Ryerson student newspaper, The Eyeopener;

As the largest student group on campus, the Muslim Students’ Association has made its presence known in student politics. Former MSA vice-president Muhammad Ali Jabbar is heading up the RSU, thanks to support from the MSA. The group has monopolized use of the multifaith room, putting the true meaning of the room’s name in jeopardy.
Through its renewed fight against Islamophobia, the MSA has also been criticized as being increasingly polarized and turning the RSU’s attention mostly toward Muslim issues. Smaller religious groups with less influence have been left wondering when their needs will be addressed.
A variety of religious groups on campus have said they have felt uncomfortable trying to use the multifaith room.
Eric Da Silva, president of the Catholic Student Association, says the group looked into using the room for mass but was told by RSU front desk staff that the room was “permanently booked” by Muslim students.

h/t to Stella, in the comments.

*

Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun (Australia), Nov. 2;

Excuses over. The disgraced mufti of Australia set Muslims a test last month and they failed.
That test couldn’t have been easier: make Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilaly pay for preaching that unveiled women invited rape.
Prove that Muslims can’t be led by a man who says raped women must be “jailed for life”. Prove we have nothing to fear from your faith.
Simple? Yet yesterday 34 Muslim groups signed a petition backing this bigot, while others plan a big rally for Sydney tomorrow, denouncing not Hilaly but the non-Muslims who criticise him. (Ed Note: The rally was called off at the request of Hilali.)
The results are in: Islam here — as represented by many of its leaders — is now a threat.
What’s more: our culture of self-hate makes us too weak to properly resist.
[…]
Yesterday Suzanne Bassette, national secretary of the Australian Democrats, even said: “I’m willing to stand up with anybody else in this country who happens to agree with Sheik Hilaly’s sentiments . . . Unfortunately, how a woman dresses does affect her level of likeliness to be chosen.”
She said the “real lesson” from this fuss was this “latest opportunity to get angry”. The problem wasn’t the mufti who wants to jail raped women, but his critics.
Bassette wasn’t alone. The Age ran a big cartoon likewise blaming sluttish white girls for putting themselves in danger, and federal Labor’s Peter Garrett, the former singer, said Hilaly’s comments were terrible, but “at the same time, the levels of violence against Australian women is something happening in the bars, in the clubs, in the bedrooms, in the boardrooms”.
Again, we are the truly wicked. Leave Hilaly alone.
How can a culture so sick of itself resist the kind of challenge that Hilaly and his angry supporters represent? How can it inspire young Muslims to side not with him but with us?
I don’t know, when we teach the young we are a country of child-stealing, land-raping, Muslim-murdering, Yank-licking, gas-belching vandals. Until that changes, expect the traffic to flow more into Hilaly’s ghetto than out of it.

Via Thomas LIfson who asks “Has anyone heard from NOW on this story?”

“A documentary about radical Islam and the West’s hesitancy to confront it”.
If you didn’t catch it on Foxnews over the weekend, you have the choice of an abridged or full version at News Buckit.
Highly recommended.

VDH;

Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity.
Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?
Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle.
It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.
Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity — and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims’ heads on poles for public display, would’ve been thrilled by such a gruesome show.
Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans — in fear of radical Islamists — would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

Related:
A portion of this piece in Welt, by Michael Wolffsohn is translated into English at the German blog, Medienkritick, “The integration disaster looks like this: The few true Euro-Muslims are also leaving us and going to the USA . Both disasters threaten us from within.”
In France, where the burning buses are always empty; “Facts pop up once in a while like fish bubbles on a quiet lake—hundreds of cars burned on a relatively calm night, at least a hundred every night all year long, 2500 policemen injured since January 2006—and disappear without consequences.”
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred: Why generalizing is necessary when confronting moral bankruptcy and the passive facilitation of evil.

Canada in the dark;

In Ottawa, the Steyn book is available neither at Chapters nor at such independent bookstores as Nicholas Hoare. A clerk at the Nicholas Hoare bookstore said the book has been difficult to obtain for Canadian retailers.
“Our speculation is that they’re keeping the book in stock in the States because of the demand there,” said the clerk, who identified herself as Stephanie.
A Canadian citizen, Mr. Steyn lives in New Hampshire with his wife and three children. He is a former National Post columnist and now writes for the Atlantic Monthly, Maclean’s and the Western Standard, among other publications.
In an e-mail exchange, Mr. Steyn yesterday said the excuses of Canadian book sellers, who insisted there was no demand for his book, are increasingly hilarious.
In Canada, he said, there are enough copies of Jules Carlysle’s Dumbass “to carpet the Arctic Circle,” but no one thought enough of his book to order sufficient copies.
“I can understand that there are products one might consider it prudent to restrict distribution of — certain Canadian novels spring to mind — but, oddly enough, my publishers prefer the old-fashioned model: They’re in the bookselling business not the book-withholding business.
“My advice to Canadian readers is drive over to the Buffalo Barnes & Noble and smuggle it back in, cunningly hidden under the Algerian terrorist in the back seat.”

Steyn has sold enough copies through his website to make America Alone a Canadian bestseller. He talks about the book in an interview at National Review.

