Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2014/09/12 Leave a comment
Short and to the point:
For observant Sikhs, wearing a turban is a religious obligation.
But there is no human right to drive a motorcycle without a helmet — no matter how dehumanizing gridlock gets in Toronto.
Helmetless motorcycling isn’t a human right: Cohn | Toronto Star.
2014/09/11 Leave a comment
Small numbers but start of a trend. Last para captures the mentality:
The exact number of women who have joined jihadi groups in Syria is impossible to ascertain, but terrorism analysts at London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation estimate there are some 30 European women in Iraq and Syria who either accompanied their jihadi husbands or have gone with the intention to marry members of ISIS and other militant groups. That may be less than 10 percent of the number of Western men currently estimated to be fighting in Syria and Iraq, but the fear is that the number of women involved may grow more quickly. A recently established French hotline for reporting signs of jihadi radicalization has seen 45% of its inquiries involve women, according to the Interior Ministry, and there have been several cases of women, one as young as 16, arrested at France’s airports under suspicion of trying to travel Syria to join Islamist rebels.
….But for any woman who thinks coming to Syria and joining ISIS might bring new opportunities or equal rights, Al-khanssa is clear. “The main role of the muhajirah [female migrant] here is to support her husband and his jihad and [God willing] to increase this ummah [Islamic community].” She follows with a quote culled from a salafist website. “The best of women are those who do not see the men, and who arenot seen by men.” ISIS’ recruitment may take place with 21st century technology, but when it comes to women, its ethos is firmly ground in the seventh.
How ISIS Is Recruiting Women From Around the World | TIME.
National Post also has a good article, focussing on British women, some converts, some not, going to Syria and Iraq and enforcing their version of the Islamic dress code and behaviour on other women:
British women join ISIS police force responsible for punishing Muslims who break strict sharia law
Lastly, more on one of the Gordon brothers, two Canadian-born extremists, and the wondering why they chose this path. A reminder that the factors and influences that push people over the edge vary and do not fit any particular pattern:
[Thompson Rivers University political science professor] Cook said many people on campus are shocked by the revelation about Gordon, and those who knew him and still care about him are understandably worried.
But, he said, the former volleyball players old acquaintances should be wary of trying to contact him.
“It’s impossible to know whether you can communicate with him because the cadre of ISIS elite control the media. Even if you think you may be engaged with him on Facebook you don’t know that for sure,” Cook said. “If we tried to persuade him to come back, what would happen? Hed be killed.”
“Unfortunately, he’s lost,” Cook said.
The goal now is to ensure others don’t follow the Gordon brothers path, he said.
2014/09/10 Leave a comment
Trying to straddle the fine line between strong condemnation of ISIS and not leading to further mission creep and a seeming endorsement of R2P (Responsibility to Protect):
And, he says, it’s time that Canadians, who live in a secular society, brought religion into public debate — something many Western governments have shied away from.
“We can’t be afraid of religion in public discourse and how we advance foreign policy goals. We cannot say that religion is just bad, because it isn’t. It motivates people to great good and justice. But when we talk about the advancement of religious freedom we don’t mean theological disputes. We’re looking at the inherent dignity of every human being.”
Canada is well placed to set an example of tolerance, he said. But it is also correct to take military and humanitarian action on “religiously based persecutions,” that amount to “genocides in the case of the Yazidis and Christians.” The Islamic State has threatened both groups with conversion to their brand of radical Islam or death, and has massacred hundreds of men, women and children.
“The worst thing we can do is to throw up our hands and say it’s too complicated and we need to back away,” Bennett said. “It depends on countries of goodwill like Canada and its allies — that believe in democracy, freedom, rule of law and human rights — to take a stand.”
Islamic State attacks on religious minorities ‘genocide,’ Canadian ambassador says | Toronto Star.
And an interesting take on ISIS, and valid caution regarding further intervention beyond air strikes and the related current approach.
But the political pressures to do more, not least for the “brilliant” minds cheerleading the 2003 Iraq war, are hard to resist:
Unless politicians in the United States and allies in the West fall back on their traditional “Fire first, think later” approach to military planning. Consider for a moment: ISIS has suddenly begun decapitating Western journalists and placing the videos online for everyone to see. The target audience, of course, is the United States. ISIS says it is engaging in this barbarism to warn the Americans away, but even they aren’t that stupid. The 9/11 attacks, as every terrorist knows, were intended to and succeeded in luring us into war—just as bin Laden hoped it would. He believed his Al-Qaeda fighters would defeat the American military and drive it from Saudi Arabia. Why would ISIS think that killing a few journalists would cause the United States to cower when slaughtering thousands did not?
Simple: They don’t. As one terrorism expert told me, ISIS is hoping America will go too far in response, launch attacks that kill lots of innocent Muslims in an attempt to wipe out the jihadists. That would not destroy ISIS, but would derail the Islamic threat to the group. For no matter how hated ISIS is among the other jihadists and Middle Eastern Muslims, the United States is despised more. A new American strategic blunder on par with the Iraq War would distract ISIS’s Islamic enemies and turn the battle, once again, toward the U.S. If ISIS is to survive, it needs America to strike out rashly and harshly against it.
