Islamofascism warning

DAVE GORDON

Salim Mansour remembers when Yasser Arafat spoke in 1974 at the United Nations in New York, garnering something of a recognition with the world body. That same year in Toronto, the suspicions of police were raised when Mansour and other Muslims congregated in large groups. Being a Muslim, or a supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), had perpetuated something of a stigma or fear with non-Muslims.

"No political party would have anything to do with the PLO then," he said, pointing out an extreme change for the worse in the course of three decades. "Now, just about any politician rubs elbows with anyone who supports Hamas, just to get votes."

Mansour, as well as Tarek Fatah, spoke at a lecture called, Accommodation or Intimidation?: Two Well-Respected Scholars Articulate Muslim Experts on the Political Situation Give Their Opinion on Where Canada Stands.

The Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association presented the talk, which took place at the Ontario Bar Association in Toronto on Feb. 12.

Mansour became a refugee 36 years ago from East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh. He lived the stereotypical immigrant life in Toronto. "I drove a cab. I paid my way through school. I saw the world from the ground up," he said. Today, Mansour is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a syndicated columnist.

Of recent immigrants who hold extremist views, he said: "I am concerned about where we are going as a country."

He said that Canadian values are at odds with many new immigrants, but that the number of natural-born children isn't enough to sustain the country, thus necessitating an immigrant influx. "That's the story of the Western world. We have to compensate through immigration." It is, however, the maintenance of certain extremist identities among immigrants that should have Canadians worried, he asserted. "They must leave behind their beliefs or we will not know what to do in the future."

Fatah, a secular Muslim activist, was founder and former chair of the Muslim Canadian Congress, and the author of the recent Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of the Islamic State – an analysis of Islam's most fundamentalist elements.

Fatah began the talk by noting that over the past decade, some 32 jihad training camps have cropped up in the United States. Complacency and our inability to comprehend the real threats, he said, have crept in among a comfortable and decadent Western mindset. "We do not disturb our middle-class lives, the living embodiment that can best be described as ... a tourist attraction," he said. "The most privileged people abandoned the cause of freedom. It's an Orwellian world, where things are turned upside down."

On the other side of the globe, slavery is rampant in Muslim lands, he said. "There are no trade unions and no guaranteed wages," he said wryly. "The realization is not there of the enormity of the situation. Our fight goes back 1,400 years. The [Islamic radical] legacy is one of a death cult."

The West is in a clash of centuries, as he put it, with those who live in the 21st century, versus those who live in the 12th century. The problem is exacerbated when, "the left of centre begins to embrace and defend Islamism."

He alleges that certain street festivals in Toronto have been overtaken by covert Islamic radicals, who distributed leaflets imploring people to kill Jews. Fatah points a finger at a national writers' association, a women's rights group and some mainstream political parties when giving examples of his allegations.

While the fringe left, he said, appears to be hospitable to Islamic radicals, the organized ethnic community, in contrast, is silent on the matter.

A few days after the lecture, an anti-Taliban rally was to take place at Queen's Park, near the Ontario parliamentary buildings, where Muslims were to gather to voice concern over some 700 people massacred in Pakistan in recent weeks. Fatah bemoaned the apparent lack of support among Toronto's non-Muslim community.

"While people are obsessed with Gaza, they're blind to Prince Al-Waleed [bin Talal of Saudi Arabia] who donated $20 million US to a U.S. university," he lamented, alluding to the Islamists' agenda being bankrolled into the Americas. "No one's shooting Israelis or Palestinians, so people don't want to go [to a protest]."

Mansour spoke of the aspect of fear felt by Muslims with relatives still in Arab lands. "For example, Islamists killed a half million Algerians in the 1990s. Most [Muslims in the West] can't protest here against things like that, or their families will be targeted there."

Dave Gordon is a Toronto freelance writer. His website is www.davegordonwrites.com.

^TOP