he remembers sailing on as a child.
"It's an important part of Canadian heritage and it's an important part of Canada as it is today," he said.
In forgetting this idea that Society has a symbolic, albeit distant and unclaimable, head, it's not altogether clear whether we are becoming freer, or just less in touch with the culture whose successful articulation must be the basis for our freedom. I tend to think the latter. In any case, would we be any freer if we spent our time arguing whether the President truly represented us, or those other guys? The Queen represents all of us precisely because she is not part of our popularity contests. She is a model for how each of us can make self-sacrificing attempts to represent the nation, as a matter of duty, in times when someone must step forward to defend the Constitution, or our bonds of trust and shared faith, without which no system of democratic rule, however rational, can long work to protect itself against human desires, resentments, and frauds. Each of us can represent the nation, after the model of the Queen, without our trying to lay claim to the centre, just as the Queen doesn't really dominate the centre of Canadian life, notwithstanding what the more silly resentments of our monarchy would lead us to believe.
If I'm ever on a sinking BC Ferries ship, I want to be with people who know it's time to do their duty. And that's what the portrait of the Queen should remind us to do. So, shame on those who would make the monarchy into a question of human popularity contests. God save the Queen.
UPDATE: The Queen is Back
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Are Canadians subsizing the evil of polygamy?
Muslim officials say yes; Canadian officials say no, at least not officially, hehe. In any case, anyone who can say, as does Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims - in reference to the current furore over the British government's decision to recognize polygamous marriages, contracted overseas (wherever that is in the era of the world wide web), when determining a family's welfare rates - that
Canada is a very liberal-minded country," ... "Canada is way ahead of Britain in this respect."is someone who needs an education on why the concepts of "liberal" and "polygamy" are contradictory. But, sad to say, one can today imagine how a Canadian chap could come not to appreciate this contradiction. Perhaps we have here another schmuck misled by the Liberal Party of Canada? Or is this form of denying what liberalism (a word which I believe derives, etymologically, from an idea of sons being collectively liberated from the rule of the father and his horde) was once clearly about, just his way to avoid thinking about the unmarried losers back home who want to die for Allah, since they have no hope of any other bride, or about the women who whine to husband that wife #1 is being a tyrant , or letting her daughter act like a slut at school?
Canadians should be ashamed to think about what they are subsidizing in the larger world. Our political leaders and their attitudes towards "liberal" immigration policies that allow polygamous families to form in Canada (thus subsidizing their formation abroad) need to receive unsolicited letters on the meaning of liberalism, on the development needs of countries like Pakistan, and lessons on the necessary basis, in family structure, of a free society in which the individual is at the core of our shared Canadian understanding of what is sacred.
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Saturday, January 05, 2008
Freak out your prof?
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Well, aside from being seemingly oblivious to the fact that much of the professoriate is permanently freaked out (postmodern thought is the belief that any and all signs of the normal betray violence towards the Other and, since the normal, or myths defending it, will inevitably always come to the fore, it/they must be forever opposed in an institutionalized, never-ending, freak out) you've got to get a chuckle over the latest ad from the Young Tories.
But as I say, many academics can't take a politically-incorrect (if any) joke, especially not one that cuts close to the truth: they consider it their sacred duty to be permanently freaked out, reading every myth of the normal as a demonization of some victim, a process of victimization put beyond doubt for all time by the unmistakable model of the unquestionable vicimization, the Nazi and the Jew. Nothing the Jews ever did could justify their massacre.... (But the professoriate, that has been preaching one conspiratorial/Gnostic view of history after another for several generations now?) A good prof. can't miss up a chance to feed on this theme, least of all when he doesn't simply get to play the role of the victim advocate but can be, oh it's so glorious, the victim himself:
A 2004 study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., found that academics are five times more likely to identify as liberals than as conservatives. The study polled over 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 schools.Oh the poor man, the next thing we'll be asking him to do is to think through his very dependence on the theme of "demonization" and victimization and to question whether continually invoking the mad mob that wants to turn Stephen Harper into the neocon fuhrer (or is it Bush's Goebbels?) in the name of the normal, oil, and the American lie of freedom, is actually not an intellectually or professionally respectable way to make a constructive contribution to the debate on maintaining a free society. The victimary elites fear, most of all, being pressured to seriously study the conservative truth claim: that the academic victim mongers are parasitic on a free society and are working to erode our capacity to renew our freedom, as they use emotional blackmail (see above) and demand appeasement from defenders of the sacred bases of freedom, all in the name of the victim, a figure they put beyond debate whatever minor nods they make to entertaining various points of view.
