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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (13734)	6/12/2006 9:07:19 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Respond to of 32591

sucks to be them

To: lorne who wrote (13734)	6/12/2006 9:22:31 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Respond to of 32591

Imam links knife attack to news media Montreal cleric says man confronted him and asked if he wanted 'to die a martyr' TU THANH HA From Monday's Globe and Mail MONTREAL — An outspoken Montreal imam blamed recent news coverage about Canada's Muslim community for prompting a knife-wielding man to threaten him outside a mosque on the weekend. Imam Said Jaziri, a maverick cleric who has been in the news several times, said news coverage in the wake of the arrests of terror suspects in Toronto have whipped up emotions against Muslims. "There's been a lot of media who debated about the mosques, asking what are mosques for, saying they are places of terrorism," Mr. Jaziri said in an interview yesterday. "I imagine he [the suspect] got fed up and decided to take actions. Not everyone is intelligent. Some people hear what they want to hear." The incident took place shortly after midnight Saturday, as the mosque was closing after the Friday prayers. Mr. Jaziri said he and a friend were locking the building when a stranger waving a large butcher knife confronted them. "Do you want to die a martyr? Do you have an explosive belt?" the man said, according to the imam. While the man ran after his friend, Mr. Jaziri said he called the police. Officers showed up within two or three minutes and arrested a suspect. No one was injured. Pierre Brabant, 34, is to appear in court today after being remanded into custody after his arraignment Saturday on two counts of armed assault and one count each for uttering threats and possession of a dangerous weapon. "We consider this a hate crime because of its motives, because of the remarks made by the suspect," said Constable Olivier Lapointe, a Montreal police spokesman. Mr. Jaziri said the police's prompt arrival was explained by the increased patrols around the mosque after past incidents of vandalism in the spring. The mosque has also taken its own precautions, covering windows with metal wiring and installing surveillance cameras, he said. "If we've reached this point, where will we go next?" Mr. Jaziri said. The incident has been picked up by the al-Jazeera Arabic-language news network and could hurt Canada's image, he said. "My mother when she heard about this, she cried all night. . . . Everyone's worried," he said. "I hope things will settle down. Because if today one person is attacked, tomorrow others will be attacked. . . . Are Muslims going to stay with their arms folded all their lives? No. One day they'll get fed up." Mr. Jaiziri is the Tunisian-born imam of the Al Qods mosque in northeast Montreal, said to be the city's largest North African mosque. He is no stranger to controversy. In February, he led a demonstration protesting the publication of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, even though other local Muslim leaders urged the community to stay away from such events for fear of inflaming the situation. Mr. Jaziri has also criticized the Ontario government's decision to ban faith-based arbitration, saying he himself has often practised sharia to solve family disputes. He was also in the news last fall when he remained in his mosque for three weeks, saying he feared being deported after authorities decided to review his refugee status. He admits he concealed that he was convicted for assault in France in 1995, but says this came in a scuffle when non-Muslim residents demonstrated outside a mosque, demanding it be closed.

To: lorne who wrote (13734)	6/13/2006 12:17:26 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

We Muslims have work to do By SALIM MANSUR Muslim Canadians, as Muslims elsewhere in Western societies, have felt increasingly besieged for some time now, both from outside their community and from within. This sense of isolation, of being misrepresented and misunderstood, will inevitably deepen as the full story unfolds of the arrests of 17 Toronto-area Muslims on terrorism charges. But whose fault is this? Let us, Muslims, be brutally honest. We have inherited a culture of denial, of too often refusing to acknowledge our own responsibility for the widespread malaise that has left most of the Arab-Muslim countries in economic, political and social disrepair. Statistics and intergovernmental reports over the past several decades have documented a gap, perhaps now unbridgeable, between Muslim countries and the advanced industrial democracies in the West. In a recent "failed states index" published in the journal Foreign Policy (May/June 2006), Pakistan, for instance, is ranked among the top 10 failed states in the world -- ahead of Afghanistan. Pakistan is a Muslim country, a nuclear military power, but it can barely feed, clothe, educate and shelter its population. The reports on the Arab countries are a dismal catalogue of entrenched tyrannies, failing economies, squandered wealth, gender oppression, persecution of minorities and endemic violence. The cleric-led regime in Iran seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to obliterate Israel, repress domestic opposition, and seek confrontation with the West. Instead of acknowledging the reality of the Arab-Muslim world as a broken civilization, we Muslims tend to indulge instead in blaming others for our ills; deflecting our responsibilities for failures that have become breeding grounds of violence and terrorism. Many of our intellectuals in public life and our religious leaders in mosques remain adept in double-speak, saying contrary things in English or French and then in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu. We have made hypocrisy an art, and have spun for ourselves a web of lies that blinds us to the real world around us. We seethe with grievances and resentment against the West, even as we have prospered in the freedom and security of Western democracies. We have inculcated into our children false pride, and given them a sense of history that crumbles under critical scrutiny. We have burdened them with conflicting loyalties -- and now some of them have become our nightmare. We preach tolerance yet we are intolerant. We demand inclusion, yet we practise exclusion of gender, of minorities, of those with whom we disagree. We repeat endlessly that Islam is a religion of peace, yet too many of us display conduct contrary to what we profess. We keep assuring ourselves and others that Muslims who violate Islam are a minuscule minority, yet we fail to hold this minority accountable in public. A bowl of milk turns into curd with a single drop of lemon. The minuscule minority we blame is this drop of lemon that has curdled and made a shambles of our Islam, yet too many of us insist against all evidence our belief somehow sets us apart as better from others. In Islam, we insist, religion and politics are inseparable. As a result, politics dominates our religion -- and our religion has become a cover for tribalism and nationalism. We regularly quote from the Koran, but do not make repentance for our failings as the Koran instructs, by seeking forgiveness of those who we have harmed. We Muslims are the source of our own misery, and we are not misunderstood by others who see in our conduct a threat to their peace. torontosun.com From: Geoff Altman Read Replies (1) of 9345