So when does tolerance become a death-wish?
I have been attending the Manning Centre Conference for the past two days in Ottawa. It is Canada’s answer to CPAC — as I like to call it — as conservative academics, opinion leaders, politicians, media and of course grassroots supporters come to hear the state of conservative values. With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau running the ship of state, it is not the most optimistic era.
Of all the speeches and small group presentations I heard, I think the one focusing on Islamic terror was both the most relevant and the most troubling.
Troubling because the there is a potential for things to get worse.
Relevant because it’s in the news.
There are so-called “asylum seekers” streaming across the U.S.-Canada border as I write this; they are unimpeded by a prime minister who tweeted-out a metaphoric welcome mat for refugees as a hip protest to President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban. They were crossing in the dead of night at first but when they realized that the Canadian government has absolutely no plans to stop to deport them, they are now arriving at all times of the day, knowing full well that they will be staying.
Running parallel to this crisis is a growing “Islamophobia” hysteria that threatens to further stifle free speech in Canada – a basic democratic right that has already been severely restricted by various hate speech laws that criminalize criticism. Now, with a motion, blithely labelled M-103, first winding its way through Parliament and then through the federal heritage committee where it could be codified into another malodorous curtailment of free speech, “Islamophobia” is being willed into existence like a demon summoned from hell.
Enter Raheel Raza, a Muslim woman and expert on Islamic terrorist movements. Without any compunction she labelled M-103 akin to “a blasphemy law” that could quite simply render any objections to Muslim practices as illegal utterances. The Liberal Member of Parliament who introduced the motion made the outrageous assertion last week that one million Canadian Muslims are ‘victims of racism and bigotry.” Raza merely asked, “Seriously???”
I have always said that left-wing lunacy that arrives in Canada inevitably seeks to invade the United States. Most Canadian politicians and opinion leaders are in a state of abject denial over the risks of providing special legal protection to one religion. In the Toronto area, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer has not been recited in a public school for almost 40 years. Yet today, Muslim students gather on Fridays for special prayer sessions during school hours where the male and female students are segregated according to Muslim practice. Not only is a this a blatant violation of the supposedly no-religion policy of the public school system, but it doesn’t even seek to accommodate Canadian values on gender equality. Read that policy to be no Christian religion in the public schools.
The ultimate irony of all this is that the liberals who are pandering to the Muslims’s every wish and whim as they edge closer to recognize some form of Sharia law, are blissfully or willfully ignorant that Sharia law would target the liberals first. Justin Trudeau might spend a lot of weekends visiting mosques but the members of that mosque really don’t have a lot in common with him.
Are we talking about all Muslims? Of course not. Most Muslims just want to make a better life for themselves and their families. But it’s not the majo
rity we need to worry about. It’s the minority who are pushing the rights envelope in such a direction and with such force that it will overwhelm not just non-Muslims but moderate Muslims as well.
This is when liberal tolerance becomes a death-wish and it is one reason that we need to define what our democratic values really are and that they apply to all citizens and not just those who recognize that my freedom is contingent upon you not taking it away.
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