Letting Terrorists Teach *UPDATE*

From here:

Jaballah, who already lives under extremely strict house arrest, has never been charged with a criminal offense but spent nearly all of 1997 to 2007 in a Canadian jail. Attempts to deport him to Egypt, a country known to torture fundamentalists, failed on humanitarian grounds.
...
The Federal Court is currently weighing a motion for Jaballah, a former principal at a Toronto Islamic school, to be let out of his Toronto home to teach school lessons to Muslim children. He currently lives at home with his wife and five children.

We can't deport him because we suck, so....let's let him teach at a school. What? Who pays the bills at his house with wife and five children right now anyway?

*UPDATE*

Apparently, one of Mahmoud Jaballah's children is the Ahmed Jaballah of the MSA who agitated for sharia zones at UTSC, mentioned in my previous post. Like father like son. Though young Ahmed hasn't yet made his way from legal jihadism to terroristic jihadism, I'm sure he won't let his father down. (Thanks to sanwin -- whoever you are -- for the tip).

Conversions to Islam

This is actually a pretty lame post. I really tried, I tried my very best to find information on how many people in Canada convert to Islam. This information is, as of today, simply not available to the public (or perhaps anyone).

But, I offer this as a cop-out. Information on the amount of people who convert to Islam in the United States. I think it reasonable to assume that the numbers would be very similar in Canada.

There's this one number, that since the mid 90's, around 20,000 people per year in the US convert to Islam. You see this one a lot.* This is a very small number for a country of 300 million people. It's only 0.000067% per annum. There's also a similar one of 25,000 the New York Times used once. That's still only 0.000083%. Using the upper-end number of 0.000083%, I think we can reasonably estimate that around 2600 people in Canada convert to Islam every year, being so similar to the US. But this would be "overblown" according to "theologians and demographers" referenced by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Conversion is a fairly insignificant area of growth for Islam in Canada, the main reason for growth is immigration. Muslim immigration to Canada is high. (Canadian Census data). In 1991 there were 253,300 Muslims in Canada. In 2001 there were 579,600. Of those 326,600 new Muslims, around 270,000 immigrated to Canada, and so, assuming 2600 converted each year, around 53,400 were born and stayed in Canada. It's impossible to get a truly accurate birthrate from this. But if we assume both those numbers are distributed evenly throughout those ten years (which creates a little inaccuracy for this purpose) and that the number emigrating from Canada is negligible (which may be true), we get a birthrate of around 21/1000 per annum which is much higher than the 2006/2007 Canadian total of 10.9/1000, though it seems very reasonable.

Keeping that birthrate going from 2001 we would end up with 643,000 in 2006 from natural growth, and keeping the trusty 2600, we would have 656,000 from birth and conversions. The officials report there is an estimated population of 783,700 Muslims in Canada in 2006. With our numbers, that would imply an immigration to Canada of about 127,000 in 5 years, which is pretty close to the rate of the official census amount of 270,000 in 10 years from 1991 to 2001. So the birthrate of 21/1000 per annum for Muslims in Canada seems like a reasonable estimate.

* You see this a lot though too: "Rates of conversion have gone up since 9/11!" As if to say, "Terrorism works!"

Jean Charest The Sell Out

All you in Quebec are being a bunch of xenophobic, Islamophobic, racists -- that's what Jean Charest is trying to imply. He says the rest of the world in frowning on Quebec, "People in the rest of Canada, in the United States and in France are wondering what's going on in Quebec," which I sincerely doubt. In France they recently voted in Sarkozy largely for the same problem of erosion of culture from mass immigration that Quebec faces. The US has no mean share of voices demanding more assimilation from immigrants. And the rest of Canada, well I still don't think one of three is very good. But you won't be able to use this phrase "the rest of Canada" in relation to Quebec if Quebeckers' interests are continually unmet by a divergent Confederation.