But academic administrators say most professors encourage a diversity of viewpoints.
Bruce Feldthusen, vice-president of university relations at the University of Ottawa, said he hasn't seen any evidence of political bias among faculty members. He called the Conservative ad campaign an attempt to "demonize" academia.
"This demonizing of institutions is all too common in American politics, and not very helpful here. We've seen the demonizing of the courts here in the last few years. Are we going to do the universities next?"
But the good news is:
Once considered redoubts for political pariahs, Conservative campus clubs are enjoying a resurgence at Canadian universities and colleges, emboldened by a cheeky ad campaign that encourages students to "freak out their profs" and join the federal party.
Campus-club presidents say membership has increased since Prime Minister Stephen Harper took office nearly two years ago. The Conservatives' ascent to power in Ottawa, they say, has had a multiplier effect on campus, enabling clubs to attract centre-leaning students.
The surge is evident at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. Despite the university's strong Tory roots, membership in the campus club sank to the low double digits at the start of the decade, when the country's two main conservative parties were still divided.
But more than 200 members now subscribe to the club's e-mail list, said Alex Bednar, president of the Queen's Campus Conservatives.
"People are now seeing us as a more viable option. The more politically ambitious kids are joining, because they see what's happening in Ottawa," said Bednar, a 21-year-old history major.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Muslims and free humanity against Sharia
I am happy to find a comment from Muslims Against Sharia at one of our November posts.
I'm not sure which member of the group posted that, but it recalled to mind a Front Page interview with Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia:
In any case, the comment we received yesterday is full of links to the project of Muslims Against Sharia to provide a reformed version of the Koran, rid of all verses "that promote violence, divisiveness, religious or gender superiority, bigotry, or discrimination". They want readers to check out their reformed version of the Koran and to let them know (koran@reformislam.org) if they are failing in their mandate to rid the Koran of violence. There's a project that could make use of certain bloggers we know.
As anyone who has read the Koran knows, this will not be an easy task. The curses directed towards the unbelievers are ubiquitous in that book, and the more explicit denunciations of the infidels are common.
In any case, Muslims Against Sharia left us with a link,
In Memoriam of Aqsa Parvez.
The recent Canadian media coverage of the Parvez murder is full of all the sins that Massoud discussed at the opening of the Front Page interview; the media seemingly take the words of Islamist front groups that this was "just a horrific incidence of domestic violence" that Muslims condemn, and "nothing to do with religion or Islam", at face value. For example, even when the media reports they are being manipulated, so as to not be able to attend and report on Aqsa's funeral, they still take the blather of CAIR at face value: ""We're not here to talk about religion or culture - it has nothing to do with it - we're just here based on the fact that she lost her life and we just want to work toward stopping this from happening in the future," Ms. Dadabhoy said."
Of course anyone who thinks an honor killing over a daughter's desire to escape from the Islamist dress code has nothing to do with religion is being intentionally disingenuous. The media should just dump the commentators from groups like CAIR, and make people like Khalim Massoud their go-to guys when they need an example of moderate Muslim opinion. And let the CAIR warriors cry to they're wet that people like Massoud are not real Muslims.
As David Warren comments, there are other girls in Canadian society trying to free themselves of Islamic strictures who, like Warren's friend "Harata", know full well "That [Aqsa] could have been me." Anyone with a grain of integrity will want to protect these girls. And that means stopping in their tracks the Saudi-funded apologists for orthodox or "radical" Islam that pervade North American mosques.
Dag wrote a long post on this topic on Saturday at No Dhimmitude.
I'm not sure which member of the group posted that, but it recalled to mind a Front Page interview with Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia:
Most of American mosques are financed and run by Wahhabis. Wahhabi imams are anything but moderate, hence most of religious leaders are radicals. So-called "civil rights" groups, i.e., CAIR, MPAC, ICNA, MAS, etc. that comprise Muslim establishment are nothing more than offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and fronts for Hamas and al-Qaeda. They are very well financed and are extremely skilful manipulators of the media. And most of the people in government and media truly believe that those groups are moderate, because they are either too lazy to do research or they choose to ignore terrorist ties.Front Page's Jamie Glazov went on to ask:
As a result, when either the government or the media needs an Islamic point of view, Muslim establishment groups are go-to "experts" by default. With the "expert" seat being filled, moderate Muslims are left out.
