Be sure to pack a headscarf. ‘Cause that’s coming, too.
North Shore Tax driver Behzad Saidy refused to take Bruce Gilmour and his dog from a West Vancouver coffee shop to Gilmour’s Vancouver home in January 2006, saying his Muslim religion prevented him from associating with dogs because they’re “unclean.”
In addition to paying Gilmour $2,500, the taxi company was required to implement a policy for transporting blind people and their guide dogs.
It’s against the law for cab drivers not to transport blind people with guide dogs, but a settlement agreement between Gilmour and the taxi company says an exception to that law would be a Muslim driver refusing to transport a dog because of religious beliefs.
Via Mark Steyn, who (as you might expect) has more commentary. As do BCF and Shaidle
Update – Damian Brooks – “Steyn may well be right, but the case he’s chosen to highlight doesn’t make his point.”.
Update II – BCF says “not so fast….”
To paraphrase Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, “Muslims don’t drive”, and, from personal experience, I don’t wanna be in any vehicle where one is behind the wheel.
I think it might be time to start a campaign asking our MP’s and MPP’s if they would support an overhaul of these Human Rights tribunals. They should either be limited in the harm they can do (restrict ability to award monetary penalties) or allow for an easier appeal process which would use a real judge to re-try the case.
Funny thing is, taxis are so rare on the North Shore, it’s only the elderly, blind, disabled etc that use them. Nice to know that the BCHRC can now interpret a clearly written statute as being modified by the Koran. Considering that most of the people who make up the HRCs are subliterate socialists who came last in their class at law school, we are truly FUKT.
What sort of dream world does the CHRC live in? The perversity of this decision alone is grounds that this bogus Kangaroo Court be disbanded.
Interesting topic that I’ve been following for a while now: up to which point to perceived religious obligations supersede the laws passed in a secular country.
In the U.S. this has reached the courts already, where a pharmacists is suing WalMart for firing him when he refused to dispense the morning-after pill and claimed it was against his religious conviction.
There are many more silly examples I could dish out from most major religions (The Hidus in the UK protecting their sacred pull on religious grounds even though it has TB), but the important question still stands: at what point will Canada decide to curb the religious/traditional rights of it citizens if they conflict with the secular laws?
Hmmmm. My religion does not allow me to be in the same country with people who bow 5 times a day to a pedophile. As well, my religion does not allow me to be within 50 miles of anybody who performs clitoral circumcision. Finally, my religion forbids breathing the same air as anybody who would strap explosives to their children. Saying that, I think I will continue with my all pork Thursday, bacon for brekkie, ham for lunch and pork ribs for dinner. Washed down with some beer and some rock n roll, I think I like my religion over the “religion of peace”. See ya in court, islamoa$$holes.
I don’t have a problem with individuals refusing to dispense medications, rent halls, print brochures, etc. based on their religious beliefs.
I do have a problem when those beliefs are allowed to supercede laws that are supposed to apply to all of us equally – accomodating a guide dog, photo ID.
@Kate
“I don’t have a problem with individuals refusing to dispense medications”. Kate, the pharmacist in question breached the law and cited his religious convictions as the cause. The law in his specific state stated that he must dispense the morning-after pill if the patient had a prescription and she had: he refused, broke the law, and was fired. Now he is arguing that his religious convictions come above the law and the law is not allowed to discriminate against his convictions. Difficult topic and society will have to decide where the line should be drawn.
Try catching a cab at Minneapolis/St. Paul with liquor on your breath, or a bottle from the Duty Free in your suitcase.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501727.html
Small wonder I take the bus over to the Mall of America. Sheesh!
Religious Dogma strikes again.
He shouldn’t be a taxi driver, and the company should be able to exclude his type from employment do to his inability to provide service to good customers (and I assume the blind are good taxi customers.)
I would bet that the taxi company is in a bind – thanks to our idiotic Charter and the HRC as handmaiden of the Charter.
They can’t fire the taxi driver for not doing his job – which is simple: pick up and deliver people and their packages. That’s all.
They can’t fire the taxi driver for not doing that simple job – because he’d claim he’s fired because of ‘religious discrimination’. The fact that HE is claiming that his religion prevents him from doing that job for which he was hired – is shoved to the bottom of the pile. All that counts – is ‘religious discrimination’. But, but..he’s not doing the job for which he was hired!!!
