Reason to Fear
The Muslim experience in Britain, plus a little Arab history, tells us more about Canadian Muslims than any poll ever could
Salim Mansur - March 26, 2007
A recent Environics poll in association with the CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, surveying attitudes of and toward Canadian Muslims, seemed to be good news for Canada. It was released and widely reported, it would appear, with an expectation that the findings should have a calming effect on Canadian fears of homegrown terrorism. Since the arrest last summer of 18 Muslims of varying ages for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in and around Toronto, Canadians have had good reason to be concerned. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the survey to dispel those anxieties. A hard look at the statistics suggests that what occurred in Britain in July 2005--when four British Muslim suicide bombers struck London's underground railway and a bus, killing 56 fellow citizens--could just as likely happen here.
The survey interviewed 2,545 individuals, 500 of them Muslims. Seventy-three per cent of Muslim respondents described themselves as "very proud" Canadians. When asked how they viewed the arrests of the 18 alleged terrorists, 73 per cent responded, "These attacks were not at all justified," and 82 per cent said they, "had no sympathy for those who wanted to carry them out."
Licia Corbella of the Calgary Sun, however, exposed the unsavoury reality buried within the survey. She notes that 12 per cent of Muslims surveyed--a figure amounting to 84,000 in a population of 700,000 Canadian Muslims--identified themselves as extremists supporting terrorism. Even taking into account the margin of error of 4.4 per cent either way in the survey (19 times out of 20) and rounding the figure at seven per cent of the population, the number of Muslims self-identifying as extremists comes to 49,000. To give that figure some context, it means there are more than twice as many extremists in this country as there are soldiers in Canada's standing army, according to Canadian Conference of Defence Associations statistics.
The CBC spin notwithstanding, the survey is bad news for Canada. In a society open and hospitable to immigrants, Canadians have learned that a sufficiently large number of people belonging to a particular faith tradition, Islam, approve of and may be prepared to engage in violence against their fellow citizens and country. More to the point, the survey shows Canada is not really much different than Britain and some other European countries in harbouring extremist Muslims who hate the West, and who use multiculturalism as a cover for importing sharia-based religious laws into secular democracy.
In a recent opinion piece on the Arab reformist website aafaq.com (made available by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute), editor Omran Salman suggests Britain is the largest exporter of terrorism in the non-Muslim world. Salman observed that Britain is, "alongside Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, etc., at the top of the list of countries that regularly export terrorists to the rest of the world. The basic difference is that the Islamists in Britain enjoy the protection of the law and the sympathy of many political figures in Britain--or at least their activities and their presence do not present any problem for these political figures."
For Britain, the end of the empire came with a brutal irony, with those once colonized arriving in such numbers as to change the face of a kingdom that had once ruled a great portion of the world. Muslims in Britain make up a large segment of the new population. The English writer Melanie Phillips titled her book Londonistan quite aptly, for the extremists in their ranks publicly demonstrate their support for Osama bin Laden and the politics of jihad (holy war) against the West and Israel.
Canada is not quite there, but it is also not much behind Britain. There is no colourful public figure in Canadian politics like London's Mayor Ken "Red" Livingstone who pointedly embraced Sheikh Qaradawi, the notorious preacher of Muslim extremism and jihad on the Arab television station Al Jazeerah. Livingstone compared Qaradawi to Pope John XXIII, the reigning pontiff from 1958 to 1963, remembered as a great reforming pope who strived for harmony among religions.
Livingstone is a notorious headline grabber, but British politicians in general during the decade of Tony Blair's reign have gone after votes by ingratiating themselves with the most vocal Muslim community leaders--the leader of the Muslim Council for Britain, Iqbal Sacranie, was knighted by the Blair government in 2005. And they've been willing to pay a hefty price to win the electoral support of organizations like the Muslim Council for Britain, bending the country's foreign policy, in rhetoric if not in substance, to accommodate Muslim demands, as in favouring Palestine (opposing Israel) and Kashmir (opposing India).
Page 1 of 2