Breaking The Stranglehold, One Demo At A Time

I get letters. I laugh.

Thanks, Lesli Boldt and Harold Bothrop, for appreciating "StopWar’s peace is about opposing Israel."

But I see Derrick O'Keefe and Mable Elmore are stamping their feet, sparing themselves the difficulty of actually addressing a single thing I wrote or disputing a single observation I made. By the way, here's Derrick interviewing Mable a while back, an event that resulted in her becoming briefly famous for her complaints about Vancouver's plague of Zionist busdrivers. What a riot.

Do take their advice and visit the Stopwar website yourself. You will see Derrick's press release condemning the Christian cleric Pat Robertson's suggestion that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez should be killed, but you won't see any press release condemning Muslim cleric Hassan Nasrallah's suggestion that the world's Jews should be killed.

I see George Kosinski and Juergen Dankwort claim that Hezbollah's fellow travelers are just a few bad apples that show up at demos. Try again. I was specifically addressing the very leadership of Canada's so-called peace movement, the ones on the organizing committees, and the ones with the megaphones. Not the fringe stragglers.

Three days after my column appeared, the Canadian Peace Alliance proved my point yet again by pooling its efforts and sharing its Toronto protest podium with the Richmond, Ontario imam Zafar Bangash of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, which calls itself "an intellectual centre of the global Islamic movement." At that protest, Bangash drew loud cheers when he detailed `news' of how Hezbollah had eliminated numerous Israeli tanks and troops.

But nevermind what I say about Bangash ("a leading member of the Toronto Coalition to Stop The War") and his bedmates. Here's how the ICIT itself explains what it's about:

Developing, defining, articulating and promoting the intellectual basis of the global Islamic movement, particularly in the crucial areas of political thought and the social sciences. A major part of this work must be to break the stranglehold which western ideas and thinking have on the minds of Muslims. And of course: Providing intellectual and media support to the Islamic movements fighting the enemies of Islam all over the world, or struggling for Islamic revolutions and the establishment of Islamic states in other Muslim countries of the world.

What's going on here is precisely what these people were warning about when they said: "Islamism is not the new revolutionary movement against global forces of oppression, as a section of the left in this country erroneously perceives."

It is also what these people were warning about when they said: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism . . . a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others."

Mark Cripps, of Hamilton's anti-racism committee, is getting just a bit tired of all this.

So am I.