But Charest doesn't really care about any of that, you can see the real reason he wants to oppose the popular movement in Quebec and keep high immigration: "...we need to open our doors to others because we're short of workers, because some of our regions are in a demographic decline, and because we're having fewer children." Money. It is much more profitable, rather than to raise-up native workers to keep your economy going, to just import them fully grown and primed for work from poor nations, and this is what Charest wants. ("Imagine if no one had kids! You'd be rid of that 17-26 years of complete unproductiveness from every citizen's life!" -- I'm sure this is what Charest thinks with glee). He doesn't care that following along this path leads to the eventual turning over of Quebec from the Quebecois.

Imagine someone offering you: "Money. And lots of it. But you have to become a totally different person to get it." Who would in their right mind take such an offer? What good is the money to you if the person who gets it is you only in name, and not in essence? The same for Quebec. Rather than create a stable society with a replacement birthrate, Charest would keep an unstable one with a high turn-over rate, like some sort of civilisational Wal-Mart. Profitable, cheap, and crap.

My suggestion to Quebec: sacrifice the money. It won't buy you a nation when that's been scattered to the winds of Islamic Expansionism.

"Jihadist Welfare Queen"

Invective post about the Khadr family at the Shotgun Blog on the Western Standard. Yoshi determines it would be fair to apply the laws on treason in dealing with some members of this family, and end their stay in Canada that way, though he would settle for deportation.

A commenter in the discussion mentions Ernst Zundel. I'll do the same. The attitude of these Khadrs is as useful to Canada as Zundel's. They should be deported like he was. Even if Canada lacks either the means or the will to try them for their terrorism, I'm sure the U.S. won't fail -- just as Germany didn't fail with Zundel.

Why treat them differently? Does anyone actually think these terrorists are better to have here than Zundel?

Multiculturalism to Ghettoisation to Terrorism

In fellow commonwealth nation Australia, Cardinal George Pell speaks:

Violent Islamic groups tarred the image of moderate Muslims...and more terrorist attacks "would change the religious scene dramatically and provoke ferocious retaliation".

"We have to acknowledge, too, that the ideological struggle against Islamist violence in the Muslim community is one in which most of the heavy lifting has to be done by Muslims opposed to extremism, but we should be prepared to help them in this task in ways which are effective and which build trust and openness instead of fear and ghettoisation."

How could we do this? Angelo Persichilli writes in the Toronto Sun:

Not only are they not integrating into Canadian society, but they are retreating into their own culture and communities, recreating their own country in Canadian neighbourhoods. The policy of multiculturalism is helping them in this endeavour.

However, there is a major detail most of these recent stories in the mainstream media don't report: It is not the new immigrants using multiculturalism to retreat into their ghettos, it is the mainstream using multiculturalism to encourage immigrants to remain in their ghettos.

...Canada is heading toward a social disaster. We have been too concerned about making Canada than creating Canadians. But please, stop blaming the immigrants. We are ready to become Canadian citizens, just tell us what that means.

And this is true. Newcomers to Canada, and otherwise, often report that there isn't even such a thing as Canadian culture. Look here at muslimmatters.org where the poster scoffs at the suggestion of adapting to Canadian culture and asks, "what exactly is Canadian culture?" This is the prevailing attitude.

A rejection of multiculturalism and a development of a (not just a return to a past) Canadian culture is the key to cohesion in Canada.

"We are waiting on Allah’s promise to obliterate them."

At Jihad Watch:

The murderous Khartoum regime, which has been butchering Christians in Southern Sudan for years and is now waging a jihad against those it deems insufficiently Muslim in Darfur, has now accused the West of "lacking ethics and morals," and promised to "export" them to us.
...
"We are," says Omar, "waiting on Allah’s promise to obliterate them.” How beautifully moral!

As long as they "wait on Allah's promise", I am, to be honest, not too worried.

More Reasoning on Accommodation

Tarek Fatah and Raheel Raza of the Muslim Canadian Congress talk about accommodation and the Taylor-Bouchard Commission here.

[Tarek Fatah was attacked not so long ago by radical Islamists. They accused him of being an apostate (as if they had the authority to determine what his faith consisted in) and smashed his car in a thuggish attempt to silence him. In Canada this happened! Violent religious persecution.]

