MONTREAL – Just when the newly designed Maclean’s seemed finally to have shucked all the turgid remnants of its former politically correct image, the Nov. 6 issue reverted to type on the niqab controversy. Its editorial chastises British politicians for criticizing the niqab: “Their objections only harden social divisions [and] squelch the free expression of the Muslim faith.” The editorial also urges the “acceptance of diversity.”
The niqab, however, isn’t about “faith,” except in credulous liberals’ dreams. Its sudden popularity in the West coincides with the escalating muscularity of radicalized, diversity-loathing Islamism. Not only does the niqab-wearer provoke, she consciously seeks to provoke, “social divisions” for ideological reasons.
If the Maclean’s writers who glibly talk the diversity talk had joined me last week at Montreal’s Delta Hotel and met the impressive Arab women who have walked the Islam walk, they’d have been too embarrassed to write that editorial.
On Oct. 25, the Institute of Public Affairs of Montreal mounted its 10th policy conference, “Questions of Values: Ways of Response to the Islamist Challenge.” The panel consisted of four brave women—one Canadian, three Americans, all of Middle Eastern provenance:
– Persian Nazanin Afshin-Jam (www.nazanin.ca) was the first runner-up as Miss Canada in the 2003 Miss World pageant. A former Royal Canadian Air Cadets officer, with a double degree in political science and international relations, she uses “beauty with purpose” to advance her international activism for women’s rights in Iran and the wider Muslim world. An elegant role model for Shariah-suppressed women, Nazanin is a hate target for Muslim fundamentalists.
– Egyptian-born, Gaza-raised writer and anti-Islamist activist Nonie Darwish conceived www.arabsforisrael.com. Darwish’s father, Mustafa Hafez, was Nasser’s nominal chief of Egyptian intelligence, but primarily commanded the marauding, civilian-killing fedayeen, and met his end in 1956 as Israel’s first targeted assassination. Darwish was raised to hate Jews. Yet today she blames Islam, not Israel, for the woes of the Middle East;
– Brigitte Gabriel is a Lebanese Christian, the author of Because They Hate (and creator of the anti-terror and anti-fundamentalist Islam group/Web site www.americancongressfortruth.com). As a child, she barely subsisted in a bomb shelter for seven years, under siege by Christian-hating Palestinians. To Gabriel, Israel is a symbol of liberation and democracy. A journalist, Gabriel married an American war correspondent in Jerusalem, settled in the U.S. and now devotes herself to fighting Islamism through public lectures, campus appearances (where she is vilified for her support of Israel) and media interviews. She receives death and torture threats daily.
– Syrian-born, but since 1979 Los Angeles-resident, psychologist Wafa Sultan was already well-known in Arab-speaking circles for her outspokenness, but came to international prominence through a widely Web-circulated, subtitled Arabic debate on Al Jazeera with an Islamic cleric, in which she denounced Koranic violence, misogyny and anti-Semitism. Sultan was raised as an infidel-despising Muslim. The assassination of a beloved professor before her eyes by Islamist fanatics motivated her emigration. The 9/11 attacks galvanized her. Her family in Syria has disowned her, and she receives continual death threats, but she remains defiantly combative in her crusade to reform Islam’s social and political doctrines.
All three American-Arab women ardently agree that multicultural Westerners “don’t get” Islam’s inherent irreconcilability with religious “diversity” and other forms of cultural pluralism. All expressed impatience with Westerners’ blinkered determination to view retrograde and separatist Muslim behaviours (such as the niqab) through the benign multicultural lens exemplified in the Maclean’s editorial. They are particularly astonished by educated Westerners’ acceptance of pontifications on Islam by liberal, non-Arabic-speaking theorists over the politically incorrect, but intimate, experience-based insights into Islamic culture that candid Arabs provide.
Their raw courage springs from dread of Western capitulation to Islamism, trumping fears for their personal fates. “The world is at Stage 2 cancer,” states Gabriel. “The weakness of the West attracts the aggression of radical Islam,” Darwish warns. “Don’t let your civilized ways become your worst enemy,” admonishes Sultan.
These Arab Cassandras seek to rouse Western leaders and media to challenge homegrown jihadism before it is too late. Our instinct to appease radicalism in the name of tolerance saddens them. “We are discouraged because the West is scared,” says Darwish.
But also in denial, she might have added. We don’t admit we’re scared. Instead Canadians pretend, as the Maclean’s editorial misleadingly insists, that a niqab is the cultural equivalent of a Mennonite bonnet. Once we admit we’re scared, maybe the will and courage to defend our values will follow.
- Why Quebec is banning the burka - Wednesday May 19, 2010 at 7:15 pm
- I distrust Obama—but that doesn’t make me paranoid - Wednesday May 12, 2010 at 8:33 am
- The cult of multisexualism: It’s not all good - Wednesday April 28, 2010 at 7:07 am