Another problem with moderate Muslims is they are scared and not organized. They are scared because they cannot speak up in mosques for fear of being kicked out and there are virtually no organizations that represent their views. They are not organized, because, unlike the radical, they do not receive tens of millions of dollars in financial support, therefore they have to work for a living.
[...]
Their strategy is very simple. They constantly claim that they are peaceful and moderate, and Western media is more than happy to repeat that nonsense. They do not praise terrorism in public, but they justify it by playing the Muslim victimhood card. And they are very effective at it.
Many radical organizations have already been exposed by counter-terrorism researchers like Steven Emerson, John Loftus, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Joe Kaufman, Paul Sperry, Zeyno Baran, and many others. The proof that the Muslim establishment is anything but moderate is widely available. However, the government and the media either for political reasons or out of sheer stupidity completely ignore it.
I would like to touch on your intriguing point that “the Koran has been corrupted over the centuries, and all we want to do is to revert it as close as possible to the original." Is there any textual support for such a notion? And doesn't this notion run counter to the Islamic doctrine of the perfection of the Qur'an, which insists that the Qur'anic text is the same as it was in the time of Uthman? In light of these considerations, do you think you will gain much support in the Islamic world?Glazov was not convinced that Islam could be reformed, pointing out that the violence in the Koran is not incidental to the transcendent meaning of the text, but fundamental to it, a fact confirmed by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence in their calls for the Muslims to subjugate the infidels to the Ummah. Glazov also notes that Massoud's arguments about contradictions in the Islam seem to be answered by the mainstream's doctrine of abrogation - the later verses of the Koran supersede the earlier, more pacific, ones. Read the rest of the interview, to decide whether Kalim Massoud gives answers that are likely to convince a large number of Muslims who want to live in peace with modernity and its freedoms.
Massoud: We do not have any direct evidence that the Koran has been corrupted over the centuries. However, there is some circumstantial evidence supporting our point. First, if you take two English Korans translated by two different people, the difference could be very substantial. Substantial to the point that the same verses could have completely different meaning. Case in point: a recent arrest of Ghows Zalmay, who, according to the fundamentalists, misinterpreted some verses in the Koran.
Based on these facts, it is reasonable to conclude that when the Koran was copied many times over, the mere mortals who did the copying might have "adjusted" the texts to reflect their personal views, or the views of their superiors.
Second is deductive reasoning. The Koran contains verses that represent mutually exclusive concepts, i.e., human 'life is precious' vs. 'kill the infidels wherever you find them' or 'respect the People of the Book' vs. 'do not take Jews and Christians for friends'.
Allah is infallible and cannot contradict himself, which means that some of those verses are not the literal word of Allah. Also, how can Allah, who is the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate be a source of "kill them [infidels] wherever you find them"?
The only logical explanation is that the Koran we have today was significantly altered.
In any case, the comment we received yesterday is full of links to the project of Muslims Against Sharia to provide a reformed version of the Koran, rid of all verses "that promote violence, divisiveness, religious or gender superiority, bigotry, or discrimination". They want readers to check out their reformed version of the Koran and to let them know (koran@reformislam.org) if they are failing in their mandate to rid the Koran of violence. There's a project that could make use of certain bloggers we know.
As anyone who has read the Koran knows, this will not be an easy task. The curses directed towards the unbelievers are ubiquitous in that book, and the more explicit denunciations of the infidels are common.
In any case, Muslims Against Sharia left us with a link,
In Memoriam of Aqsa Parvez.
The recent Canadian media coverage of the Parvez murder is full of all the sins that Massoud discussed at the opening of the Front Page interview; the media seemingly take the words of Islamist front groups that this was "just a horrific incidence of domestic violence" that Muslims condemn, and "nothing to do with religion or Islam", at face value. For example, even when the media reports they are being manipulated, so as to not be able to attend and report on Aqsa's funeral, they still take the blather of CAIR at face value: ""We're not here to talk about religion or culture - it has nothing to do with it - we're just here based on the fact that she lost her life and we just want to work toward stopping this from happening in the future," Ms. Dadabhoy said."
Of course anyone who thinks an honor killing over a daughter's desire to escape from the Islamist dress code has nothing to do with religion is being intentionally disingenuous. The media should just dump the commentators from groups like CAIR, and make people like Khalim Massoud their go-to guys when they need an example of moderate Muslim opinion. And let the CAIR warriors cry to they're wet that people like Massoud are not real Muslims.