All this sounds like three-dimensional chess and it is. Unfortunately, in a world of Twitter foreign policy analysis and cable news blathering, America is rarely able to handle more than checkers when trying to address global threats. Yes, ISIS is hoping to strike us with something, anything, and it has enough supporters in the United States that it may succeed in executing an attack on a soft target. But the purpose of such an assault will be to provoke a response, one that will, inadvertently, save ISIS from the threat of the billions of other Muslims who want nothing to do with the group.
So, remember this: Every time you hear some commentator say America should “do something,” they are reading from the ISIS script. The U.S. can soften up ISIS with strategic bombing to aid the Islamic fighters taking them on. But it cannot beat them by rolling the Humvees back into Iraq or Syria. ISIS will be defeated by its own brutality against the people who might otherwise be their allies. In this case, the enemies of our enemies are truly our friends, at least for now.
ISIS will fall. It is inevitable. That is, unless the United States becomes the stupid one and gives them what they want.
2014/09/09 Leave a comment
Good commentary by Jon Kay on the difficulty in having a rational, balanced conversation:
The larger problem here is that, 13 years after 9/11, we still can’t seem to manage to have an adult conversation about Islam. Express any sort of compassion or nuance about the faith, and you’re accused of universal prostration before the Mohammedan hordes. Speak up about the religious and cultural traditions that cause someone to cut a journalist’s head off, and you’re an Islamophobe. Sometimes, it feels like the conversation hasn’t progressed much since the Twin Towers were still standing.
Thirteen years after 9/11, the debate about Islam is still dominated, on both sides, by hysteria
2014/09/08 1 Comment
Tim Stanley’s take on radicalization from a conservative perspective, noting the similarities to Islamic-inspired radicalization to the European young terrorists of the Baader Meinhoff and Red Army in the 1970s:
To this collage of conservative thought, I’d add two observations. First, alienation from Western materialism being expressed through revolution is far from new. It demands comparison with the urban guerilla movements of the 1970s – all of which were predominantly drawn from middle-class kids who saw their parents’ success as a form of collaboration with capitalism and fascism.
Is there any real difference between, on the one hand, Mahmood allegedly abandoning professional achievement and the life of a liberated Western woman for Jihad, and, on the other hand, Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction abandoning her children and sparkling literary career for a life of assassinations and bombings in the 1970s German terrorist underground? None, except the contrasting ideological manifestations of their malaise.
And, aside from bourgeois angst, Seventies Marxism and contemporary Jihad are linked by a an obsession with America/Israel as a nexus of capital and military power that is responsible for everything wrong with the world and b an unrealistic sense of their ability to do anything about it. They are, in reality, grubby little criminals poking at the system with a blunt dagger. But they believe they are heralds of a New Order. They all suffer from the arrogance of youth.
….I’m not convinced. Aside from the terrible idea of turning history classes into propaganda about how wonderful the Whigs were, I also don’t believe that alienation is generally reduced by attempts at indoctrination. And while theocracy is a wretched idea, it’s pretty self-evident that the undoubted appeal of Anglosphere freedom is limited. That would be – to return to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s observations – because it offers material rewards but little in the way of spiritual sustenance. Mahmood was perfectly aware of the benefits of Anglosphere liberty (Magna Carta, kangaroos and apple pie?) because she had the privilege of growing up in the midst of its wealth and freedom. Yet, still, her family say that she has rejected it. Perhaps because it was not enough. And that’s the challenge that the West faces when fighting for the souls of narcissistic revolutionaries. What we have to offer as an alternative is, for many of them, not enough.
Isils Western converts are not motivated by Islam. They are motivated by boredom – Telegraph Blogs.
From the National Post, a profile on Aqsa Mahmood, the woman mentioned in Stanley’s piece:
Inside the life of a 20-year-old Scottish woman who ran away to become a hardline supporter of ISIS
2014/09/06 Leave a comment
The Economist’s survey of Muslim Americans and the contrast with European Muslims. Same general pattern with Canadian Muslims (about 3 percent of Canada’s population) in terms of the diversity of communities and outcomes, although overall have a higher low-income percentage.
And like the US, we also have that small number of those who radicalize and go off to fight in Syria, Iraq or elsewhere:
America’s Muslims differ from Europe’s in both quantity and origin. The census does not ask about faith, but estimates put the number of Muslims in the country at around 1% of the population, compared with 4.5% in Britain and 5% in Germany.
Moreover, American Islam is not dominated by a single sect or ethnicity. When the Pew Research Centre last tried to count, in 2011, it found Muslims from 77 countries in America. Most western European countries, by contrast, have one or two dominant groups—Algerians in France, Moroccans and Turks in Holland. This matters because the jumble of groups in America makes it harder for Muslim immigrants and their descendants to lead a life apart.
Different traditions get squashed together. When building mosques, says Chris McCoy, a Kentucky native who is a prolific architect of Islamic buildings, “the question is usually not whether we should have an Indian- or a Saudi-style dome but, can we afford a dome?”
