The expected response
American Thinker
Haroon Siddiqui, who once edited the editorial page of Canada’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, pens a pathetic column that could have been predicted, on the arrests of the terror suspects. The problem, you see, is not that members of the same mosque allegedly conspired to behead the PM and topple the CN Tower, among other horrors. No, the problem is Muslim-bashing.
Not that Siddiqui offers even a single example of Muslim-bashing in Canada. No, actually coming-up with anything tangible is beside the point. Don’t even think about examining the role of religious leaders in fanning the flames of hatred among Muslims born and bred in Canada. Just remember that Canadians are always on the point of bigotry, and that anything goes on the part of victim groups, especially Muslims.
Of course, it will work with some (evidently including the Star’s current editorial leadership). But such negligent journalism is laughable, and should be a cause for shame at the Star.
Muslim-bashing dilutes our democratic values
Fears spans bigotry, which endangers Canadian values, says Haroon Siddiqui
Jun. 11, 2006. 01:00 AM
HAROON SIDDIQUI
B igotry 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?
Quebec once flirted with just such "a social contract" between immigrants and "the host society." But it had to give up the hare-brained idea.
We already have a social contract. It is the rule of law. That is our common holy parchment, bonding the native-born and the foreign-born together. Anything else is populist humbug. Or an attempt by the powerful to dictate to the weak.
The latest hand-wringing on multiculturalism and its first cousin, immigration, in reality is a debate about Muslims.
When some people say we must rethink immigration, they are not talking about the problem of economic integration of newcomers. They are pointing fingers at Muslims: Do these bearded men and burqa-clad women — their infinitely small number magnified by the media — belong in Canada?
Yes, they do. Similar doubts were raised earlier about Catholics, Orthodox Jews and others.
Muslims are no less integrated than other comparable groups. In fact, evidence points to higher levels of education and lower rates of crime among them.
Yet there's a drumbeat of Muslim-bashing, conflating the criminality of a few with all. This assertion of collective guilt takes many forms.
Any time some Muslims somewhere commit an atrocity, a chorus of voices demands of Muslims everywhere: "What do you have to say about this?"
They should have to say nothing more than Christians or Jews or Hindus must for the wrongs of their co-religionists. As Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman rightly said: "We would not condemn the Italian community because of the Mafia. We would not condemn the Irish community because of the IRA." Or Serb Canadians for the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the name of religious nationalism.
Muslims are also told to "take responsibility" for their deviants, "root out the extremists," "weed out the radicals," etc.
How are they supposed to do that? By becoming vigilantes?
Which self-appointed busybodies will use what yardstick to define "a radical," an "extremist" or "a Wahhabi?"
George W. Bush's first attorney-general, John Ashcroft, an openly Islamophobic Christian fundamentalist, proposed a program to ask Americans to snitch on fellow citizens. It was condemned as a totalitarian tool reminiscent of the old Communist states — and was dropped.
Yet, here we are, suggesting about the same thing in Canada.
That some Muslims also support it does not make it any more right. They may want their own version of "liberal" Islam to prevail. Some of us might want it, too. But it is no business of the state, or the media, to take sides in theological turf wars.
It is laudable that many Muslim leaders and groups are, voluntarily, offering to help in figuring out an early detection system to identify militant deviancy, especially among the young.
But it is the responsibility of the state to ferret out and prosecute criminals, whether they invoke religion or not.
Fear spawns bigotry. Whatever hurt it might be causing the beleaguered Muslim community, it poses a greater danger to the principles that make Canada what it is: the envy of the world.
Haroon Siddiqui, the Star's editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday and Sunday
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