As David Warren comments, there are other girls in Canadian society trying to free themselves of Islamic strictures who, like Warren's friend "Harata", know full well "That [Aqsa] could have been me." Anyone with a grain of integrity will want to protect these girls. And that means stopping in their tracks the Saudi-funded apologists for orthodox or "radical" Islam that pervade North American mosques.
Dag wrote a long post on this topic on Saturday at No Dhimmitude.
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Sunday, November 11, 2007
Lest We Forget: a thought for Remembrance Day
"But there was many a man for whom the brief moment of exhilaration was followed by years of depression. Of the third or more of the expeditionary force that had returned wounded, many were incapacitated permanently, and although no country exceeded Canada in efforts to salvage the human wreckage of the war, the broken soldier became a familiar sight. Not only that, the spiritual wounds that many men received were as serious as the physical. Many old veterans found it hard to settle down again to hum-drum civil life, were hard to please or resentful of employers who had stayed comfortably at home. Civilians began to use the term "returned man" as signifying a difficult, unadjusted, barey respectable individual. That cut. It was a good number of years before authority officially admitted the situation and made provision for "burned out" veterans. The phrase was graphic and the condition behind it real enough: during the late `20's and early `30's the deaths of ex-service men in their forties were reported with inescapable frequency. The veternas had not been entirely re-absorbed into civil sociey by the beginning of the second World War, and the Veterans' Guard formed at that time enabled them to recapture, after a fashion, the days when, a generation before, they had really lived."
Arthur M. Lower, Colony to Nation. A History of Canada (1946), 459-60.
What we ask of our soldiers is often tragic, to live the rest of their lives with memories of great violence, of killing and watching their friends be maimed and killed. But humanity has yet to find a way to banish war as the ultimate means of checking unacceptable resentment and aggression. It remains for us to do what we can to support our troops, both those fighting today and those old men, the last survivors of the last century's great wars.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Come to the Covenant Zone and grow a little
On a day when we mourn more fallen Canadian soldiers, those brave souls struggling against great forces to make this a freer world, we need to rededicate ourselves to this shared cause.
Let us remind that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee - look for the blue scarves). All those interested in renewing a national culture founded on citizen self-rule through a discipline conducive to freedom, and not through submission to any form of totalitarian political religion or phony expertise, are welcome and encouraged to join us. This week I will just give you a few links to help do that job of encouraging.
Concluding a speech to a European audience, Gil Bailie notes (as he might well if he were in Canada):
It is in the affirmation of what makes us a new race of free Canadians - entirely unlike, say, those who take advantage of a chance to come to the West to become well-paid doctors, only to then attempt to kill as many Westerners as they can - that we discover the need to renew and recreate the old and new covenants of the West that can make this nation a true unity in diversity. It is time to decide whether you are on the side of freedom or of the totalitarian management of "diversity".
Only people with constitutional or covenantal guarantees that they, as free persons, can take the lead in negotiating and trading their differences, and not have to rely on expert bureaucrats (or thugs with religious books) to do more than what is the expert's proper job - to help us recognize and institutionalize, not initiate or control, the fruits of a free national discourse - can be considered mature, fully-realized, human beings. Those who best understand our common human origin are today rightly arguing that we are meant by the original events of human creation (or by our Creator, if you prefer) to negotiate and perform our history in freedom, to continually seek for the truth.
And if we don't encourage each other to become fully human, each in our own way, by meeting and talking on a regular basis to this end, how are we going to be able to negotiate with the aliens if they return? Must we again behave like children who only know how to dominate or be dominated? Or can we show the aliens we are up to the possibilities of a truly free political and economic exchange? Or, as the liberal mainstream would today seemingly have it, must we convince the humanoid aliens that we are all just the same, or that our differences are all equal in importance, which is to say nothing that distinguishes us from them is really important, and certainly not to be discussed in public? Just a friendly thought -:)
Let us remind that the Covenant Zone bloggers and friends meet every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library (in front of Blenz Coffee - look for the blue scarves). All those interested in renewing a national culture founded on citizen self-rule through a discipline conducive to freedom, and not through submission to any form of totalitarian political religion or phony expertise, are welcome and encouraged to join us. This week I will just give you a few links to help do that job of encouraging.
