Harry's Place

Salim Mansur and Tarek Fatah are Canadian liberal Muslim writers and are both East Asian immigrants. Mansur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, while Fatah is the founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

At a recent lunchtime lecture sponsored by the Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association, both men have launched a stinging attack on liberals who seek to defend Muslims in all the wrong ways:

In their view, the liberal and left-leaning Canadian intelligentsia is wracked by guilt and contempt for their own intellectual heritage and they do all they can to stand up for radical Islamists whose agendas are more closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood than to Canadian freedoms.

They, on other hand, the “good-looking” Muslims whom the mainstream media generally ignore, stand with John Stuart Mill in upholding individual freedom and traditional values associated with an earlier Canada.

Fatah is clear about the causes of the problem:

[T]here is a tremendous amount of white guilt. The intelligentsia in this country in a selfish way tries to assuage this guilt. It caters to the most idiosyncratic behaviour of the immigrant and practices the racism of lower expectations. It sets standards of behaviour for our community, but when dealing with immigrants and especially the Muslim community, it does not expect them to live by the same standards.

Fatah’s Muslim Canadian Congress states:

The Muslim Canadian Congress is a grassroots organization that provides a voice to Muslims who are not represented by existing organizations; organizations that are either sectarian or ethnocentric, largely authoritarian, and influenced by a fear of modernity and an aversion to joy.

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The Muslim Canadian Congress looks to the future, and not to the past for the best days of the Muslim community; a community that will fully integrate and participate with other Canadians to build a country that is a beacon of hope, peace, prosperity and joy for the rest of the world.

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As Muslims we believe in a progressive, liberal, pluralistic, democratic, and secular society where everyone has the freedom of religion. We want our communities to be equal and active contributors and participants in the development of a just, democratic, and equitable society in Canada.

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We believe in the separation of religion and state in all matters of public policy. We feel such a separation is a necessary pre-requisite to building democratic societies, where religious, ethnic, and racial minorities are accepted as equal citizens enjoying full dignity and human rights enunciated in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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We look forward to building communities free from the ravages of racism, intolerance, ignorance, disease, and poverty, and where religion becomes a force of joy, enlightenment, democracy, peace and bridge-building, rather than hate, oppression, war and division.

Fatah argues that ‘”nine-to-five” Muslims, who are mostly concerned with making a living and getting ahead, are cowed into silence by the authority granted by Canadian officials to … traditional Muslim representatives’.

Sound familiar?