So- could a Muslim become a firefighter, and then, refuse to help women flee a burning office building because they weren’t ‘dressed properly’?
Could a Muslim become a waiter, and refuse to serve someone with pork because he won’t handle the plate??? etc..
Our society’s services -both private and public – are not bound to a religion; they are secular. The problem is – the Charter and the HRC bonds them to a religion, an ethnic group, a linguistic group – and privileges these ideologies over our laws and norms.
The problem is the Charter and the HRCs. People will try to privilege themselves, isolate themselves into ‘groups’…no matter what. But our secular society insists, on paper, that no discrimination is permitted. In reality, if the discrimination is carried out by a ‘group’, then, within our Charter’s policy of multiculturalism, the discrimination is permitted. No dogs.
Supposedly, an important reason for allowing 3rd world immigrants (largely muslims) into Canada, as well as other western nations, is that they will do the jobs natural born citizens won’t.
Another immigration myth.
As far as dogs being “unclean,” have you ever taken a cab driven by a muslim? Most of these people are filthy. They stink to high heaven. In fact, a friend of mine in Toronto asks for his money back from the cab company and gets it, due to their printed promise of providing a clean cab.
In European public baths, muslims are asked not to shit in the drain. What civilized person needs to be asked that?
We must end muslim immigration.
Weigh the pros and cons and any rational citizen will find there is not one logical reason to support muslim immigration. But there are absolutely vital reasons to end it.
CAIR (and undoubtedly its Canadian clone) is behind a lot of this. Perversely calling itself a “civil rights” organanization and crying “hate crime” at the drop of a hat, it is a front group with extensive off-shore funding and definite ulterior motives far beyond the “civil rights” of Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis, North Vancouver, and elsewhere.
Simple solution–tell the dispatcher you have a dog when you call the cab company.
You know I think the CHRC may be violating themselves;)
http://www.chrc-ccdp.ca/discrimination/physical_mental-en.asp
“Amendments in 1998 to the Canadian Human Rights Act require employers and service providers to accommodate special needs short of undue hardship, including those of people with disabilities.”
Being forced to wait for another cab with a person who considers your guide dog unclean seems an “undue hardship” to me.
This is really going to piss MADD off. Now drunk drivers will be able to use the excuse that they had to drive because taxi’s refused to drive them on religious grounds.
Yup I need another coffee.
Really don’t mean to flog my blog through Kate’s place, but this is related, in case you missed it.
According to that settlement, it is legal to discriminate against people, as long as it is a muslim cab driver who discriminates.
Saying that, I think I will continue with my all pork Thursday, bacon for brekkie, ham for lunch and pork ribs for dinner. Washed down with some beer and some rock n roll, I think I like my religion over the “religion of peace”. See ya in court, islamoa$$holes.
Alas, it’s more likely they’ll see you on a cold slab, following your massive coronary! 😉
“Try catching a cab at Minneapolis/St. Paul with liquor on your breath, or a bottle from the Duty Free in your suitcase.”
So, I wonder how this sits with the ‘Don’t drink and drive’ campaign.
How can any organisation, like MADD for example, or the government, for that matter, allow this?
Where is the legal challenge?
This is simply a case of supremacist muslims belligerently forcing sharia in our lands. And getting away with it.
“Could a Muslim become a waiter, and refuse to serve someone with pork because he won’t handle the plate??? etc..”
In Minneapolis the answer is a resounding Yes, ET. That’s because big corporations can generally be scared easily:
Target shifts Muslims who won’t ring up pork
MINNEAPOLIS – Muslim cashiers at some local Target stores who object to ringing up products that contain pork are being shifted to other positions where they don’t need to, the discount retailer said Saturday.
http://tinyurl.com/yqzjrt
“at what point will Canada decide to curb the religious/traditional rights of it citizens if they conflict with the secular laws?”
Secular law has to and will trump. Religion is filed under “your own personal opinion”.
Kate- I geuss it’s merely a coincidence that when it comes to conflicts of religion and law you always side with religion when Christianity and always side with the law when the religion involved happens to be Islam.
Personaly I’m glad the cabbie got slapped just as I’m glad the pharmacist got the shitcanning he deserved.
With all due respect, dudley, I am 47, 6ft, 200 lbs, run 4 miles, 3 times a week, as fit as I was in basic training, and the only slab-laying will be by any islamonutjob who enters my space cushion.