In the article, they say:

Muslims should realize that citizenship in Canada is not based on inherited race or religion, but on a set of common laws created by men and women whom we elect and send to Parliament. Those who wish to introduce laws based on divine texts should try living in Saudi Arabia and Iran before they force the rest of us to embrace their prescription.

A very non-multiculturalist notion: common laws stemming from reasonable principles of democracy, rather than accepting all customs, no matter how extreme and poised against freedom.

Voting While Veiled

The Harper government introduces a new bill to ban voting without showing your face. Muslims defend veil, saying, "If they make this a rule, Muslim women will not come out and vote and that will take away their democratic rights," but, on the other hand, "They would still be able to cast their vote by mail."

If they can still cast their vote, then have their democratic rights really been taken away?

This is just another issue of religious accommodation, which becomes problematic because of how it is dealt with under multiculturalism, as talked about in my previous post. There is no easy way to determine what constitutes genuine religious belief and what is just the idiosyncrasies of the individual. This bill does not prohibit just Muslim women from covering their faces while voting, but everyone. Without it, anyone -- Muslim, kafir, woman, or man -- can vote without showing their face, just as long as they make a big enough stink of how they believe God commands them to do so. Which is exactly what some Quebec residents threatened to do a while back. The bill is not multiculturalist, but it is fair as it treats everyone as equal as possible. The multiculturalist alternative results is giving people special treatment based on how much they agitate for it.

Nonetheless, that this one issue is overblown is probably true and the Globe and Mail mentions this.

Nevermind Alcohol, Is Living In Canada Haram?

Over at The Varsity, the student paper for the University of Toronto, we get a couple updates regarding the halal controversy at the UT Scarborough campus, a topic the paper originally covered a few weeks ago. President Wulkan is censured by the student union (whatever that amounts to), and the paper mentions that they plan on continuing to cover issues of religious accommodation, though they lack an "m" with their "accomodation" (I don't know if that is a Freudian slip where the "m" may stand for something, or if it's just Canadian schooling). Anyway...

As the original article outlines, a school cafeteria, Bluff's, started to offer halal foods. Ahmad Jaballah, an MSA executive, criticised the move, saying, “This initiative was brought forth solely by Bluff’s without ever consulting the MSA or Muslim students. If this was a deliberate accommodation, it’s kind of offensive in giving us the food in a manner unsuitable to us" and he also "argued that patronizing such an establishment is wrong because Muslim students would provide revenue for Bluff’s to purchase alcohol—an action forbidden by hadith, a Prophetic saying." So, according to the MSA, not only must halal food be offered in order to be religiously accommodating, but so must the haram substance of alcohol be removed. Beer being "Canada's drink," this didn't go over so well with many.

At the bottom of this article, a discussion (of varied quality, including some nasty remarks) among posters ensues. In it, though, a few posters discuss how MSA actually comes to the conclusion that alcohol is haram and that, further, they're not even allowed to buy halal products from a store that sells it. The best evidence offered is an hadith Al-Tirmidhi Hadith 2776 Narrated by Anas ibn Malik, which is probably the hadith Mr. Jaballah was referring to, which says:

The Prophet invoked the curse of Allah on ten people in connection with wine: 1. the wine presser; 2. the one who has it pressed; 3. the one who drinks it; 4. the one who conveys it; 5. the one to whom it is conveyed; 6. the one who serves it; 7. the one who sells it; 8. the one who benefits from the price paid for it; 9 the one who buys it; and 10) the one for whom it is bought.

From this, the one poster picks out number 8, saying that everyone in Canada benefits from the price paid for alcohol, because of taxes which pay for public services. If this hadith forbids Muslims from patronising Bluff's, it surely forbids them from what everyone Canadian does: using roads, sidewalks and water.

But that the MSA can't justify their actions textually doesn't really matter as to if they should be accommodated or not. This is the bizarre but natural result that the current ideas on religious accommodation, a subset of multiculturalism, in Canada bring, as represented in University policies.

