Is something I simply have to do after watching this:
Wishing all Muslims a Merry Christmas
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Tag Archives: Islam
Calgary Imam says his comparing the plight of Canadian Muslims to pre-Holocaust Jews was “misinterpreted”
Imam Syed 
Soharwardy is the twerp who filed a complaint to the Alberta human rights commission against Ezra Levant for publishing the notorious Danish cartoons. Two years later he tried to withdraw the complaint, claiming that he had been misunderstood.
Here we go again. He is now protesting that he was misunderstood when he compared the requirement of Muslim women to have unveiled faces during the citizenship ceremony to the persecution of Jews in pre-Holocaust Germany. He has taken pains to clarify his true meaning, but it turns out that he still thinks much the same, although he may have had the timing wrong:
A local Muslim imam who compared the plight of pre-Holocaust Jews to Muslims’ situation in Canada said he only regrets he was misinterpreted.
[….]
“I have regret in the interpretation, on how people understand … what I don’t regret is the truth I believe.” Other Calgary imams and Jewish leaders have criticized Soharwardy for being insensitive for mentioning the Holocaust to discuss Islamophobia. Though he hadn’t told reporters in previous days, Soharwardy said he meant to compare the rising hostility facing Muslims in Canada to the genesis of anti-semitism decades before the Second World War Holocaust. “It could be 50 years before, 100 years before but if the trend continues, we will have a major hard time for Muslims in North America,”
To confirm his less than tenuous grip on reality, Syed implores us not to make Canada like “Afghanistan or Pakistan” where, he seems to have forgotten, it is Christians who are not just persecuted by Muslims, but routinely murdered by them. Does he really believe that being able see each other’s face is a harbinger of a similar persecution of Muslins in Canada?
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The Archbishop of Wales effuses over the “common faith journey” of Muslims and Christians
From here:
The Archbishop of Wales will praise the “open and honest” relationship that exists in Wales between Christians and Muslims in a lecture tomorrow (Tuesday Nov 22) to celebrate National Interfaith week.
Dr Barry Morgan will pay tribute to the Muslim Council of Wales, as well as the First Minister, for their commitment to promoting good relations between people of different faiths.
He will say, “I want to thank the Muslim Council of Wales and Saleem Kidwai, its Secretary General, in particular, for all he has done to foster good interfaith relationships in Wales over the last decade. Because of his commitment to our common Faith journey and because the fostering of good interfaith relationships has been high on the agenda of our own Welsh Government, I also want to thank the First Minister for continuing the sterling work of his predecessor Rhodri Morgan for this. Wales has not seen some of the problems encountered in other parts of the United Kingdom.
Christians should, of course, be on good terms with Muslims: it is very difficult to present Christ to someone with whom one is on bad terms.
Two things that can never be on good terms are Christianity and Islam because Christianity teaches that Jesus is God’s highest revelation of himself to man while Islam teaches he was merely a prophet. Both cannot be correct, so there is no “common Faith journey” in Islam and Christianity.
From an empirical perspective, almost every country that is predominantly Islamic persecutes Christians, often to the point of death and every country that is a part of what used to be known as Christendom tolerates Muslims, often to the point of self-effacement.
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Primate Fred Hiltz endorses sympathiser of radical Islam for Huron college appointment
Huron college has accepted a $2-million endowment for a new Chair in Islamic Studies within the College’s historically Anglican Faculty of Theology. As you can read here, the money is tainted by its jihadist association:
About half the money is to come via fundraising facilitated by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), and the other, matching half from the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). A cofounder of the latter group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007-2008 trial of Sami al-Arian, an Islamist academic linked to jihadism.
Ingrid Mattson has been installed as the “inaugural Chair of the new Islamic Studies program.” Unfortunately, she comes with a rather less than impeccable pedigree:
She has been disturbingly equivocal about Wahhabism, the repressive and backward strain of Sunni Islam that is the state creed in Saudi Arabia. In 2001, for instance, she told a CNN chat forum: “This is not a sect. It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European protestant reformation. Because the Wahhabi scholars became integrated into the Saudi state, there has been some difficulty keeping that particular interpretation of religion from being enforced too broadly on the population as a whole. However, the Saudi scholars who are Wahhabi have denounced terrorism.”
She has stated publicly that the best English-language Koranic commentary for Muslim youth is by Maulana Abul A’la Maududi, an Islamist author who wrote that “Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam.”
In commenting on the subject of “injustice,” she lambastes the Taliban and the Israeli government in the same breath, because in both cases, people stood by as the two regimes perpetrated “oppression” – an odious juxtaposition, in my view.
