Corbella: Let's change the tune on official multiculturalism
11 February 2011
Licia Corbella, Calgary Herald
About one dozen families who recently immigrated to Canada are demanding that the Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg excuse their children from music and coed physical education programs for religious reasons.
The families believe that music is un-Islamic - just like the Taliban believe and then imposed on the entire population of Afghanistan - and that physical education classes should be segregated by gender even in the elementary years.
The school division is facing the music in a typically Canadian way - that is, bending itself into a trombone to try to accommodate these demands, even though in Manitoba, and indeed the rest of the country, music and phys. ed are compulsory parts of the curriculum.
Officials say they may try to have the Muslim children do a writing project on music to satisfy the curriculum's requirements. The school officials have apparently consulted the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, and they have also spoken to a member of the Islamic community suggested by those very same Muslim parents.
In any event, the school district is trying to find a way to adapt the curriculum to fit the wishes of these families, rather than these families adapting to fit into the school and Canadian culture.
Mahfooz Kanwar, a member of the Muslim Canadian Congress, says he has some better ideas.
"I'd tell them, this is Canada, and in Canada, we teach music and physical education in our schools. If you don't like it, leave. If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hellhole country you came from or go to another hellhole country that lives under sharia law," said Kanwar, who is a professor emeritus of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
That might be putting things a little more forcefully than most of us would be comfortable with, but Kanwar says he is tired of hearing about such out-of-tune demands from newcomers to our country. "Immigrants to Canada should adjust to Canada, not the other way around," he argues.
Kanwar, who immigrated to Canada from Pakistan via England and then the United States in 1966, says he used to buy into the "Trudeaupian mosaic, official multiculturalism (nonsense)."
He makes it clear, that like most Canadians, he is pleased and enjoys that Canada has citizens literally from every country and corner in the world, as it has enriched this country immensely. But it's official multiculturalism - the state policy "that entrenches the lie" that all cultures and beliefs are of equal value and of equal validity in Canada that he objects to.
"The fact is, Canada has an enviable culture based on Judeo-Christian values - not Muslim values - with British and French rule of law and traditions and that's why it's better than all of the other places in the world. We are heading down a dangerous path if we allow the idea that sharia law has a place in Canada. It does not. It is completely incompatible with the idea and reality of Canada," says Kanwar, who in the 1970s was the founder and president of the Pakistan-Canada Association and a big fan of official multiculturalism. Kanwar says his views changed when he started listening to the people who joined his group. They badmouthed Canada, weren't interested in knowing Canadians or even in learning one of our official languages. They created cultural ghettos and the Canadian government even helped fund it.
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"One day it dawned on me that the reason all of us wanted to move here was going to disappear if we didn't start defending Canada and its fundamental values." That's when Kanwar started speaking out against the dangers of official multiculturalism. He has been doing so for decades.
So, it's no surprise that Kanwar is delighted with the recent speech British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered to the 47th Munich Security Conference on Feb. 5.
"Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism," said Cameron, "we have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values. So when a white person holds objectionable views - racism, for example - we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn't white, we've been too cautious, frankly even fearful, to stand up to them. . . . This hands-off tolerance," said Cameron, "has only served to reinforce the sense that not enough is shared. All this leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless and . . . can lead them to this extremist ideology."
Kanwar actually credits German Chancellor Angela Merkel for being among the first of the world's democratic leaders to take the courageous step in October to say that official multiculturalism had "failed totally."
It appears leaders are getting bolder. During an interview with TFI channel on Feb. 10, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that the government policy that encourages immigrant groups to foster distinct societies within France "is a failure."
"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," he said.
"We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him," Sarkozy added.
Kanwar says for years, some "non-whites like me" have felt comfortable pointing out the failings of official multiculturalism. What's encouraging is that now "whites" or the majority culture and its leaders are starting to sound the alarm.
Cameron ended his speech by saying: "This terrorism is completely indiscriminate and has been thrust upon us. . . . We need to confront it with confidence.
"At stake are not just lives, it's our way of life. That's why this is a challenge we cannot avoid - and one we must meet."
