Declarations condemning Honor Killings don't deserve praise

The past two weeks have been particularly eventful ones regarding the problematic subject of the integration of Muslim immigrants and Islamic culture into Canadian society.

The ongoing Shafia trial in Ontario has been taking up a lot of ink and appears to have been the catalyst for a declaration by about 60 Canadian Muslim groups denouncing Honor Killings. Meanwhile in Belgium, Canadian Muslim reformer Irshad Manji was violently accosted during a book tour by about twenty Islamist fanatics who spat on her and threatened to kill her.

Now before any of us get on a high horse about how much better western religions are than Islam, we should keep in mind that we too all had our centuries-long episodes of religiously-inspired violence. Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity, and when Catholicism was as old as Islam is now, the Church was torturing and burning heretics.  As recently as 300 years ago, Protestant "reformers" were burning witches. Judaism too has a well-detailed history of violence that is extolled in biblical lore.

However there are many religions younger than Islam, such as Mormonism, Scientology, Baha'i, Sikhism, etc, whose practitioners are not bent on mass murder, terrorism, or the elimination of anyone who would dare to utter a word of criticism or mockery of their beliefs.

Even in Canada, up until the imposition of the multicultural, non-assimilating Trudeaupia, we had an extremely well-integrated Ismaili Muslim population that exhibited virtually none of the extremism that has become a somewhat factually-based caricature of contemporary Islam.

What has happened to the west in the last 40 years or so is the mass immigration of Muslims from what, in non-cultural relativist terms, one might refer to as backwards Muslim countries. The problem the west faces is not really Islam so much as it is the culture of these third world countries which happen to be predominantly Islamic. And the challenge we face is that the narrative of contemporary Islam has increasingly been dominated by those who hold on to those cultures' regressive interpretation of that religion.

Where we are failing miserably is by allowing that narrative to continue.

If a group were to make a grand announcement declaring that they believed it was wrong to rape cats, and tried to organize a campaign to denounce cat rape, people would, quite rightly, view them as crazy. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and moral sense knows it's wrong to rape cats and no sane person would do such a monstrous thing. It shouldn't require anyone to speak out against it.

Yet when Canadian Islamists declare that it's wrong for Muslims to murder their wives and daughters, they are embraced by the mainstream media as being progressive.

This truly is a sign of the soft bigotry of low expectations. When a community feels the need to make a pronouncement opposing infanticide and domestic violence, and the addled minds of an enabling media behave as if this is some significant achievement, it bespeaks a disgusting rot in our entire culture.

What's worse is that the trend to try to accommodate the troglodytes in the Islamist community tacitly undermines genuine Canadian Muslim reformers like Manji, Tarek Fatah, Salim Mansur, and many others. Most Canadian Muslims are not extremists, but when we engage and praise extremists, merely for meeting the minimal standards of civilized behaviour, it sends out a message that is not only condescending, but implies that the extremists are the mainstream. That message allows the real reformers to be marginalized as radicals within the Muslim community.

We should not be engaging extremist groups who have been denounced by the government for anti-Semitism and support for terror, like the Canadian Arab Federation or the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose president recently spoke at a multi-faith conference at the University of Toronto. Engaging them merely allows reformers like Irshad Manji to be tagged with the description "controversial." What should be controversial is that the president of a group that expresses support for terrorist organizations was welcomed at Canada's most prestigious university.

This whole matter points to the challenges facing and the many failures of Canadian multiculturalism whose guiding philosophical moral relativism is poorly adapted to responding to inherently bad cultural practices.

When Canadian Islamists feel the need to condemn the murder of women in their community, our response should not be, "aren't you wonderfully progressive!," it should be: "What the hell is wrong with a culture that needs to say that in the first place?"  

Salman Rushdie: Multiculturalism "has decayed to something much less than multiculturalism; which is cultural relativism"

A fascinating discussion between Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji:

Rick Salutin returns to a major daily newspaper.. and no one notices

The Looney Left went crazy a few months ago when the Globe and Mail replaced Rick Salutin's column with one from Irshad Manji.

"A blow to "progressive" (read: regressive) voices in the media" was the gist of their shrill cries. As of last Friday, Salutin has been writing for The Toronto Star. His first column for the Liberal-leaning paper was ostensibly a review of a TV series called NCIS, but Salutin being Salutin, it was filled with undertones about the evils of the United States.

One would think all those people who decried Salutin's firing from the Globe would be cheering his return with great fanfare.

But such was not the case. In the 3 days since his article was published online, it managed to draw only 3 user comments and virtually no attention.

