You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
Submit your comments on this article
Great White North
Canadian MP had encounter with one of Canadian jihadis
2006-06-08
Wajid Khan won't decide til the last minute whether to fly as scheduled to Brussels today for a meeting of defence chiefs at NATO headquarters. It's an important summit and the Liberal Party's associate defence critic — Khan was a former military pilot in Pakistan before coming to Canada in 1974 — wants to be there. He missed the meeting last October because he helped organize Canada's response to the earthquake in Pakistan.

There is just one problem: Khan is also MP for Mississauga-Streetsville. It's on his turf that security forces scooped up suspected Islamic terrorists last weekend. It may not be a good time to be out of the country. Khan realized with a shock on Saturday that he knew one of the accused, or rather, had had an encounter last year with Qayyum Abdul Jamal, the 43-year-old caretaker and frequent radical speaker at Mississauga's Ar-Rahman Islamic Centre.

Khan had been invited to speak at the Islamic centre at a Mississauga strip mall. Jamal was slated to introduce him. But in the process, the avowed fundamentalist launched a verbal attack on Canadian institutions and, in particular, on the deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, where, he said, they were raping the Afghan women.

"It was all kinds of derogatory things," Khan recalls. "I said, `You're talking a lot of nonsense. The troops are doing a wonderful job there.'

"I told the congregation that this was misinformation and they shouldn't accept it. Then I walked out."
Good for you.
He later learned that some members of the centre were "so upset with Jamal they roughed him up a little, pushed him." The point is, Khan says, not all Muslims are like-minded.

Khan met on Sunday with representatives of 25 different non-religious Muslim organizations who want to help security forces root out Islamic extremists. He told them they can start by "not tolerating this kind of nonsense in the community."

Critics such as Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress, however, charge that ordinary Muslims are all too often left out of the loop. Police and politicians seem to meet only with religious leaders, he says.
There's an interesting point -- perhaps the average Ahmed on the street would be more willing to help the police, but the mosque leaders are getting in the way.
He's also critical of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair for holding a press conference Sunday at a Scarborough mosque. "Blair sat down with the most radical imams and gave them credibility," he says.
Posted by:Dan Darling

#1   25 different non-religious Muslim organizations

Given that Islam is more of an ideology than what we in the West would call religion, exactly what is a non-religious Muslim?
Posted by: SteveS   2006-06-08 18:59  

00:00