Concluding a speech to a European audience, Gil Bailie notes (as he might well if he were in Canada):
The history of this century and beyond will be very largely determined by whether the West finds a way to reclaim and reaffirm its spiritual inheritance and thereby reenergize a culture that fosters the genuine flourishing of its people and to which others – whatever their race, creed, ethnicity, or background – will want to transfer their national allegiance, culturally assimilate, and contribute their part.On Canada Day, David Warren gave a useful update of the "two nations" interpretation of Canadian history:
Canada today is “deux nations.” There are the people who speak and think in French; and the people who speak and think in English. Together they make up one nation, with a continuous history, of more than five centuries. And then there are the people who speak, effectively, no language; who are deracinated, who have no history. That is the other nation. There is very little communication between these two nations -- the “old” Canada, and the “new” Canada -- because little communication is possible between two such groups. The one is aging and shrinking, the other expanding while growing ever younger. (Yet all trends are reversible.)But if you can't judge and discriminate, e.g. identify how Islam is different from all other "religions", you can never hope to grow up and truly become humble in service to a decent human cause or nation. The contemporary left, in denying our need to validate meaningful differences, around which a free human exchange of differences may be organized, makes all important human differences either into a scandal for some abstract notion of "equality", or occasion for a phony celebration. In either case, it becomes the responsibility of some bureaucrat to smooth over the differences, with whatever force necessary. The left today intends to impose a cult of victims and "equality" that will require a managerial priesthood constantly to determine who is a victim of a lack of proper equality of outcome, to seek redress (since any freedom generally permitted people will not lead to equal outcomes, at any one point in time), and hence to restrict the freedom that inevitably leads people to create, affirm, and exchange, differences.
Demographically, but also spiritually. Those who have no language, no culture, no religion, no sense of past, and therefore of destiny, remain ever young. Outwardly they may become old and wrinkly, but inwardly they retain the mind of the pre-school child, unformed and cloudless. Yet they fulfil the requirements for citizenship set out in John Lennon’s famous hymn to emptiness, “Imagine”:
“Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries: it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for; and no religion, too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace.”
This is the postmodern dream, of perfect vacuity -- of the serenity we imagine will sweep over us like sleep. All we need do is abandon everything of value in our heritage, everything for which so many of our ancestors actually fought and died. In this great zero, everyone will be equal, and no person will be better than another. The heroine and the harlot will be one and the same, great saints and great monsters indistinguishable. “Judgementalism” -- the aversion that one individual has behaved better than another -- is, among the vacuous today, the only crime remaining to be punished. And likewise, under the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” there is nothing to choose between one culture and another. They are all just fine, and so far as any particularity can still be distinguished, “everything is beautiful in its own way.”
It is in the affirmation of what makes us a new race of free Canadians - entirely unlike, say, those who take advantage of a chance to come to the West to become well-paid doctors, only to then attempt to kill as many Westerners as they can - that we discover the need to renew and recreate the old and new covenants of the West that can make this nation a true unity in diversity. It is time to decide whether you are on the side of freedom or of the totalitarian management of "diversity".
Only people with constitutional or covenantal guarantees that they, as free persons, can take the lead in negotiating and trading their differences, and not have to rely on expert bureaucrats (or thugs with religious books) to do more than what is the expert's proper job - to help us recognize and institutionalize, not initiate or control, the fruits of a free national discourse - can be considered mature, fully-realized, human beings. Those who best understand our common human origin are today rightly arguing that we are meant by the original events of human creation (or by our Creator, if you prefer) to negotiate and perform our history in freedom, to continually seek for the truth.
And if we don't encourage each other to become fully human, each in our own way, by meeting and talking on a regular basis to this end, how are we going to be able to negotiate with the aliens if they return? Must we again behave like children who only know how to dominate or be dominated? Or can we show the aliens we are up to the possibilities of a truly free political and economic exchange? Or, as the liberal mainstream would today seemingly have it, must we convince the humanoid aliens that we are all just the same, or that our differences are all equal in importance, which is to say nothing that distinguishes us from them is really important, and certainly not to be discussed in public? Just a friendly thought -:)
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Canadian Forces Day
May God Bless the members of our Canadian Armed Forces, and their families, on this, the 6th annual Canadian Forces Day.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued the following statement:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued the following statement:
“Sunday, June 3, 2007 marks a day where Canadians from all walks of life have the opportunity to pay tribute to the outstanding men and women of the Canadian Forces.
