http://www.judeoscope.ca/breve.php3?id_breve=1658
Monday 5 June 2006 So Islam has nothing to do with terror, eh? The Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford: I drove back from yesterday's news conference at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto in the northeastern part of the city, but honestly, I could have just as easily floated home in the sea of horse manure emanating from the building. So frequent were the bald reassurances that faith and religion had nothing - nothing, you understand - to do with the alleged homegrown terrorist plot recently busted open by Canadian police and security forces, that for a few minutes afterward, I wondered if perhaps it was a vile lie of the mainstream press or a fiction of my own demented brain that the 17 accused young men are all, well, Muslims. (...) Even before I knew for sure that they're all Muslims, I suspected as much from what I saw on the tube, perhaps because I am a trained observer, or you know, because I have eyes. The accused men are mostly young and mostly bearded in the Taliban fashion. They have first names like Mohamed, middle names like Mohamed and last names like Mohamed. Some of their female relatives at the Brampton courthouse who were there in their support wore black head-to-toe burkas (now there's a sight to gladden the Canadian female heart: homegrown burka-wearers darting about just as they do in Afghanistan), which is not a getup I have ever seen on anyone but Muslim women. And from far outside the courthouse, if the Muslim question wasn't settled, there was the likes of Scarborough Imam Aly Hindy telling the Toronto Star that: "Because they are young people and they are Muslims, they are saying it is terrorism." Now look, of course it is a good thing that Chief Blair, who is a wonderful guy, made the trek out to Scarborough yesterday. It's even good that he told local Muslims that their places of worship will get extra patrols and that if anyone wearing traditional beards or the hijab is hassled, the police will investigate and treat it seriously. The chief is right that now, as in the aftermath of 911 (talk about property damage), that all of us have to be particularly tolerant of one another. And he is also right that there is a distinction, though in my view it may be a distinction without a difference, between terrorism motivated purely by religious zealotry, and terrorism, as was the alleged case with these 17 mostly young men, motivated by political ideology - even if the ideology seems to have been nothing more than the ideology of rage fuelled by overseas conflicts. And it should go without saying - but it never, ever can in this country, and must be shrieked at every turn - that this whole business is as at least as distressing to the vast majority of good, peaceable Canadian Muslims as it is to everyone else. But what came clear at that meeting yesterday, which was an odd mix of community venting and news conference, is that many of those people who went to the microphone to ask questions, and some of those who answered them from the podium, are far more concerned about a possible anti-Muslim backlash to the arrests than they are about the allegations that a whole whack of their young people were bent on blowing something up in the city; that they are generally worked up about Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and the Americans in Iraq, and that even as they talk about Islam being a religion of peace, they do not sound or appear particularly peaceable. See online: Full <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060605.blatch05/BNStor y/National/home> Story (requires subscription). . <http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97476590&grpId=4015662&grpspId=1600043956&msgId =12850&stime=1149558539> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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