Canada’s parliamentarians led by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal MP Frank Baylis recently passed a motion “condemning all forms of Islamophobia.” Initially, some Conservative MPs declined to give unanimous consent, but under threat of being labelled “racist” and “Islamophobic,” unanimity was eventually achieved.
Had the motion also denounced the Islamist doctrine of armed jihad and Islamic sharia as a source of public law, it would have met the test of good faith. Unfortunately, it did not and thus the motion made a mockery of the facts on the ground.
Condemning or harassing anyone solely on the basis of their religion is wrong.
But public concerns and fears about so much death and destruction being caused around the world by terrorists who claim to be guided by Islam is not Islamophobia. Nor is it racism or bigotry. It is a rational response to a real threat to western civilization, even though the preponderance of so-called “white guilt” in our Parliament, eventually coerced all MPs to back the Islamophobic petition.
Public concern about terrorists who claim to be guided by Islam is not Islamophobia.
So let’s see what has transpired around the globe since this motion was passed, with little or no debate on Parliament Hill or in the media.
From Pakistan, to Egypt, to Somalia, to Indonesia, to Yemen, to Turkey, there has been no letup in Islamist terrorism that is the main source of people’s anxiety with regard to Islam.
Not even Prophet Muhammad’s birthday celebrations, “Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi” (the Muslim equivalent of Christmas), last weekend brought any respite to Islamist terror. A report from Pakistan says a Canadian may have been involved in an attack on a mosque belonging to the minority Ahmaddiya Muslim community on Monday.
The Canadian High Commission in Islamabad tweeted that it was “deeply concerned about reports of an ongoing mob assault on an #Ahmadi site in #Chakwal, including reports of a fatality.”
Even so, the Islamist attack on the mosque was mild compared to other recent atrocities committed by jihadis in the Islamic world.
The bombing of St. Peter Cathedral in Cairo on December 11 left at least 25 people dead. |
On Friday, Dec. 9, as Nigerians prepared for the Eid festivities, two female suicide bombers exploded themselves in a market in the predominantly Muslim northeast of the country, killing 57 people and wounding 177 others, including 120 children.
On Sunday, Dec. 11, Boko Haram, a jihadi terrorist group in Nigeria, sent two girls, one seven-years-old the other eight, to blow themselves up. That horrific decision killed both children and at least three adults, while injuring 17. Also on Sunday, on the other side of Africa in Somalia, jihadi terrorists of Al-Shabab killed 16 people in a suicide truck bombing outside the busy seaport of Mogadishu.
On the same day in Egypt, a Christian cathedral complex was bombed, killing 25 worshippers observing Sunday mass while wounding scores of others, many women and children.
Why are Canada’s parliamentarians willing to condemn ‘Islamophobia’ but not Islamist terror?
But the tally of death that day did not end in Egypt or Nigeria.
The jihadi bloodlust continued on the eastern edge of the Arab world in the Yemeni port of Aden, where Islamic State bombed a military school killing at least 48 soldiers.
Finally, to bring the message of death to Europe’s borders, bomb blasts in the Turkish city of Istanbul killed 38 people, mostly policemen, also on Sunday.
All of which begs the question: Why did Canada’s parliamentarians condemn “Islamophobia,” but not, equally and simultaneously, terrorism committed in the name of Islam?
Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
