An estimated 138 million people live in places other than their country of birth. Many are forced by circumstances, especially wars, to flee to safer havens. The overwhelming majority, however, are economic migrants seeking a better life elsewhere.
Held for three years at a local school without incident, it suddenly became an issue last month when a Hindu group objected to Muslim students praying in the school cafeteria. Valley Park Middle School in Flemingdon Park, in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills inhabited predominantly by Muslim immigrants from Pakistan and India, became the centre of controversy when a group calling itself Canada Hindu Advocacy (CHA) raised objections.
Family members of the ousted Tunisian dictator, General Zine el-Abidin Ben Ali have arrived in Montreal, Canada even as France and the US have refused them entry.
Some Canadian media outlets have become conduits for Israeli propaganda. The latest in this series were “leaked” United Nations documents about the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s 2005 assassination in Beirut.
Tortured endlessly, deprived of sleep for 21 days, attacked by dogs and threatened with rape, Omar Khadr, now 24, was handed one last piece of vigilante justice: guilty plea to all charges because confessions extracted under torture
Politicians in the West love to play wedge politics. Picking on the weakest members of society is their favourite ploy but the recent hysteria about niqab — the full facial and body covering, except an opening for the eyes, worn by some Muslim women — is quite out of proportion with what is perceived as a “threat” to Western freedoms and liberties...
The minority Conservative government of Canada appears determined to deny Omar Khadr his Charter Rights even in the face of several court rulings, the latest of which was handed down on April 23. Justice James O’Reilly of the Federal Court issued a clear ruling ordering Canada to seek Khadr’s repatriation from Guantanamo Bay where he has languished since October 2002.
While the February 19 visit of US President Barack Obama to Ottawa led to official chest-thumping about the importance of Canada because it was the first country he graced with his presence since becoming president, it also mobilized various groups to press for Omar Khadr’s return from Guantanamo Bay.
The trial of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr that was due to begin at the notorious detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on November 10 was postponed until January 26, 2009. Guantanamo has come to symbolize the worst of American attitude toward the rule of law.
The US supreme court verdict on June 12 that detainees at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to habeas corpus (the right to be free from illegal detention and, if held without charge, to challenge it in a civilian court) was welcome to human-rights activists and lawyers, but so far appears to have left the US government unmoved.
What was described as the biggest terrorism-related case in Canada is gradually unraveling: four more Muslims have walked free after the prosecution “stayed” charges against them on April 15. Qayum Abdul Jamal, Ibrahim Aboud, Ahmad Ghany and Yasin Abdi Mohamed joined three others against whom charges were dropped a year ago.
The West’s all-out assault on Islam and Muslims–from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine to the political and military occupation of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia by the US–has murdered or maimed millions. Muslims living in the West were spared such assaults in the past, but no more. One only has to glance through Western newspapers, magazines or television programmes to feel the intensity of hatred directed at Muslims. While the West has always been intolerant of ‘Others’, since 9/11 the mask of civility has come off, and there is barely the pretence of respecting human rights and the rule of law.
The year 2007 has turned out to be one of the costliest in blood and lives since the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the US in October 2001. On November 19 a bomb-explosion killed seven people but missed Ghulam Dastagir Azad, governor of Nimroz province, the intended target in the town of Zaranj. On the same day an attack on a military bus in Kabul was thwarted when the bomber was prevented from boarding. Two days earlier a roadside bomb near Qandahar had killed two Canadian soldiers and wounded three others, bringing the Canadian death toll to 73.
The preliminary hearings into the terrorism-related charges against 14 Muslim youths that should have determined whether they should be tried took a bizarre turn on September 24 when the prosecution abruptly halted proceedings. Crown attorneys wanted instead to go directly to trial. Defence lawyers were appalled at such “abuse of process” and described prosecution tactics as a “disgrace”.
Afghanistan is sinking into a black hole, but this is not what the rulers of the West, whose forces are busy killing Afghans, will admit. They continue to talk as if all is well and that the Afghans are happy to be "liberated" by gun-toting foreigners who shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.
On September 18, almost exactly four years after Canadian citizen Maher Arar was arrested at John F Kennedy airport (New York) on September 26, 2002, as he returned from a family vacation in Tunisia, Justice Dennis O'Connor released an 822-page report into his arrest and torture in Syria.
Canadian officials, egged on by virulently anti-Muslim media and secular Muslims, are in a lather about the case of one Zahra Kazemi, who died in a hospital in Tehran last year...
Having discovered the political utility of fear, US officials miss no opportunity to invoke the dreaded terror alert, thus keeping the American public scared enough to have no time to think about the real problems confronting them...
Most Americans have now seen through the hoax perpetrated by president George Bush and his fellow right-wingers to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush himself was forced to concede in a speech on September 17 that there was no link between Saddam Husain’s regime and al-Qa’ida but he couched his admission in language that still left most people with the impression that he was. Not surprisingly, most Americans(between 57 and 70 percent, depending on which poll one consults) still believe that Saddam, no doubt a tyrant, was somehow linked to the September 2001 incidents.
A storm of protest has erupted in Canada, instigated by elements opposed to Islamic Iran, as well as anti-Muslim groups, over the death of Zahra Kazemi, 54, an Iranian-born photo-journalist, in Tehran.
