Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘islam’

So Louise Beaudoin says out loud what most of the PQ has been saying – openly or not-so-openly – for years: We only care about one culture, and that’s pure laine quebecois, and everyone else can shape up or get out.

Okay, not in so many words, but that was the gist of the Pequiste leader’s remarks to the press after a group of Sikhs were denied entrance to the National Assembly. They were there to speak out against Bill 94, a racist piece of claptrap that would deny services to Muslim women wearing face coverings, for instance, and is supported by an overwhelming 95% of Quebecers. This law as written won’t impact the Sikh community specifically, but the people who came out to speak up were there to represent the 5% of people who disapprove of the Quebec government’s attempt to further infringe on religious freedom for xenophobic reasons.

Now, there is a very legitimate question about the kirpan, and whether any kind of weapon – ceremonial or otherwise – should be permitted past security screening at the National Assembly. Beaudoin could have taken the high road, saying “we would like to hear from all Quebecers, and we invite the views of the Sikh community on this issue, and we regret that security concerns did not allow us to admit them” or something to that effect. It wouldn’t have solved the tricky kirpan debate, but it would have signalled an openness to at least discuss it.

But Beaudoin chose the low road. Specifically, she said that:

“Religious freedom exists, but there are other values,” she added. “Multiculturalism may be a Canadian value. But it is not a Quebec one.

“And we haven’t signed the constitution of Canada because it contains this notion of multiculturalism.

“I think we can be different.”

If by “different”, she means “more xenophobic”, then she’s hit the nail on the head. At least there’s no hypocricy in Beaudoin’s position. It’s getting harder to call racism one of Quebec’s “dirty little secrets” when it’s being promoted so openly. Quebec has never wanted to be pluralistic, accepting or tolerant. If the disastrous reasonable accommodation debates showed us anything, it’s that most people in Quebec would prefer us to turn into France and do away with religious freedom altogether.

Meanwhile, the Liberals missed an opportunity to take a strong position against Beaudoin and company. Charest’s team waffled on the issue, staying quiet and basically stumbling through an attempt to walk the fine line between not pissing anyone off and not pissing anyone off. All of that to cover the dirty little secret that, if it weren’t for the fact that the Liberals rely on the “ethnic vote” to get elected, most of them would be as opposed to multicultural values as their Pequiste compatriots. That’s some strong leadership we’ve got in Quebec City, folks.

My logical follow-up question to Louise Beaudoin is therefore this: If multiculturalism isn’t a Quebec value, how can we change that and turn it into one?

A few things that have been on my mind lately:

1. Idiots are their own worst PR nightmare. Let ‘em talk long enough, they’ll shoot themselves in the foot. No need to do it for them.

2. Laziness is an addition, just like alcoholism. And it has enablers. Don’t be one. Next time someone asks you a question instead of looking it up themselves, send them this link: http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com.

3. It seems to me that people are much less shutter-happy than they were a few years ago, and are more likely to put away the camera. Has the novelty of digital allowing us to take thousands of photos worn off? Do we have photo fatigue?

4. Food really does taste better on pretty new dishes.

5. I used to think that writers were just being hyperbolic when they talked about sirens “screaming”. Now I know better. They mean it literally.

6. Summer’s not over yet. There’s still almost a month to go until NHL Preseason begins.

But according to a new poll, one in five Americans think that he is:

Americans increasingly are convinced — incorrectly — that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a growing number are thoroughly confused about his religion. Nearly one in five people, or 18 per cent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 per cent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 per cent.

Some of this could be considered backlash for Obama’s apparent cardinal sin in promoting the principle of freedom of religion with respect to the plans to build a mosque in downtown NYC, near the World Trade Center site. Because everyone knows that the US is a Christian theocracy, and the Constitution be damned. And of course, freedom of religion simply means freedom to practice the “right” religion.

But between the conspiracy theorists who don’t believe Obama is American, the racists who question whether he’s black, white or purple, and now the growing segment of Americans who want to make an issue of his religion, you have to wonder where the percentage of Americans are who would honestly say that they do not care.

Why should Americans be so afraid of electing a non-Christian anyway?

It’s an obvious fallout of a culture that emphasizes that the personal is political, and that not only tolerates but expects its leaders to put personal religious conviction ahead of public interest when making decisions. The arguments haven’t changed much since Kennedy – a Catholic (gasp!) was elected in 1960. Separation of Church and State? Hogwash. They want a leader who is seen going to church and quoting the bible in speeches. Which is why any hint, suggestion or misconception about Obama is such a big story.

Us Canadians, in contrast, have a stronger tradition of making the distinction between the personal and the political. Jean Chrétien was a Catholic prime minister who refused to bow to religious pressure when passing legislation for same-sex marriage, for example. We expect our politicians to have personal lives that are just that – personal.

Barack Obama is Christian, not Muslim. But it would be nice to think that maybe one day, Americans would be happy to elect a Muslim president. Or a Jewish one. Or a Buddhist one. Or – imagine – an atheist one. Oh, the horror!

What do you get when you mix two of my pet peeves: Quebec unions, and the “healthy” reasonable accommodation hearings? Plenty of religious intolerance to go around:

No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec’s two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission yesterday.

