Naik Scratched

It looks like next month's Journey of Faith conference is going to have a gaping hole in its program. Its featured speaker, Indian preacher Dr. Zakir Naik, will not be allowed into Canada. Kathryn Blaze Carlson of the National Post reports:

An Indian Muslim televangelist who was banned from Britain last week for "unacceptable behaviour" will not be allowed into Canada to speak at an upcoming conference in Toronto, sources familiar with the situation have told the National Post.

Dr. Zakir Naik, who has said "every Muslim should be a terrorist" and that Jews are "our staunchest enemy," was to headline next month's Journey of Faith Conference -- which is billed as one of North America's largest Islamic conferences and is expected to attract upward of 10,000 people.

Dr. Naik, the Mumbaibased founder of Peace TV and a widely respected lecturer in India, has a laundry list of views that could have led to his exclusion from the U.K. and Canada, both of which require an Indian citizen to obtain a visitor visa.

The 44-year-old medical doctor recommends capital punishment for homosexuals and the death penalty for those who abandon Islam as their faith. He has said that a man is within his right to beat his wife "lightly," although in a July 2009 YouTube video he cautioned against hitting her on the face or leaving a mark.

The "Keep Zakir Naik Out of Canada" Facebook group, which was launched over the weekend, also points out his view that Western women make themselves "more susceptible to rape" by wearing revealing clothing.

Among the chief reasons British Home Secretary Theresa May decided to quash Dr. Naik's U.K. speaking tour later this month, however, were comments he made in a widely circulated 2007 video.

"If [Osama bin Laden] is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him....

"If he is terrorizing a terrorist, if he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am with him," said Dr. Naik, who has delivered hundreds of talks in India, Canada, the United States and the Middle East. "Every Muslim should be a terrorist."...

Jewish spokesperson Bernie Farber is pleased that Naik has been barred, calling his comments

highly inflammatory and highly provocative. When you put them together in one cauldron, you have a stew of hate.

But, really, aside from the unabashed rah-rah for "terrorism" (which doesn't go over too well in our parts; if one wants to back jihad here, one must learn to couch it in euphemism because, after all, "war is deceit") the ingredients of the potage--a soupcon of wife battery (to keep the uppity woman in line), a heaping helping of Jew-hate, a big pinch of capital punishment for queers and apostates--is by-the-book-Islam. The same kind of stuff is preached regularly from local pulpits by imams whose thinking and worldview are exactly the same as Naik's. So I would say to all those who laboured to keep him out: Don't delude yourselves. He's already here, and has been for some time.