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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 28, 2001
Fighting intolerance
The letter I've just opened is one of several received recently postmarked in the Ottawa area from Muslim readers. By comparison I've received far more e-mails. Instead of a return address an awkward hand has scrawled: "A Patriot". The envelope is one of those with the stamp printed on it but this stamp was cut out. Needless to say Canada Post delivered it anyway its cancellation printing through the hole. I am addressed by name and as "Ottawa Citizen's colamist". The letter begins We think, it is time to lay siege to Israel openly by the muslims world. ... "If you do not want more terrors please tell your America and Israel to solve Palestine's issue in no time withdraw all barriers from Iraq etc. It concludes, My dearest David Warren take care." Is the man who wrote this letter a terrorist or just an angry Arab immigrant? Who knows. I have received two other letters only slightly less immoderate and in different hands. None incidentally contained talcum powder. And I would be less inclined to attribute terrorist motives to the larger number of Muslims who have written or e-mailed to me or to the editors of the Citizen or other papers in which my articles have appeared -- even though these accuse me falsely of racism and totally misrepresent what I have written. In fact I have entered into e-mail correspondence with some three of these who gave their names. Each became polite to the point of endearing when I wrote soft words. It is my belief nay knowledge that many Muslim immigrants in Canada feel isolated and angry that they are in a painful dialectic with their surroundings that they actually want to be noticed and accepted here -- accepted for what they are. But they have a strange way of attracting one's attention. We have here -- not in Afghanistan nor Saudi Arabia but right here in Canada -- a "culture clash" that I feel certain will grow and grow. I was not born in a Canada in which even journalists received such letters. To this day I do not think I would ever receive such a letter from a native-born Canadian -- and by that expression I do not mean "of British ancestry". I mean anyone who was born and educated here regardless of parentage. It is just conceivable that in another generation we will find people like my present Muslim correspondents who were actually born here; who have been raised in more or less complete isolation from Canadian society at large. Behind our "multicultural policy" is the absolutely fatuous belief that it is good to encourage domestic ethnic separatism including in this case Muslim parochial schools with mediaeval curricula. Just conceivable but it is not likely to happen. The multicultural policy was like the "political correctness" in which it flourished one of the casualties of the terrorist strikes. It was a mortal blow to that naive belief structure that uncompromising relativism that ghastly intellectual embrace we still see between the radical left-wing and movements like Islamo-fascism. (Anti-Americanism is their common cause.) But while this outlook is doomed we must still witness its death spasms. It may take a year or more it may take several more spectacular terrorist strikes in North America and Europe before the outlook itself becomes insupportable. What I fear is that we are now moving instead in the direction of mass expulsions and internment camps. And let me make this clear as day: this is NOT something that I want to see it is something I dread to see. It would represent the death of an important part of our old "liberal dream" a closing of the "open society" that is also my dream my aspiration. But how can this be prevented given the way the world is now moving? Time and again we are told by Jean Chretien and our other formerly smug but now increasingly frightened political leaders that we must not succumb to intolerance that we must be respectful of minorities. But this rhetoric has become extremely counter-productive. The reality is that Canadians native-born of all races and creeds and colours form a society as tolerant of peaceful cultural diversity as any the world has seen. And while it is true that even such a society contains bigots and psychopaths we have and have long had the laws to curtail them. We the native-born people of Canada are not the problem and it does no good to pretend that we are. The problem is instead the growth within Canada of ethnic separatism -- of the fifth columns that have been encouraged by our multicultural policy. We now have within Canada itself immigrant communities that do not merely live outside the North American mainstream but live in murderous resentment of it. Not harmless monastic communities such as the Mennonites and Shakers and even Doukhobors have been but people animated by rage against us who have come here swimming in a sea of grievances none of them of our making. At the moment the whole world is in crisis and we in Canada as people throughout the West are under attack from a terrorist force that claims to speak for all Muslims. Our American allies with our support are acting militarily in self defence against the immediate source of that threat in Afghanistan. Yet from around the Muslim world on Fridays people are emerging from those mosques controlled by the Islamist ulema chanting such slogans as: "Death to America!" Death to the Crusaders! and Death to the Jews! >From the Al-Jazeera television network in Qatar messages have been broadcast and are being frequently rebroadcast by satellite television throughout the Middle East that tell Muslims to kill Christians and Jews wherever they can find them. This is the context in which I am writing. It does no good to tell Canadians at large to be more tolerant. Instead we need to hear outrage from the Muslim community in Canada against their intolerant co-religionists. We need to get co-operation from the Muslim community in hunting down the terrorists in their midst and in isolating and exposing the fanatics. We need public declarations from Muslim clergy and community leaders that totally disavow terrorist attacks that disavow the Islamist ideology behind those attacks that affirm their loyalty to Canada and to the values of the society in which they now live. And that do this without any kind of stinking "anti-Zionist" qualification. The fight against intolerance depends on them. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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