This special day is an opportunity to thank and recognize not only military personnel but also their families and loved ones for their tremendous contributions and sacrifices. Appropriately, this year’s theme, “The Canadian Forces Family – Celebrating those supporting us!” acknowledges the extraordinary contributions of Canada’s military families who provide vital support to our sailors, soldiers, airmen and airwomen uniform, sustaining them while they carry out their duties.
Both at home and around the world, our Canadian Forces play a vital role in protecting Canadians and spreading the values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
By helping to address instability and conflict at their source, the Canadian Forces contribute to the safety and security of Canadians, this is especially true of our brave men and women serving in Afghanistan.
During my recent trip to Afghanistan, I had the honour of once again addressing our troops. I thanked them for their courage and fortitude, often at considerable cost to themselves and their families. To be apart from a loved one who is serving far from home is never easy.
But due to the work of these brave men and women, the people of Afghanistan have seen the institution of democratic elections, the stirring of human rights and freedoms for women, the construction of schools, healthcare facilities, and infrastructure. Progress is being made.
In the words of President Karzai of Afghanistan, "If the greatness of a life is measured in deeds done for others, then Canada's sons and daughters who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan, stand among the greatest of their generation."
Our men and women serving in Afghanistan are Canada's sons and daughters and we owe them a debt of gratitude and our unwavering support.
On behalf of the Government of Canada and all Canadians, I want to express my appreciation for the dedication, skill and professionalism that all Canadian Forces members demonstrate everyday, and also to military families for their commitment.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
A nation of shabby resentments
Canadian anti-Semitism at an all-time high (ht: David T.):
It has often been said that a people who hate the Jews are condemned to destroy themselves or be destroyed by divine will. If the idea is useful, it is not so much because some among the Jewish minority in a Judeophobic population are blocked from realizing their full creative potential and thus denying us, say, another Einstein, Proust, or Arendt, or simply an entrepreneur who creates opportunities, wealth and jobs, or a doctor who saves lives. It is because what the Judeophobe resents - Jewish priority as the first monotheist nation, and all that goes with it - acts to delude him about the necessity of some people going first in various creative endeavours that discover new truths or opportunities that somehow apply to all of us (even to those whose Judeophobia takes the intellectualized form of the denial of any universal truths), and thus restrains his own creative potential. The role of Israel as the first among equals in the history of nations is a role we can all aspire to play as individuals, and should play at times. But those who step out of the pack to have a go at going first in some area of cultural, business, professional, or political leadership are often resented and denigrated. This, it seems to me, is a recurring problem in Canada.
And today, we have the phenomenon of "multiculturalism" (not that the Canadian born and bred have anything but a shallow monoculture drilled into them by the school system's enforcers of "multiculturalism", i.e. a singular victimary ideology) under which we welcome immigrants from some of the most virulently Judeophobic places on earth, now that a new kind of antisemitism mixing traditional European forms with Islamic or Koranic ones is pervasive in the mass media of the Islamic world. If Canadians want a decent future for their children, where people are served by risk takers and cultural innovators, if they want a country in which they don't have to witness the cement barriers in front of Jewish schools and the metal detectors outside rooms where Jewish professors are giving public lectures on topics of ancient Biblical history, or the queer looks given to bloggers who meet on Thursday nights in the library atrium with Israeli and Canadian flags on their caps - as are all presently the case here in Vancouver - then they are going to have to grab their Judeophobic fears and give them a good shake, demystify them, study the anthropology of resentment, and start building a country where firstness is celebrated, and where the nations that are first among equals (Israel in the Middle East, America in the world) are not the target of a constant and delusional victimary politics. Yes, even Canada can become a totalitarian hate state. If you want to imagine it, it's not too hard to do.
There were 935 reported incidents of anti-Semitism in Canada in 2006 - representing a 12.8 percent rise from the previous year, a four-fold increase over the past 10 years and an all-time high since counting began - according to figures released by the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith Canada.There has always been antisemitism, or better put, Judeophobia, in Canada, and I doubt the headline that it is at an all-time high - it was pretty rank in the 1930s. It first came here, as many places, with Christianity, as a test of the Christian (or post-Christian) to realize the true message of Jesus' transcendence, a test many have always failed.
