Category Archives: Multiculturalism

Marines’ Islamic Prayer Center ‘sends a bad signal’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An announcement that the U.S. Marine base at Quantico, Va., has refurbished a building to be used as a prayer room for Muslim soldiers and civilians on base is a “bad signal,” one critic has concluded.

The Marines announced earlier this summer that one of the buildings on the base had been repainted so that Muslims would have a place to pray and hold religious services. The new “Islamic Prayer Center” is the first of its kind on a Marine base, and “serves to express the Marine Corps’ recognition of diversity among service members and the commitment to provide continued support to all Marines regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or gender,” the base announcement said.

However, Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer said he wonders why the Marines do not seem concerned such facilities might to used to generate anti-American sympathies. “It’s going to go up as part of a testament to American multiculturalism and so on without any indication of the possibility that this could be a source of what we’re fighting against,” he said. “It just sends a bad signal.”

World Net Daily, 16 August 2006

‘Multiculturalism is to blame for perverting young Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Bishop of Rochester asks “how does this dual psychology – of victimhood, but also the desire for domination – come to infect so many young Muslims in Britain?” One reason is that “in the name of multiculturalism, mosque schools were encouraged and Muslim pupils spent up to six extra hours a day learning the Koran and Islamic tradition, as well as their own regional languages”.

Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2006

‘Britain a soft target for Islamists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britain, like much of Europe, has discarded the anchors that held society in place and enabled it to endure in times of uncertainty. Churches are being turned into mosques…. Britain has made a virtue of its post-colonial guilt and its own loss of values by embracing multiculturalism, a fuzzy notion which holds that all cultures, all standards, all values are of equal merit. Into this morass of uncertainty step the young Muslims, certain of their belief and confident in their identity. Like the stranded passengers at London’s airports, wandering around glassy eyed and lost, Britain has become a soft target for these new Islamists. They know exactly who they are and where they are going.”

Douglas Davis explains the background to the alleged terrorist plot.

National Post, 11 August 2006

‘Why the sight of veiled women offends me’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Deborah Orr“I’ve been more and more troubled lately by the sight of veiled women swathed in heavy black, getting on with their everyday business in Britain. A woman on the bus the other day looked like she was auditioning for an Islamic version of the Blues Brothers, with the only part of her body uncovered by her drapes, hidden behind very black sunglasses….

“Multiculturalism tells us that it is rude and insensitive to be critical of such garb, and that we must tolerate and even celebrate difference. But I’m afraid I find that the sort of difference these women proclaim by getting themselves up in these sinister weeds to be deeply offensive.

“I understand that in a free society they are entitled to dress as they please, just as I am. But I also understand that in a free society I am at liberty to say that the values these outfits imply are repulsive and insulting to me.”

Deborah Orr in the Independent, 8 July 2006

Blame it all on multiculturalism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… both Canada and Britain need to face the fact that multiculturalism, which for both countries is an article of faith, has brought havoc in its wake. This doctrine holds that all minority cultures must enjoy equal status with the majority, and that any attempt to impose the majority culture over those of minorities is by definition racist…. In the wake of the London bombings, people came up with a litany of excuses – such as the war in Iraq, poverty or Islamophobia – to explain what had happened. There was a widespread determination to avoid discussion of the actual cause: religious fanaticism. The orthodoxy of minority rights means any criticism of minorities is deemed unsayable…. The greatest exponents of this morally upside-down grievance culture are those Muslims for whose pathological inferiority complex it seems to be tailor-made.”

Melanie Phillips offers her thoughtful advice to Canadians following the arrest of 17 suspected terrorists in Ontario.

National Post, 16 June 2006

Meanwhile, Matthew Norman has his own advice for Mad Mel: “I beg Melanie to learn meditation, yoga or some other technique for finding inner calm. This constant hysterical raging cannot be good for the health.”