Mybe these Muzzie cabbies should get a set of the official prophet-sanitized Iranian radial tires that do not become unclean by running over road killed dogs and cats. 😀
Someone should tell Behzad Saidy that the Prophet was so impressed by dogs that he even prayed in their presence. I have no idea where the “modern” (i.e., post-Mohammed) Islamic attitude towards dogs comes from, but considering that the little fur-balls were our constant companions against the terrors of the day and horrors of the night for possibly as long as the last 100,000 years (and almost certainly since the beginning of the last inter-glacial period), we owe them an eternal “get out of jail free” card, rather than slandering them as “unclean.”
Ignorant twit. “The more I learn about people, the better I like my dogs.”
The estimable folks at Power Line, who are themselves Minneapolis-based, keep an eye on CAIR for good reason. Remember the “flying imams” leaving from Minneapolis after a big conference, the Minneapolis Muslim cabbies who wouldn’t pick up infidels with alcohol at the airport, the Target We-won’t-touch-pork clerks, and the footbath installation at one area college I believe:
http://tinyurl.com/2j6jsc
A muslim clerk at a walmart store, in the US, refused to put pork products thru the till. Religious rights won over common sense. This happened a while ago, but perhaps someone could find the story.
As was previously mentioned. Anytime we call a cab from now on, we have a _guide_dog_ with us.
Not just any dog. Has to be a guide dog.
In a nutshell, as Mark Steyn points out–and I have too, on occasion–the HRCs actively discriminate against Christians. That seems to be the only religion–the one on whose shoulders the whole culture of Western civilization stands–which gets shafted by the ideological fanatics who staff these kangaroo courts, with Canadians’ tax $$ too.
If the taxi driver’s Christian sensibilities had been breached, the HRC would have said too bad and probably fined the driver as well as extorted “pay back” to the offended party. Look at the precedents: Christians are told to remove their “offensive” actions from the public square and pay retribution to those who complain about them.
What a bloody double standard! And, in a Western country, the Muslim driver’s reasons for refusing to have a dog in his car are, frankly, ludicrous. In Muslim countries, they make no exceptions for other religions. In fact, the Muslims punish such practitioners–dhimmis. Why, then, should Western countries become pretzels in order to accommodate eccentric, unpalatable Muslim behaviour over here?
I’m altogether sick and tired of the Muslims who misuse the freedoms this country affords them in order to make the lives of the rest of us increasingly miserable. A pox on such treachery! And I’d be quite happy for such leeches to stay put in their native countries–if they don’t like the norms of certain countries, don’t go to them– or go back.
Canada needs a John Howard (Australian PM) to tell these people to shape up–to Western values–or ship out!
MaryT, please check my two previous posts including a link about Muslim clerks in Target (a major U.S. chain) refusing to handle pork and being accommodated by a frightened corporation.
The rhetorical questions in ET’s earlier post are unfortunately being answered.
Just adding to the richness of the multicultural mosaic…
Your karma ran over my dogma! No, but seriously, what I don’t get is why the taxi company is forced to pay for the decision of the driver. The driver knew, or ought to have known, that part of his job description was transporting the blind and their seeing eye dogs. Refusing to do the job should be grounds for dismissal. The only exception would arise if he owned his own taxi in which case he should be allowed to accept or refuse any passenger he so wishes.
What really irks me is that these kangaroo courts/political commissars aka human “rights” tribunals have no compunctions about compelling a christian couple, against their religion, to take gays into their bed and breakfast, or compelling a christian printer against his religion, to print gay propaganda, but allow a muslim taxi driver to refuse a ride to a blind passenger on religious grounds. Double standard?? Let’s hear the lefty defence of this one.
no, murray, your suggestion is not simple; it’s simplistic.
After all, your use of a cab is not subject to Islamic law – such that you must inform that dispatcher that you: have a dog, have purchased bacon and ham; have several bottles of alcohol and, have consumed alcohol; and….
Why not just wear a yellow star and inform the dispatcher that you are ‘dhimmi’…
This is not a Muslim but a secular society. The services of a public or private company must operate within the rules of our society- which is secular.
The problem is, that within our Charter with its focus on the ‘rights of groups’ trumping any rights of individuals – and the Big Brother of the HRCs – groups, with ideologies based on ‘origin’ ie, religion, ethnicity and linguistic origins – their ideologies trump our secular rights. The taxi company can’t fire the Muslim driver – even though he isn’t doing his job.