"Canada is a good place," affirmed B'nai B'rith Canada's Executive Vice President Frank Dimant, "but the barometer of intolerance is rising, and police statistics show it's Jews and blacks who are the most targeted groups in this country. When 42 synagogues were vandalized this year, it's not even a news item anymore," he told The Jerusalem Post by phone from Toronto on Wednesday.
The figures, reported in the League's 2006 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, show a steady trajectory of rising violence and harassment toward Jews. From around 60 incidents reported annually in the early 1980s, the number of reports rose to 212 in 1997, 459 in 2002, and on to 935 in 2006.
"With the exception of a small hiatus in 2005, when a slight 3.3% decrease was reported, there has been a relentless upward movement over the past 10 years," the report reads.
Mitigating the severity of the audit is the fact that, of the 935 incidents reported, only 30 - that is, a mere 3% - involved violence. However, that figure also represented an increase over the previous year.
"My instinct is that Jews in Canada are starting to worry about their place here," attorney Marvin Kurz, national legal counsel for the League, told the Post, adding that Canadian Jews "are recognizing that this isn't a shrinking phenomenon but a growing one, and that it may not go away even if [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud] Abbas and [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert sign a peace treaty tomorrow."
For this reason, he noted, "Jews are increasingly preoccupied with security. There are guards at synagogues now, and Jewish institutions are getting bullet-proof windows."
[...]
While police figures for 2006 are still being compiled for most of Canada's regions, those for the Peel Region, north of Toronto, show that in an area with 2,635 Jews and 53,470 Muslims in a general population surpassing 1.1 million, Jews were the targets of hate crimes in 29% of cases, followed closely by blacks with 27%. Muslims, despite popular perceptions of their victimization, were targeted just 8% of the time, the report found.
The increase in anti-Semitic incidents is partly due to growing anti-Israel sentiments among Canada's burgeoning Muslim population, Canadian Jewish leaders say.
As one example, Dimant cites an attempt during the Liberal Party leadership conference in December to convince voters to reject candidate and former Ontario premier Bob Rae because his wife, Arlene Perly Rae, was Jewish and holds a leadership position in the Canadian Jewish Congress.
The flyers accused the JNF, to which Rae once spoke, of "war crimes and ethnic cleansing" and said Rae supported "Israeli apartheid."
While Khaled Mouammar, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, denied distributing the flyer, The Canadian Press reported it had obtained a copy of an e-mail showing he was distributing it.
It has often been said that a people who hate the Jews are condemned to destroy themselves or be destroyed by divine will. If the idea is useful, it is not so much because some among the Jewish minority in a Judeophobic population are blocked from realizing their full creative potential and thus denying us, say, another Einstein, Proust, or Arendt, or simply an entrepreneur who creates opportunities, wealth and jobs, or a doctor who saves lives. It is because what the Judeophobe resents - Jewish priority as the first monotheist nation, and all that goes with it - acts to delude him about the necessity of some people going first in various creative endeavours that discover new truths or opportunities that somehow apply to all of us (even to those whose Judeophobia takes the intellectualized form of the denial of any universal truths), and thus restrains his own creative potential. The role of Israel as the first among equals in the history of nations is a role we can all aspire to play as individuals, and should play at times. But those who step out of the pack to have a go at going first in some area of cultural, business, professional, or political leadership are often resented and denigrated. This, it seems to me, is a recurring problem in Canada.
And today, we have the phenomenon of "multiculturalism" (not that the Canadian born and bred have anything but a shallow monoculture drilled into them by the school system's enforcers of "multiculturalism", i.e. a singular victimary ideology) under which we welcome immigrants from some of the most virulently Judeophobic places on earth, now that a new kind of antisemitism mixing traditional European forms with Islamic or Koranic ones is pervasive in the mass media of the Islamic world. If Canadians want a decent future for their children, where people are served by risk takers and cultural innovators, if they want a country in which they don't have to witness the cement barriers in front of Jewish schools and the metal detectors outside rooms where Jewish professors are giving public lectures on topics of ancient Biblical history, or the queer looks given to bloggers who meet on Thursday nights in the library atrium with Israeli and Canadian flags on their caps - as are all presently the case here in Vancouver - then they are going to have to grab their Judeophobic fears and give them a good shake, demystify them, study the anthropology of resentment, and start building a country where firstness is celebrated, and where the nations that are first among equals (Israel in the Middle East, America in the world) are not the target of a constant and delusional victimary politics. Yes, even Canada can become a totalitarian hate state. If you want to imagine it, it's not too hard to do.
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