(Ottawa, Canada – Oct 31, 2006) The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) is asking all people of conscience to write to Maclean’s Magazine.
In the October 23rd issue of Maclean’s, a provocative and Islamophobic article by Mark Steyn was printed entitled, “The future belongs to Islam.” The article’s fear mongering tone focuses on the influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe and North America through an analysis that parallels Samuel Hungtion’s [sic] infamous book, “The Clash of Civilizations.”
[…]
TALKING POINTS
1. The article entitled “The Future belongs to Islam” is inflammatory and offensive. It does little to build bridges, it simply divides people.
2. It would be appreciated if such provocative articles are not given space and if Maclean’s maintains a balanced editorial policy.
3. Maclean’s in the past was an authoritative and respectable voice for Canadians; however, today’s Maclean’s is clearly breaking away from this tradition.
4. If Maclean’s Magazine continues to publish such articles, I will consider not renewing my subscription.

The CAIR release does provide some useful information for those of you who mght choose tocongratulate Macleans for embracing the only diversity that really matters in a free and democratic society – diversity of thought.
letters@macleans.ca,
adsales@macleans.ca
Fax: 416.764.1332
Maclean’s Letters
One Mount Pleasant Road
11th floor
Toronto, ON M4Y 2Y5
Via Cjunk, who shares his own letter.

Two years later.

A people that bows to tyrants
Will lose more than life and belongings
Then, the lights will go out

I think what they’re really looking for are Danish cartoonists.

A: A normal day in France.

And the righteous struggle against the Zionist occupiers – in Argentina

Stanley Kurtz; “Islamic militias tear capital apart. Country may soon be divided….No, not Iraq. I’m talking about France. Europe continues its descent into…what shall we call it? Civil war? Intifada? Call it what you like, but take it deadly seriously. More scare-mongering from an American conservative? Well, I’ve noticed the beginnings of a shift in the European press in just the past week or two. There’s a new sense of alarm, and even the partially spoken belief that Europe’s American critics may have a point after all. Take a look at “What’s Wrong With Europe,” from Spiegel Online.”

The French capital has an intifada unfolding on its doorstep. For 11 nights running, garbage containers and vehicles have been burning in Departement Seine-Saint-Denis. Night after night, gangs of teenagers storm through their neighborhoods, throwing Molotov cocktails into carpet shops and nursery schools, turning vehicles into bonfires — 250 in one night, then 315 the next night, and 500 the next.
[…]
Social divisions in today’s French society run along ethnic and religious lines, and they also signify deep cultural rifts. The ideal of the French republic — the nation as a community of the willing, of citizens who enjoy equal rights, regardless of their ethnic origins or religious beliefs — is giving way to a volatile co-existence among communities that want to retain their identities and live according to their own rules. The official French position has always been to condemn multiculturalism — and yet the state must now deal with the consequences.
Between “us” and “them”
The strict separation of church and state, a sacrosanct pillar of French government, has become an illusion. Jihad may not be what’s inspiring the rioters, but Islam is undeniably an inseparable component of their self-identity. Islam strengthens their sense of solidarity, gives them the appearance of legitimacy and draws an unmistakable line between them and the others, the “French.”
Suddenly “big brothers” — devout bearded men from the mosques who wear long traditional robes — are positioning themselves between the authorities and the rioters in Clichy-sous-Bois, calling for order in the name of Allah. As thousands of voices shout “Allahu Akbar” from the windows of high-rise apartment buildings, shivers run down the spines of television viewers in their seemingly safe living rooms.
As welcome as these self-appointed keepers of the peace may be, worried authorities think they have detected something akin to a Muslim law enforcement group — perhaps even the beginnings of an Islamic militia. “The logic behind this unrest,” says one police officer, “is secession.” If he’s right, it would be a nightmare scenario of entire neighborhoods and communities separating themselves from the state and essentially declaring their independence, creating zones with their own laws, areas to which the authorities no longer have access unless they wish to be perceived as hostile intruders.

RTWT
(Note – the Spiegel piece is from 2005)

This week’s must read, at the Belmont Club. Exerpts;

According to this thinking, the Church of England cannot be benign enough to escape its fundamental guilt. Guilty while kneeling. But part of the problem is that the discussion is not wholly objective. Secularism itself has at least once in this century taken on the trappings of a religion. Karen Armstrong, quoted in the 5th page of the UK Times article, notes this explicitly: “There have been five major missionary movements in the world — Christianity, Marxism, Islam, Buddhism and secularism. Secularism can be as lethal as any religion. Our society is very secular but, in the Middle East, where modernism is new, secularism is seen as lethal and invasive.” Sayyid Qutb would probably agree. Al-Qaeda’s ideology was precisely a Muslim response to the perceived menace of secularism during its heyday in the late 1940s. Proposals by European “intellectuals” to banish Christianity and Islam would probably founder on the objection that the priests of one sect — namely Marxism and secularism — should not have the right to outlaw the votaries of other rites. In other words, any solution to remove “belief” from public life is itself be founded on a normative belief. But embracing this contradiction is easier than to accept the alternative proposition that politics and society have historically been not only about systems of belief but about the dominance of one system of belief over another. That all wars are ultimately wars of religion. Viewed in this way, the debate over banishing “religion” in Britain is really the old one of avoidance versus confrontation in another guise. We twist and turn in an effort to avoid the War, but attempts to define the War out of existence may ultimately be unsuccessful.
It is the awareness of the potentially bottomless nature of the conflict, not only in Afghanistan but throughout Europe, that has driven public officialdom into the unprecedented use of euphemism. It talks about the danger in hushed tones in the hopes that it will go away. For example, civil unrest threatens Paris, according to the Telegraph but the mysterious insurgents cannot be identified as anything other than “youths”.
[…]
One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are its most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda’s pet hates that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats.