Harper meets with Muslim leaders

June 10 - Unsurprisingly, PM Harper held a closed-door meeting with Muslim community leaders in the aftermath of the arrest of 17 terrorists in Southern Ontario and, although the details of the meeting were not released, the response by one of the participants hints that in addition to the soothing of ruffled feathers, issues of accountability may have been broached:

[Farzana] Hassan-Shahid [of the Canadian Muslim Congress] told The Canadian Press that those in attendance had different viewpoints about what may have led a group of young Muslims to consider violent attacks on their own country.

"It's about time Muslims owned up to the fact it's a Muslim problem," she said, adding that she thinks the community must forcefully denounce extremism.

"We need to be more proactive, rather than issue statements of condemnation," she said.

And then there was some unintentional humour:

[Tarek] Fatah [spokesperson for the Canadian Muslim Congress] said the issue of American-based Islamic organizations spreading fundamentalism and extremism in Toronto was also brought up.

He said two - the Islamic Society of North America and the Islamic Circle of North America - were singled out.

"This is America pushing its fundamentalist Islamist thinking into Canada, not vice versa," he said.

That's a switch. Instead of bashing the U.S.A., President Bush and evangelical Christians, he bashes the U.S.A. for importing Muslim fundamentalism. That man is like totally Canadianized -- he just can't address home-grown Canadian issues without invoking the anti-American card.

By the way, don't blame me for designating Fatah as "spokesman" for the CMC and Hassan-Shahid as being "of" the CMC - that's how the article is written. Another well-known dirty little secret is that the Canadian value of equal rights for women is applied somewhat selectively - although I blame the usually vocally outraged Canadian feminists for that unprincipled failure.

As I wrote yesterday, there does indeed seem to be a concerted attempt to push fundamentalist thinking onto Canada but the source is Saudi Arabia, not the U.S.A.

The Saudi royal family has issued over $70 billion in grants to leading U.S. universities - including Harvard, Cornell, Texas A&M, MIT, UC-Berkeley, Columbia, UC-Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins, Rice University, American University, University of Chicago, Syracuse University, USC, UCLA, Duke University and Howard University and the purpose of the grants was to establish departments and chairs that promoted the Wahhabist version of Islam.

There is a fairly well-defined line between propaganda and education and it's no secret that many U.S. and Canadian universities crossed that line long ago, but what many don't realize is that Saudi money helps fund that propaganda.

Question of the Day: How much money do the Saudis contribute to Canadian mosques and universities?

Posted by: Debbye at 11:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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