It threatens all of us. Plus, it's just dumb.
Dangerous disconnect
Terrorism arrests should prompt complete rethink of immigration policy
By Licia Corbella
Calgary Sun
June 11, 2006
Do multiculturalism and political correctness threaten Canada?
Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar has no doubt they do.
"Multiculturalism takes away our complete undivided loyalties to this country," explains Kanwar, a criminologist, and professor of sociology at Mount Royal College in Calgary.
"Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK. It is not," says Kanwar, a devout Muslim.
"And political correctness threatens us because we can't fight something we refuse to label and understand."
Kanwar, 65, says the amount of political correctness stemming from last weekend's arrests of 17 radicalized Muslims in the Toronto area is "sickening" and "dangerous."
"Everybody was tripping over themselves not to state the obvious, that these men mostly attended the same mosque," said Kanwar, referring to the Al-Rahman Islamic Centre -- a small store-front mosque in Mississauga, a suburb just west of Toronto, that twists true Islam.
Toronto police Chief Bill Blair actually boasted that "there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslim or the Muslim community" at the post-arrest news conference a week ago.
"That is an absurdity. Political correctness has gone too far. Political correctness threatens our society," said the Pakistani-born Kanwar. "It is the responsibility of the minorities to adjust to the majority, not the other way around," added Kanwar.
David Harris, a Canadian security analyst and senior fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies in Toronto, agrees political correctness threatens our safety.
"Political correctness is analytically and intellectually dishonest. We have to understand the doctrine and the dogma of our enemy and we can't do that if we dare not even speak the m-word or the i-word," said Harris, a former CSIS agent who is now a counter-terrorism expert with Insignis in Ottawa.
Harris, who was reached in Washington, D.C. on Friday afternoon, appeared before a U.S. government judiciary subcommittee on Thursday and Friday where he said Canada should consider imposing a moratorium on new immigrants until it figures out what needs to be done.
That seems a little on the extreme side, after all, this is a country of immigrants and immigration is essential to the well-being of this country with its low birth rate, aging population and vast geography.
But surely a complete rethink of the policies behind Canada's immigration system is needed. Immigrants should be screened more thoroughly, not just for criminal records, but for incompatible ideologies as well.
"We're bringing people in as convention refugees who nowhere else in the world would qualify as convention refugees," pointed out Harris.
"In the average western nation, the acceptance rate of refugee claimants is 12 to 15%, in Canada it's close to 50%."
The numbers of refugees, said Harris, has skyrocketed from 500 people in 1977 to tens of thousands a year in Canada.
Next, Harris said Canada must stop Saudi Arabian money from coming into the country to fund extremist Wahabi Islamic ideology in Canadian mosques.
Kanwar, however, hits closer to home when affixing blame for the development of homegrown terrorists in Canada.
"I think the parents of these young people bear a lot of the responsibility," said Kanwar.
Kanwar points out that Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, the eldest of the men charged in the alleged terrorist plots that included blowing up numerous Toronto and Ottawa landmarks and beheading the prime minister, "is just an uneducated, unemployed bum."
"Why didn't these parents go with their children to this mosque to see who is influencing them?" asked Kanwar.
Kanwar also rejected the idea put forward on Thursday by members of Ontario's Muslim community who said Muslim youth are becoming radicalized because they are "marginalized" in Canadian society.
"They marginalize themselves," he said. "I came to Canada in 1966. I did not speak a word of English. I worked hard, furthered my education. No Canadian marginalized me ever. I don't see any country in the world better than Canada."
Kanwar points out that on Tuesday, when 15 of the 17 men -- five of them young offenders -- were brought into a Brampton, Ont. court, James Silver, a lawyer representing Fahim Ahmad, 21, complained to the court his client was held in "isolation 24 hours a day" in Maplehurst Correctional Centre by staff who wear full body armour and "face masks."
For accused terrorists this should be expected, pointed out Kanwar.
But what of Canadian society on the whole, which is expected to tolerate the wives, mothers and daughters of these accused terrorists wearing complete face masks all the time in public since they wear burqas that reveal only their eyes? Kanwar said covering one's face in Canada should be illegal.
"I'm sick and tired of political correctness," said Kanwar from his Calgary home.
"When I talk to other immigrants who complain about Canada I say, 'if you hate this country, why don't you go back to hell where you came from?' I tell them, 'nobody begged you to come here and no one will stop you if you want to go. So, go to hell and get the hell out of here.'"
Good point.
Last I checked there's no barbed wire at the border.
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