In his enthusiasm for interfaith dialogue garnished with a smattering of recreational jihad, Anglican Primate Fred Hiltz has endorsed Mattson’s appointment:
“In establishing the “London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies”, Huron College is on the cutting edge of interfaith dialogue. With delight I endorse the appointment of Dr. Ingrid Mattson as the first occupant of that chair. She is a highly respected scholar and widely published. She is well known for her leadership in nurturing Muslim-Christian relations. The College and Community will be blessed by Dr. Mattson’s academic qualifications, and her capacity to engage people in dialogue, mutual learning and public witness to the values we hold in common as people of faith.”
The Most Reverend Fred Hiltz
Archbishop and Primate
The Anglican Church of Canada
h/t to the person who kindly emailed me on this.
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Poll reveals that Canadians believe Western and Muslim societies are irreconcilable
From here:
A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.
The survey of 1,500 Canadians, conducted over three days last week for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, showed 56% of respondents see Western and Muslim societies locked in an unending ideological struggle, while about 33% — just one-third of the population — held out hope that the conflict will eventually be overcome.
Obviously not many politicians or Anglican clergy were included in the poll.
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Stephen Harper in hot water over "Islamicism" remarks
From here:
The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada is urging Muslims to speak out against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent remarks about their religion.
Harper told CBC this week that “Islamicism” poses the most pressing threat to Canada’s security, and that the country’s intelligence service is mostly preoccupied with Islamic extremism.
[…..]
“How can Mr. Harper associate Islam with radicalism and fanaticism?” the group asked in a statement.
That’s a real puzzle.
I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but perhaps the 17,000 acts of Islamic terror committed since 9/11 provided the clue that enabled Harper to make the association.
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Oakville author attacked for writing “"Islam is a religion of 'peace' and Muslims will kill you to prove it"
It seems the attackers have proved the author’s point.
From here:
After publishing Wake Up Call with his cousin Gabrielle, Paris Dipersico was beaten by two men in OAKVILLE — Halton police are treating an attack on a first-time author whose self-published book has been branded anti-Muslim as a possible hate crime.
Raised Islamic, Paris Dipersico, 24, reported being dragged from his bicycle Aug. 17, tied up among trees, then beaten briefly unconscious by two Muslim men.
Accused of being gay, they then “called me a Jew in Arabic and said the Jews are paying you to write this against Islam,” the author of Wake Up Call said Thursday.
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Islam: the religion of peace – along with the occasional rape and mutilation
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The Anglican Journal comes to grips with bin Laden’s death
And, apparently, it’s really all about “overcoming our rage”.
Here:
For most Americans, and for many people in the free world, the death of Osama bin Laden was cause for celebration…….
Feelings of anger, hatred and revenge are not uncommon to people at times of social and religious upheaval. When the foundations begin to shake, when established certainties are put in doubt, when innocent people are cruelly murdered and when a nation is besieged, the natural reaction is to hate those who hurt us, to strike back at those who attack us. We may think of ourselves as tolerant, reasonable people, but in the face of horrific violence we can easily turn into people of rage
Nicolosi goes on to compare the supposed “rage” that Americans feel towards bin Laden to Psalm 137:9, “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock!”.
He has things backwards. The “rage” that has spawned the indiscriminate murder of innocents is the rage of Islamists; the West has taken extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties.
Another point that Nicolosi makes is this:
Third, unless we are prepared to accept the kind of violence described in Psalm 137, our task today is to enter into dialogue with Islam rather than to demonize it.
Nicolosi obviously takes the view that Islam, rather than radical Islam, is the problem. It remains to be seen whether he is correct or not, but I have little doubt that Nicolosi would be squirming in anguish if he realised that he has placed himself in the same camp as Geert Wilders.
Either way, whether Islam or Islamism is the problem, thinking that “enter[ing] into dialogue” will solve anything is a delusional fantasy.
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Islam: a threat to Western freedom
From here:
The presence of Muslims in Canada threatens the country’s freedoms and democracy, and only if immigration from Islamic countries is suspended can the cultural deterioration of the country be stopped, controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders told a packed house Monday night in Toronto.
“Our Western culture is far superior to Islamic culture,” Mr. Wilders said. “And only once we are convinced of this will we be able to defend our civilization.”
There was a protest populated by 10 people who called Wilders a racist – an epithet derived, presumably, from the misunderstanding that being a Muslim is an involuntary racial condition.
I have little doubt that Western culture is superior to Islamic culture and I hope that Canadian Muslims also have little doubt of that. Geert Wilders would probably say of them that they are not real Muslims and he may well be right – that is not such a bad thing. For those Muslims who remain unconvinced, Wilders also may be right: if they prefer an Islamic culture, they should opt to live in one.