Independent, 19 June 2006

‘The latest hand-wringing on multiculturalism and its first cousin, immigration, in reality is a debate about Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim-bashing dilutes our democratic values

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 11 June 2006

Bigotry increases in times of trouble, as we have seen in our own age.

An anti-French backlash was palpable in English Canada when bilingualism was introduced in 1969 and a year later we had the FLQ crisis. I felt it in the Prairies when the paper I worked for, The Brandon Sun, had the foresight and courage to support the Official Languages Act and oppose the War Measures Act.

The recession of the early 1990s stoked anger at multiculturalism and helped spawn the anti-immigrant Reform party.

The 1990 Oka crisis, the 1999 Mi’kmaq fisheries dispute in Nova Scotia and the Nisga’a land deal in British Columbia led to charges that “race-based rights” for First Nations would undermine common Canadian values.

On all those occasions, as also during the recent standoff in Caledonia, pessimists said racism lurks just below the surface and can bubble up any time. Congenital optimists like myself dismiss such episodes as aberrations, confident that the Canadian social equilibrium will always reassert itself.

The post-9/11 period, even while helping Canada become more Canadian, is slowly Americanizing our public discourse. It has fanned an anti-Islamism that resembles the old anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.

The arrest of 17 Muslims on terrorism charges has made matters worse, and also rekindled the debate on multiculturalism: Are we being too tolerant of different cultures? Do we instill enough “Canadian values?” Should we make newcomers sign a code of ethics?

Continue reading →

‘Blaming all Muslims, or Islam or multiculturalism is just a McCarthyesque witchhunt against a rather powerless minority community in Canada’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No easy answers

Toronto Star, 8 June 2006

By Haroon Siddiqui

Blaming all Muslims, or Islam or multiculturalism, is just a witchhunt against a rather powerless minority community

Dalton McGuinty said it best. He found the alleged Toronto terrorist plot to be both “unsettling and reassuring,” the latter because law enforcement agencies have done their job, removing what has been described as Canada’s greatest terrorism threat.

Now the courts will decide whether that’s what it was.

Let the rule of law prevail, in fair and transparent trials.

If we are hearing some skeptical voices about the dramatic charges, there is a reason. Similar claims made in 2003 against 22 Pakistani and Indian students — that they had planned to topple the CN Tower and the Pickering nuclear reactor — proved to be utterly false.

That episode of incompetence, coupled with the Maher Arar tragedy and the ongoing detention of four terrorism suspects without charge on security certificates, devalued the moral currency of the law enforcement agencies — always a liability in a democracy.

This time, however, authorities seem to be on firmer ground.

Continue reading →

Another rant from Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or ‘Islamophobia’. They simply ignore the statements and signs which show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicize the west.”

Melanie Phillips rants on, this time in the New York Post, 4 June 2006

More racist nonsense about the Muslim conquest of Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

While Europe SleptAnother plug for Bruce Bawer’s hysterical Islamophobic rant, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within, this one by Andre Zantonavitch:

“While Europe Slept argues that while Europe is currently only about ten percent Islamic – vs. two percent for America – if present trends continue it will only take a generation or two for Muslims to become the majority. The once-noble Continent will become what Bat Ye’or in 2005 called ‘Eurabia’. The shocking claim by Gary [sic] Bawer is that well before 2050, most of Europe is likely to become an outpost of Islamdom governed by Sharia.

“The second theme is that Europe today is a hellhole of leftist multiculturalism, far worse than anything in America, and even far worse than almost anyone in America suspects. American expatriate Bawer – who has lived the past ten years in various European countries, mostly Holland and Norway – is almost uniformly horrified by every country he resides in or visits. According to him, political correctness and multiculturalism are ‘a habit of thought that in America is an annoyance but in Europe is a veritable religion’.

“Bawer excoriates his European friends for their propensity to display phony ‘respect’ and ‘understanding’ of the various foreigners in their midst, especially Muslims.”

Front Page Magazine, 2 June 2006