Maybe it's because in the Globe, his column stood out. Whereas in the Star, among raving fanatics like Linda McQuaig, Haroon Siddiqui, Antonia Zerbisias, and James Travers, Salutin gets lost in the crowd. In fact, he seems relatively sane compared to his new colleagues, particularly when considering that Heather Mallick is one of them.

Feeling More Marginalized: Looney left goes crazy over Irshad Manji replacing Salutin at The Globe

Canadian “progressives” infuriated by the replacement of a privileged white male with a gay Muslim woman-of-color

Let Freedom Rain's Jymm Parrett originally titled his post  "Globe and Mail replaces Rick Salutin with piece of shit"  but after being taken to task by one of his own readers, calmed down slightly and changed the title to the more straightforward, if grammatically incomplete, " Globe and Mail replaces Rick Salutin Irshad Manji"

However the prose lost none of its demented color with:

Irshad Manji is a clueless bore of an ideologue who is the leading edge of the new Globe & Mail campaign to out fox Fox News. Forget Kory and his TV dreams. This is much worse. The Mop & Pail has flown the coop.

(it goes on, getting better ..or worse, here .. and here )


"Eugene Forsey Liberal" offers:

I beg of you Globe, stop this folly. The world needs less Manjis, Teneyckes, Lavignes, etc., and more brains, more originality, more wit, more insight, uh, like...hmm, who again? Ah yes, Salutin!

"Orwell's Bastard"  gives us:

At a time when the reinvigoration of civil discourse is more important than ever, why in god's name is the Globe jettisoning its most thoughtful, original and engaging columnist? Are focus groups and demographic targeting and tokenism more important to Canada's self-appointed National Newspaper than raising the tone of the national conversation? Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.

In losing Rick Salutin's voice, the Globe isn't just getting rid of a genuinely original and progressive thinker. It's abandoning the whole notion of intellectual curiosity, leaving us with hacks like Blatchford and Wente.

Antonia Zerbisias, in her usual exhibiton of unintentional radical leftist self-parody, characterizes Manji's efforts to reform and liberalize the form of orthodox Islam that imposes the Niqab and condones suicide bombings as "Muslim bashing."


If there was a prize for idiotic interpretations of this event, it might go to David Beers at the tyee.ca who wrote:

Why did The Globe and Mail fire Rick Salutin? Without a better answer from the newspaper's brass, we're left to read Salutin's last two columns and ponder how power behaves when the politics of fear, and those who wield them deftly, are ascendant.

The two columns Beers refers to were critical respectively, of Stephen Harper and Rob Ford. If that were grounds for dismissal at the Globe, they would have no one left on staff but Christie Blatchford. But for Beers to know that, he would have to actually read The Globe and Mail.


What's behind the hysterics, of course, is that the old-school radical left realize that they are being regarded as less and less relevant to public discourse. In the US, Barack Obama knows he can ignore them or take them for granted, depending on the circumstance.

Salutin in the Globe was the way that these people could delude themselves into thinking their voice was being taken seriously. Propping a corpse up and putting it into a chair doesn't make it a living person. The Globe finally decided it was time to bury the corpse.

UPDATE: Manji's first column as a regular Globe columnist. An interesting and balanced discussion about the Tea Party's growing popularity and its Canadian applications.

The usual suspects  (see above)  have flocked to the online comments section to say how awful they think she is. With their usual deficit of irony, some claim they will permanently abandon the Globe because of its replacement of Salutin with Manji, then return two hours later to post another disparaging comment.

The Word at the Globe: Salutin out - Manji in

The Coast in Halifax reports that Rick Salutin's being fired from The Globe and Mail was a long-standing plan in order to replace him with Irshad Manji.

Manji, the author of the best selling The Trouble with Islam Today,  is one of the most intelligent voices of a non-politically aligned generation of Canadians. A strong advocate for free speech, a defender of women's and human rights, and a reasonable voice in a politicized wilderness.

She will make a big positive addition to The Globe and Mail and the change is a good one!

UPDATE: this is driving the Looney Left crazy!

Irshad Manji: Stopping the rot in multiculturalism

Irshad Manji provides some insight into the aftermath of the murder/honour killing of Aqsa Parvez that eludes the likes of the Toronto Star's Jim Coyle . Even if Manji were not from a Muslim family, I'd be far more inclined to trust her insight than Coyle's.

After reading Coyle's column, the first thought that occurred to me was, 'How does one get a job as a columnist for the Toronto Star?'  It employs Coyle, ran Antonia Zerbisias for years, so obviously the ability to express rational thoughts is not a criterion.


Of course Haroon Siddiqui is Editor Emeritus there, which explains much.