That democratically elected leaders are at long last starting to sing a different tune is sweet music to Kanwar. Here's hoping those poor kids in Winnipeg will get to hear some of it.
» » » » [Calgary Herald, via Vlad Tepes]
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Multicultural Suicide
England, France and Germany’s leaders have finally begun to speak out about and against it. It may be too late. America refuses to even acknowledge it
Alan Caruba, Canada Free Press
Sunday, February 13, 2011
In his famed poem, Mending Wall, the American poet, Robert Frost, chided the rock wall that he and his neighbor would mend each spring, replacing fallen rocks. “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
You can see the Great Wall of China from outer space. It is an astonishing piece of work.
Begun in the fifth century B.C. and added to by later dynasties, it succeeded in defending China from invasions by northern tribes. In 1600, it helped the Ming dynasty defend against the Manchu, but when the gates at Shanhaiguan were opened in 1644 by a dissident Ming border general, the Manchus quickly seized Beijing and that was the end of the Ming dynasty.
There has been a growing call for a wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico. Given the way Mexico has fallen into a state of barbaric anarchy by warring narcotics gangs, including increasing murders of Americans foolish enough to go there, it is a very good idea.
There are currently an estimated twelve million Mexicans and “other” illegal aliens residing in the United States, enjoying many benefits. Instead of aggressively dealing with the problem, the government under several administrations and the current one has opted to offer “amnesty” and grant them a citizenship they have not earned and do not deserve in the context of our laws.
The only thing these amnesties managed to accomplish was to encourage more millions of illegal aliens to cross our borders, to stay on beyond their visas, and to otherwise flout our immigration laws. They are not “undocumented”. They are criminals.
Naturally, when British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently gave speeches or expressed their opposition to “multiculturalism”, it made news when it turned out they were appalled by the failure of this idiotic concept. Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had already expressed that opinion.
There was a time when someone was proudly British, French or German. Today, their distinctive cultures are being hollowed out by waves of immigrants who have no desire to assimilate or adopt the values of their new homelands.
All of which raises the question of why, here in America, you have to “press one” to conduct a conversation in English, Islamic foot baths have been installed in the Kansas City airport, why ‘Islamic immersion’ classes have been inflicted on children in a California school district, there was a demand an Arabic public school in New York and a mosque within sight of Ground Zero, and why government documents are often printed in foreign languages.
The victory over Europe that the Muslims could not achieve by invasion and which ended with the defeat of a Muslim army outside of Vienna on September 11, 1683, has been achieved by a constant flow of immigrants from the Middle East and northern Africa as Europe opened its doors because their indigenous populations failed to reproduce in enough numbers to maintain their economies.
It is a principle of demographics that, as a nation becomes more prosperous its population tends to replace itself more slowly. Birthrates in America across the racial spectrum are in decline, reflecting those in Europe By contrast, places like China and India are where you find a billion or more people.
In 2008 Los Angeles County, population 10.2 million, was where 42% of workers were paid cash and did not pay taxes; 90% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; more than two-thirds of all births were to illegal aliens; nearly 40% of all inmates in California were Mexican nationals who were there illegally; and, nationally, while less than 2% of illegal aliens were picking crops, 37% were on welfare.
These and a mountain of other statistics testify to the failure of the American government to enforce its immigration laws and deter an army of illegal immigrants from invading the nation.
The argument will be raised that America is “a nation of immigrants”, but that was then and this is now. The earlier flow of immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany and Russia were needed in the 1800s to provide workers for the nation’s industrial base and as farmers for its expanding land mass. And they were white and Christian.
The importation of Afro-Americans as slaves, starting early in America’s history, led to the Civil War, followed by the horrid “Jim Crow” era until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. These days they are minority population smaller than Hispanics and, thanks to a variety of liberal welfare programs, are too often a dysfunctional element of American society.
There is an unrelenting tyranny to demographics; the statistical study of migrations and birth rates of peoples throughout the world. Unless Europe and America address it, putting the breaks on further immigration, they are at risk of falling prey to it and failing as a result of it.
England, France and Germany’s leaders have finally begun to speak out about and against it. It may be too late. America refuses to even acknowledge it.
» » » » [Canada Free Press]
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