There is rarely ever a method to determine what counts as a genuine religious requirement for any religion, especially for a religion like Islam that lacks strong authorities, and this is realised by crafters of policies. They eventually come to say that anything can be a religious requirement as long as it is sincerely believed in by a person. Rather than setting up a set of actual rules and regulations, which students can consider when deciding if they either want to follow them and face no consequences, or not follow them and face the consequences, students are allowed to mend the rules to their own personal beliefs -- not having to write scheduled tests when they'd rather be praying for example. What would prevent a student from "sincerely believing" that God wants them to have an extra day to write an exam? Apparently nothing; and, indeed, students are given extra days to study as the result of religious accommodation all the time. Why even have an exam schedule? Just let students write them whenever they believe they're [divinely] ready.

So, back to the titular question, is living in Canada haram? According to multiculturalism, yes...if you sincerely believe it.

Islam is Peace in Word, but...in Deed?

(<-- Click for bigger version; on John Trenchard's request)

Everyone believes they're on the side of good. The Islam Is Peace Campaign believes Islam is peaceful, and so did the June 7th bombers. [And it's their two viewpoints on what exactly this peace is that are juxtaposed in the image here.] All Muslims, moderate and extremist alike, say that Islam is peaceful, but does Islam actually bring its fair share of this uncontested good, peace? Or is it better thought to bring, as the Pope in his infamous Regensburg speech quoted Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologus II, saying, "things only evil and inhuman, such as [the] command to spread by the sword the faith..."

That quote comes from 1391 AD, but this is not an early example of linking Islam to violence. In fact, the earliest of all known bits of writing on Islam (earlier than the Quran itself, which wasn't compiled and standardised into its present form until 650-656 AD) includes the Doctrina Jacobi of 634-640 AD, which mentions a prophet of the Saracens (Arabs) who had came "armed with a sword." For as long as Islam had been around, it has been seen as violent. So we see ourselves in no different a situation today with this criticism continuing.

But what does this criticism lead to in response for groups like the Islam Is Peace Campaign, and CAIR, and others who would rather Islam be seen as peaceful? The Islam Is Peace Campaign lists their approach as having five steps. Numbers two to five are: 2) Create dialogue; 3) Address grievances; 4) Be creative; and 5) Create friendships. Four and five seem vacuous. Two and three read like they are acting towards peace, but they are actually the opposite of what you may expect. Two is not creating dialogue with extremist Islam so as to convince them otherwise, but actually with the rest of society, so that they may warm to Islam evermore. And three is not addressing grievances of the victims of Islamic terrorism, but rather the grievances of the Islamic terrorists! So the response to violence is to give those who commit it what they want, and, to those who suffer it, nothing but empty words. And, last but not least, step one is, "To fight Islamophobia," where Islamophobia includes any poignant criticism of Islam.

So where are the actions against the violence of Islam, and not just the words? They seem to be contained only to the purely reactive and defensive measures of the counter-terrorism departments of the intelligence agencies. Any pro-active, constructive steps to combat it are pushed out of bounds by accusations of Islamophobia. This goes so far that even Muslim groups are accused of being Islamophobic.

[I hope to get some comments before I keep on making posts, so that I may know someone cares that I'm saying anything.-KC]

Blog Inauguration

From Dictionary.com:

Can-a-da - [kan-uh-duh]
–noun
1.a nation in N North America: a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. 29,123,194; 3,690,410 sq. mi. (9,558,160 sq. km). Capital: Ottawa.

Kaf-ir [kaf-er, key-fer, kah-]
–noun, plural -irs, (especially collectively) -ir.
...
2. (lowercase) Islam. an infidel or unbeliever.

So, as the name implies, this is, at the very least, a soapbox for infidelity in Canada. I cannot have any pretensions as to what will transpire beyond this most timid outline of a modus operandi. I do suspect, though, there being collection of varied articles, analysis of these, and discussion of these, if not a more thorough laying out of an opposition to the growing anti-kafir, anti-secular, anti-reason movement of Political Islam, and against the wider policies which feed such extremism.

Welcome all!