Monday, August 14, 2006

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.

7 Comments:

Blogger Bob Broughton said...

I saw the letter from Mable Elmore and Derrick O’Keefe in the Straight, and had the same reaction to it that Terry did. I was unaware of the "Zionist bus driver problem" until today, however.

8:49 AM  
Blogger Simon said...

Surely it would only be fair to note that Canadian Stoppers engaged in "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" only mean that when referring to PEACEFUL fighting of enemies, BLOODLESS revolutions and the calm, orderly and entirely democratic establishment of theocracies? Who could suspect otherwise of individuals clearly possessed of and guided by such pacificist and progressive ideals?

1:20 PM  
Blogger Schneewittchen said...

Well, all I know is that 55% of people think that "the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war? " whatever that means, it must be true however because I read it on Iran's leader's own blog.

http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/

Bless him.
(you have to click on the US flag to get the English up)

And bless you Terry, your article in the Vancouver Straight was the most sense I have heard since I arrived here off the banana boat.

1:55 PM  
Blogger Schneewittchen said...

Sorry, the Georgia Straight.

1:55 PM  
Blogger Schneewittchen said...

Thanks for the article link waterdragon, that makes very interesting reading indeed.

4:03 PM  
Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said...

"Remember the underlying roots of the crisis in the ME."

Yep, Dirk - for some people the underlying roots are artificially shortened to 1967. Is this to suit the shortsightedness of this people or their short attention span? I wonder...

BTW, hi Terry.

6:36 AM  
Blogger Stephen K said...

I say, a pox on all their houses. Hizbollah, the IDF, the neocon cabal in the US, al Qaeda all have their ideological agendas to advance, and it is alway the innocent people who get caught in the middle who lose, regardelss what they look like.

Only death and destruction win.

That's what I'm getting sick of.

8:54 PM  

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