Canadian Resident charged in Iran

Mernoushe Solouki, living in Canada since 2003, and having been under arrest in Iran since February, has been charged by the Iranian government with "intending to spread propaganda."

Now that she is going to be given a trial, maybe she won't end up like like Zahra Kazemi.

Islamic Saudi Academy and the ISNA Schools

A Saudi-funded school in Washington, D.C. is on the rocks for promoting hatred. From that article:

The 11th-grade textbook, for example, says one sign of the Day of Judgment will be that Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind trees that say: 'Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him,' " the article said.

It goes on to quote several students of the school who say they are taught in Islamic studies that "it is better to shun and even to dislike Christians, Jews and Shiite Muslims."

One teen, who recited by memory parts of the Quran, told the Post he's taught by academy teachers that it's OK for Muslims to hurt or steal from such "kaffirs."
And Canada?

Saudi-funded as well, the ISNA runs both an elementary school and a high school in Toronto. Is that same grade 11 curriculum taught here, as in DC? Is there anyone here who reviews these things, as they apparently do in the States? Or do we just take the ISNA on their word that they're clean and "progressive"? (The actual word for themselves, "progressive" -- though, I could have sworn adhering to a literal interpretation of a medieval text wasn't the most progressive thing in the world). Regarding the Arabic texts, the school in DC, no doubt thinking that no one would check, said they were "clean":

What about the Arabic texts? He doesn't read Arabic. But the Saudi Embassy, which controls the school, assures him they're clean.

The nonprofit Freedom House recently translated a sample of those cleaned-up official Saudi texts and found they're still indoctrinating students to wage jihad against the infidel to "spread the faith."

When the advocates for Islamic schools in Ontario say that worry of them is "unfounded," are they speaking the same way the Saudi embassy was? As I said in my last post, watch out for taqiyya.

*UPDATE*

Similar phenomenon in Britain, from Gates of Vienna: "a new survey conducted by think tank Policy Exchange that reveals a message of hatred for non-Muslims found in within a significant number of Britain’s mosques."

On the Quran, Canadian Prof. Speaks

Heinz Klatt, a professor at King's College in London, Ontario, writes on a new English translation of the Quran which has been called "woman-friendly." He says, "It is obvious that Islam needs other reforms than feminist translations of the Quran."

When considering translations of works of Islamic ideology, readers should wary themselves about the Islamic concept of taqiyya. In the spirit of taqiyya, Mohammed said, "War is deceit" (Bukhari hadith 4:269).

Dr. Klatt has written scholarly work on political correctness, and you can download his speech, "Political Correctness: Its Reign of Terror on University Campuses", from this page. As a case in point, in this situation with the Quran, Dr. Klatt has been called an "Islamophobe" for making purely factual statements about an historical work -- some people demand that their views go without any criticism whatsoever. Just think about the unlimited amount of criticism, textual and otherwise, that professors have done on the Bible and Christian ideology -- such a level would perhaps never be reached for Islam, at the rate things are going now. Islam is perhaps the only ideology that gets an essentially free pass from academia in Canada. One professor makes a most timid attempt at correcting this contradiction, and he gets smeared in an attempt to extinguish critical thought.

On the Muslim Brotherhood and MSA

Here's a report from NEFA on the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. It outlines how the Brotherhood is concerned with a grand, "civilizational jihad." This is taken from the Brotherhood's own documents:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

It mentions how the MSA is part of this jihad. Looking at the actions of the MSA in this light, one can actually understand them. The MSA has established groups at many Canadian universities which receive funding from these universities to carry out their activities. This should be stopped.

(I've heard the term the "Great Jihad" to describe this process, as it has been observed. Now that we have the actual term for it from these jihadists themselves, perhaps we use the "Grand Jihad" instead. Point to their own foundational texts if someone inquires about the sensibility of the term.)

Religious Funerary Accommodation

Canada's funeral law fails large immigrant groups:

The Hindu community faces a problem with scattering of ashes after cremation. According to Hindu custom, ashes should be immersed in a river but Canadian conservation authorities have objected to the ritual citing potential hazard to the ecosystem.
...
'Everything is geared to the Christian tradition, but the rules are outdated. They have to change because the demographics have changed,' Roopnath Sharma, a priest at the Shri Ram Mandir temple in Mississauga, was quoted as saying by The Star newspaper.

Christian? I don't think ecological regulations are just quite an extension of the Christian faith, more just a protection of the common good. It would already be absurd to accommodate such a practice, but lets just bring this to its logical end. There's another Hindu ritual called Sati. Here, when a bride outlives her husband naturally, she is burned to death on the pyre of his cremation. This still goes on today.

How about we accommodate that one too?

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.