Mixing breeds tolerance: Pew found that most American Muslims think that their faith is open to multiple interpretations, making them the Episcopalians of the Islamic world.
America’s Muslims are better off than their European co-religionists. They are almost as likely as other Americans to report a household income of $100,000 or more. The same cannot be said of the Pakistanis who came to work in the now-defunct textile mills of northern England or the Turks who became guest workers in West Germany. Many American Muslims arrived in the 1970s to complete their higher education and ended up staying. Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, which issues fatwas, or religious opinions, to guide the behaviour of the country’s Muslims, is typical: he was born in India and holds a Harvard PhD in comparative religion.
There is a stark contrast between this group and some of the more recent immigrants from Somalia, who have fewer qualifications and lower wages as do African-American Muslims, who make up about an eighth of the total. This divide, if anything, makes America’s Muslims look more like the nation as a whole.
2014/09/04 Leave a comment
Interesting take by Jonah Shepp:
This is all by way of saying, as a reminder, that “Caliph Ibrahim” Baghdadi represents Muslims about as thoroughly as Tony Alamo represents Christians. The fact that he has attracted enough funding and followers to run roughshod over northern Iraq and eastern Syria is nothing to brush off, but it’s not winning him any friends, and it doesn’t make his ideology any less ridiculous. It’s certainly not “Islam”, at least not as any Muslim I know practices it. That’s why I suspect it will fail, like most grandiose visions of world domination do. And by radicalizing the Islamic heartland against radicalism, as it were, perhaps ISIS will take the entire edifice of radical Islamism down with it.
2014/09/03 Leave a comment
More on the Sikh motorcycle helmut controversy. A motorcycle as a “standard mode of transportation?” Perhaps, but a higher risk one, hence the need for helmets:
In Ontario, the helmet law as it applies to Sikhs was first challenged in 2008, when the Ontario Human Rights Commission took up the cause of Baljinder Badesha, who was fighting a $110 ticket he received a few years prior for refusing to wear his motorcycle helmet. Scott Hutchison, a constitutional lawyer at Henein Hutchison LLP, represented the OHRC in that case, arguing reasonable accommodation is justified for Sikh motorcyclists, given that observant Sikhs would otherwise be unable to access a standard mode of transportation. Ontario Court Justice James Blacklock, however, ruled against Badesha and the OHRC, issuing a 35-page decision. In it, he writes an exemption would render the helmet law unwieldy, since anyone violating it could simply claim they were devout.
“The officer wouldnt know if he was dealing with a devout Sikh or not, unless he took the word of the accused.”
The original challenge brought by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 2008 sought an accommodation exemption based on the province’s Human Rights Code. A subsequent appeal of the decision to the Ontario Superior Court in 2011 upped the ante, focusing on Charter rights violations. In the end, Justice John Takach found no error in the lower-court ruling.
Sikhs Vow to Litigate Helmets Issue – New Canadian Media – NCM.
2014/09/02 Leave a comment
Imam Delic’s book on the advantages Canadian Muslims have and the need for an intellectual renaissance within Islam:
Anybody who tries to destroy this creativity, who tries to block it, who tries to demean it, definitely does not understand what God Almighty was asking us with the first word that was revealed in the Qu’ran, and that is ‘iqra’ [read]. The first word that was ever revealed to the Prophet, peace be upon him, was not ‘pray,’ or ‘believe.’ It was ‘read.’ And ‘read’ came as a command. Why? Because if we don’t read, we will not learn. And if we do not learn, we will not know. And if we do not know, we will not understand. And if we do not understand, we will not be able to apply. Make sense?” Mr. Delic said. “Knowledge that does not actualize itself in positive action or ethical action is knowledge without base.”
The growth of Islam from the founding in Arabia through expansion as far as Moorish Spain suggests this intellectual command was once well understood, he said.
“At that time, when we stopped being intellectually challenged, or when we didn’t want to challenge ourselves, that creativity died out and that’s the reason why the Muslim community became stagnant, not progressive,” Mr. Delic said. “We need to re-read our historical texts in the context of modern times, modern societies, modern demands. I don’t want to take opinions of scholars from the 14th century that do not talk to my needs, my aspirations, even though I do respect them and their work for the time in which they lived. But their ideas do not apply to my time.”
In 2010, Defence Minister Peter MacKay cancelled a speech by Mr. Delic at an Islamic History Month event because he was then the new executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress, which frequently indulged extremist views from 9/11 conspiracies to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel, and whose founder Mohamed Elmasry once made controversial comments about the Mideast conflict on a talk show that he later apologized for and retracted.
Mr. Delic’s speech was by no means extremist. It was, like his book, a call to active citizenship for Canadian Muslims, and a rejection of Islam’s orthodox, insular traditions.
The Government’s decision to disinvite him Imam Zijad Delic: The cancelled speech | Full Comment | National Post), as well as a narrow focus on relations with minority Muslim communities, created some challenges for the security agencies that recognized the role they could play in reducing risks of radicalization.
Click image for book purchase
Multicultural Meanderings 