As for Target and other stores – they must insert a clause into their employee agreement, that, as a supermarket, they sell a great variety of products, and no employee can, on religious or other grounds, refuse to process these products. Then..a religious nut can sue Target – and take it to the Supreme Court – and hopefully, the Supreme Court would side with Target.
But, the West has to stand up and protect its secular rights. The fact that the Canadian Charter doesn’t protect individuals and privileges minority groups – is a deep ‘fault line’ in our society.
Simple solution–tell the dispatcher you have a dog when you call the cab company.
What’s simple about that? Are you suggesting that the blind with a dog should have to pre-arrange services at public travel junctures, finding phones first, no small inconvenience, so a Muslim won’t be offended? Are we to phone restaurants in advance to see if the Muslim waiter will bring our ham sandwich too? In your universe pre-approval should be granted to Muslims before they will perform a public tasks for us. They can take employment in any field and be exempted from that providing service at will. Have I got that right?
Hey, murray, surrender all want to Islam. Your comments make you dhimmi material anyways. Most of us aren’t going to let the tyranny of a 7th century minded minority disrupt our secular society.
Can a muslim apply for a job with LCBO and refuse to sell liquor? He/she would then sit in the corner all day and collect pay. Fair enough? I am converting!
Maybe if over Xmas there is a fatality due to the Muzzies refusing a (harmless) drunk passenger, people will finally start to get a bloody grip. In the meantime, I warn the cab company when i travel with Bug (my chihuahua), and tell them straight out I don’t one some Allah-lover showing up and refusing me. Always makes the dispatcher laugh, and I ALWAYS get a Christian cab driver (usually a Catholic – rosary on the rearview).
RG
Nice points, DrD. I hope that next time the HRC tries to bash a Christian organization, the Christian org.’s lawyer will bring up these other cases, and claim religious discrimination.
These things are going to have to be fought out in the courts AND, AND – in blogs. Blogs are vital in this fight – because the MSM is infected with the brain disease of leftism – a state of increasing dogmatism, irrationality and jealous hatreds of success and individuals. So, blogs are vital in ‘spreading the debate’ and focusing on reason.
Daniel Henninger on “The Death of Diversity,” or why it deserves to die:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110010477
Having ridden in more than a few cabs in Vancouver, I would pit the cleanliness of my dog against the cleanliness of the Muslim cabdriver anytime – and almost always win.
I would also recommend emailing Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon, who recently made a committment to ending the discriminitory practices of cab drivers in Vancouver.
Kevin.Falcon.MLA@leg.bc.ca
So, a Muslim cabby in BC can refuse a fare that involves a dog, but a university in BC is installing foot-washing stations for Muslims who need them prior to prayer?
Glad to see that “Accommodation Street” continues to be one-way.
Glad I live in the great socialist enclave of Trudeaupedia.
the kid from brooklyn weighs in on flying . language warning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA8x_YypfjA
Ward:
Absolutely right: and the next time you’re in Toronto try calling Diamond Cabs- but don’t wear any clothes you ever intend to use again.
muslims need to get with the program or get out.
Murray, should gays need to phone a printing company to see if they’ll violate the religious beliefs of Christians?
If you don’t support the religious rights of Christians to refuse gays, how do justify muslim’s refusal to transport guide dogs?
“Now he is arguing that his religious convictions come above the law and the law is not allowed to discriminate against his convictions”
The law isn’t discriminating since it applies equally to all. It’s his religion that discriminates and now these people expect the law to discriminate in their favour. They should be told that separation of Church and State is a two way street and that their real problem lies with the Church and not the State.
These muslims seem to have alot of needs.Also seem to be a high mantience race, they should adapt to are style of life here in canada or leave. im tired of accomadating them.
Another example of Islamics/Muslims are not a fit in our Western world, never will be.
Problem is, they get away with stuff like this, we are supposed to bend to their religion, mired in the 7th century.
What are we doing about it?
Immigrating more of the same and turning away Europeans who are a fit in our civilized world.
We are also doing what we do best, complaining and tolerating while they slowly but surely get their way, Sharia law is on it’s way, just sit and wait, it’s the Canadian way.
Let them try that sharia law shit, and see how fast vigalantie law will follow.