“We think that teachers shouldn’t wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the

National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not,” said René Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour.

“The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service … in order to ensure the secular character of the state,” said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new “charter of secularism” – akin to the Charter of the French Language – that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau, president of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux.

Such a charter is needed “to avoid anarchy, to avoid treating (reasonable-accommodation) cases one by one,” Carbonneau said yesterday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation’s 300,000 members at the commission’s hearing at the Palais des congrès.

Same point of view at the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Québec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

Quebec needs a “fundamental law” akin to the Charter of Rights that sets out clearly that public institutions, laws and the state are all neutral when it comes to religion, said Centrale president Réjean Parent. The new law would also “define (people’s) rights and duties … in other words, the rules of living together.”

Nobody should be too surprised that our unions would like to see us turn into… well, France. And by dressing it up as an anti-Muslim initiative, playing into people’s hatreds and stereotypes, they may just succeed in drumming up enough support for this asinine idea.

The “reasonable accommodation” hearings really ought to have been renamed long ago. My vote is for “Forum to allow all pissed-off, intolerant, inbred and otherwise racist idiots to vent their stereotypes and prejudices in public”. Okay, maybe it doesn’t quite have that nice ring to it. But it’s a lot more accurate.

These women stood up to speak out against radical fundamenatalism in the middle east and in the world:

“We must speak out now, because we’ve got nothing to lose,” said Dr. Wafa Sultan, one of four Middle Eastern women taking part in a panel discussion in Montreal yesterday to argue their position on the West’s response to Islam.

The four were keynote speakers at an Institute of Public Affairs of Montreal conference. They talked before the event about the place of women under the yoke of an increasingly fundamentalist Middle East.

[ . . . ]

Iranian-born Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a former Miss Canada, has been leading an international effort to publicize the plight of an 18-year-old Tehran rape victim sentenced to death under sharia law. Afshin-Jam recalled a peaceful rally held in Iran in which the protesting women were dispersed by extremist, heavily veiled women.

“They feel more powerful,” she said of the veiled women.

Sultan said many Muslim women are not freely choosing to wear the veil, but do so because it’s in their best interest.

Islam has other ways of enforcing a bias against women, Afshin-Jam said: “In Iran, 65 per cent of university students are women but the laws say women are not allowed to be judges.”

And under sharia law, it’s very difficult for a woman’s word to be taken seriously, she said.

In the West, “we cannot afford to lose our cherished freedoms to radicalism,” Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian, told the conference audience later in a Delta Hotel meeting room.

We often wonder where the voices are, speaking out against oppression and injustice. They exist; there are too few of them so far, they tend to get drowned out, and those who speak sadly – in this country where freedom of speech is cherished – often fear legitimately for their personal safety. But more and more, they exist. And we owe it to them to listen to what they have to say. Because the more people speak out, the more courageous the next people will feel… and the next… and the next.

Of course it’s good news that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were released unharmed. But Lynn B. is essential reading on the larger context here:

My elation at Steve and Olaf’s release was quickly replaced by outrage when I heard about their forced conversion. The video turned my stomach. It should turn the stomach of every American and every person of whatever nationality who believes that the concepts of liberty and freedom have any value and any meaning. What sort of religion, in this day and age, would demand converts at the point of a gun or the blade of a sword? What sort of religion would even want such “converts?”

In any event, as has been pointed out elsewhere (and it was my first thought after hearing about this “forced” conversion), Centanni and Wiig are now marked men if they retract their coerced statement of faith. That would make them apostates under Islamic doctrine, subject to the death penalty at the hand of any devout Muslim who wishes to glorify Allah by carrying out the sentence. So it isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Read the rest. Now.

Where were Newsweek’s fact-checkers on this story?

Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.

On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

But… I thought the media was all controlled by an international Zionist conspiracy. Why would the Arab world trust it in the first place?

I wonder how many of Daniel Pipes’ critics have read his article entitled Islam isn’t evil: (via Damian Penny)

It is a mistake to blame Islam (a religion 14 centuries old) for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam (a totalitarian ideology less than a century old). The terrorism of al Qaeda, Hamas, the Iranian government and other Islamists results from the ideas of such contemporary radicals as Osama bin Laden and Ayatollah Khomeini, not from the Koran.

Pipes then goes on to defend Islam against common misconceptions, as well as to develop a reasonable thesis about how Islam needs to modernize.

This makes me wonder why all the people protesting against Pipes were so against him. I suspect it has very little to do with Pipes’s views on Islam, and more to do with his defence of Israel. Because to the extreme left, any defence of Israel is “racist”.

I just love it how international journalists complain about Israeli restrictions on its generally free press, but say nothing about things like this:

Three journalists were formally charged Tuesday with slandering Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and harming Jordan’s reputation in an article that discussed the sex life of the prophet and his wife, Aisha.

Muhannad Mubaideen, 29, Roman Haddad, 28, and Nasser Qamash, 33, were also charged at the trial’s opening with “destabilizing the society, propagating perversity and circulating false rumors.”

The charges, outlined in an indictment sheet read out at Jordan’s military State Security Court, are considered misdemeanors punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine.

Under the law, the verdict and sentencing are irrevocable.

Yeah, sure, good ol’ freedom of the press.