letter to Sun and their articles

• Between Mansur's column and Coren's column the answer to many of our problems is easy. We don't need immigration and we especially don't need immigration from Islamic countries, as those immigrants will bring with them a type of Islam or customs which are antithetical to Canadian values. It doesn't much matter if the practices and ideas of those from Islamic countries are or are not part of Islam. They are customs and values that we do not want in our country.

Immigration in the face of globalization
115

By Salim Mansur ,QMI Agency
FIRST POSTED: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2012 08:00 PM EST

In 1958, John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, published a small book aptly titled A Nation of Immigrants. The world was much different then, as new states in Asia and Africa emerged, while European colonialism retreated.
The West was in the midst of a post-war economic recovery, and there was demand for low-wage workers in a growing economy.
Kennedy’s book made the case for ending quotas on immigration based on national origins. His argument was also in keeping with the Cold War politics, of denying Soviet Union influence among the newly emerging countries at the expense of the U.S. depicted as a racist society.
Two years after President Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The U.S., as Kennedy had called for, adopted an open immigration policy and Canada followed soon after.
Kennedy celebrated in his book how much America, in its making, owed to immigrants. He wrote, “Since 1607, when the first English settlers reached the New World, over 42 million people have migrated to the United States.
“Another way of indicating the importance of immigration to America,” Kennedy observed, “is to point out that every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.” The exception was the aboriginal people inhabiting the continent.
The act of leaving the old world for the new, Kennedy wrote, involved breaking with the past and embracing the future as immigrants braved the immense hazards in making the journey across seas and oceans filled with uncertainties. But inside a decade of Kennedy’s writing, the arrival of wide-body transcontinental jetliners brought about a revolutionary change in the means of travel, and with it the entire meaning of immigrants and the experience of migration were altered.
Then came Pierre.
Elliott Trudeau’s multiculturalism and this policy, together with the revolutions in global transportation and communications, meant immigrants arriving since the 1970s were more or less trading places without making any break with their old world cultures and loyalties.
As a result, what Kennedy wrote about earlier generations of immigrants may not be said to the same extent for new immigrants. In the new conditions of globalization, the distinction between migrant workers and immigrants became increasingly obscure.
Many among new immigrants — given the policy of multiculturalism and the acceptance of dual or multiple citizenships — are migrant workers landed as immigrants, who draw upon the benefits of the host country while remaining attached to the customs and values of their native country.
It is politically incorrect to probe the practical reality of what has come to pass in the half-century since Kennedy pushed for open immigration, but the growing disconnect evident among newly arriving immigrants with the culture of their host country is undeniable.
These are issues that need to be discussed openly and widely. Immigration is not merely about numbers, as I indicated in my previous columns. Its effects over time inevitably change, and not necessarily for the better, the host country’s culture.
Kennedy, in looking back, celebrated the overall positive outcome of immigration. In looking ahead, we are far more aware since 9/11 of immigration’s divisively negative side.

Article by Coren – Feb 3rd 2012 – Toronto Sun
I sat last Sunday watching television with a mixture of incredulity and anger as a police inspector stood in front of a camera and explained the evils of domestic violence.
He was discussing, of course, the Shafia case and the murder of four innocent women, some of them mere girls, by their Muslim father, their Muslim mother, and their Muslim brother.
The detective meant well, I’m sure, but this had nothing to do with domestic violence and everything to do with honour killings.
I then watched a Kingston Islamic cleric explain how this mass murder was not about Islam, and how “people of other faiths commit such crimes.”
Do they? Well, there have been some isolated cases within the Sikh community, but the only religion that produces such slaughters in countries throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, is Islam.
Yes, of course the vast majority of Muslims would never kill or harm their children, but what does Islam actually say about the place of women within the family, the community and society?
A woman is property within the Muslim faith, first of her father, and then of her husband. Often these fathers and husbands are loving and kind, but not always. And when they are not, they are empowered by teachings of the Qur’an and by Muslim tradition to act in a horribly barbaric and oppressive manner. Look, let’s be candid here. There are Jewish people who think their children dead if they marry out of Judaism. This is rare these days, but even when it occurs, there is never any violence and certainly not death.
The same might occur with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there can be division and pain when a Hindu or Christian young person goes astray or even marries a non-Christian or non-Hindu.
But nothing like an honour killing. This is a product of the gender power imbalance intrinsic to Islam, just as was the polygamous marriage that was the context for this family. Two wives in this case, more in many marriages in our major cities.
For God’s sake, when are we going to grasp the nettle truth and ask genuine questions?
What happens if a Muslim converts to another religion? Will they be safe, will they be tolerated? What happens if a Muslim is attracted to someone of the same gender? Forget gay marriage — that’s a viable debate — but will a Muslim be allowed freedom and safety if they are homosexual? What if a Muslim marries a Christian or a Jew, what if they critique the Qur’an?
This is not the cringe-worthy Little Mosque on the Prairie, this is not cozy fantasy, but difficult reality. You’ve read and will read myriad comments and articles splashing around in relativism and obfuscation.
You’ll hear comments about “all religions,” “all people,” Islamophobia, racism. Put it aside. You know the truth, and you know police, politicians, consensus journalists, mainstream commentators and the like are running scared.
It’s too late for that cowardly, anti-intellectual nonsense. Four dead women are crying out from the grave for the truth to be screamed from the top of the houses, from the top of the mosques!

Coren - Why Catholics are right

There are so many things wrong with this excerpt from the National Post (April 12th) that it is difficult to know where to start. If Coren says Catholicsm is right than other faiths must be wrong. The more modern view of myself, a Jew, Bishop Spong and Tom Harpur is that we don't know the truth and there are many paths to God. No path is in itself better - different paths suit different people. Coren, like many other rigid ideologues feels oppressed because everyone doesn't agree with him. It is true that Christianity is publically criticized more freely than Judaism (except in the Middle East) and Islam, but the criticism generally applies to both Catholism and Protestanism, not to Catholism alone. It is also usually criticism of specific ideas of Catholicism, not of the religion in toto. Undoubtedly he lost jobs, but not because he is a Catholic but because of his rigid ideas about abortion etc. It is not being a Catholic per se that is the problem but some of their ideas which are out of sinc with modern ideas of justice equality and forgiveness. Coren lists many things the church has doen wrong and then says they are all nonsense, instead of saying that the church was wrong and has or will make the correct. Lastly from his other writings it is clear that he loved and respected his Jewish father, but being Catholic must assume that he will burn in hell forever. I just cannot understand either the ruling or Coren's mindset that he would be able to believe that. We don't know the unknowable God, let alone which rituals will please him/her. When the Messiah comes to let us know "the truth" we will know which if any is the better religion until then, life will be better if there is no absolutely "right" religion and we all follow our respective paths to God and allow others to follow their paths to God.

Coren's defence in the National Post

Also in the National Post Michael Coren defends his view of the Catholic Church. His defence belongs with the defence of Stalinism, Mao, and the Sandanistas, not that Catholicism is like them, but because it is, like the above, a defence of an ideology with the defence lacking any substance, reason, logic or understanding.