"Moderate" Imam Crows That Canada Is as Muslim as It Gets

The NatPo seems to be all about Islam these days, what with Afsun Qureshi proffering the shahada as a sort of beheading repellent and articles galore about "homegrown" lads off to fight with ISIS. There's an article today, though, that suggests to me that the paper has finally lost it ("it" being its mojo). It's about "moderate" Canadian imam Zejid Delic by a tremendously sympathetic Joseph Brean. In it we learn that, according to Delic (whose new book on the subject is about to drop), "Islam is Canadian and Canada is Muslim."

It is? How, erm, "moderate" of you to say so, imam. (Although to me it sounds a lot like the same old supremacist palaver).

Bream knows that Delic's purported "moderation" may be a tough sell, but the reporter does his utmost to try persuade us to buy it:

In 2010, Defence Minister Peter MacKay cancelled a speech by Mr. Delic at an Islamic History Month event because he was then the new executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress, which frequently indulged extremist views from 9/11 conspiracies to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel, and whose founder Mohamed Elmasry once made controversial comments about the Mideast conflict on a talk show that he later apologized for and retracted. 

Mr. Delic’s speech was by no means extremist. It was, like his book, a call to active citizenship for Canadian Muslims, and a rejection of Islam’s orthodox, insular traditions.
The episode revealed a major rift between Mr. Delic’s progressive vision and the extremist identity politics of the CIC’s old guard, and it threatened to isolate this renegade imam. Instead, as the CIC has since declined in influence, it opened to him the moderate middle ground between Islamophobia and Islamism.

There's no such beast as "a moderate middle ground between Islamophobia and Islamism." First, because Islamophobia is a Muslim Brotherhood invention designed to make infidels shut the hell up about the problematic aspects of Islam, of which there are plenty. Second, because it is precisely those problematic aspects which are animating the current round of the jihad (the Third Jihad, as it has been called), and those aspects are part and parcel of Islam proper. Sure, append an "ism" to it if you'd like, but that doesn't mean that the Islam sans the "ism" will suddenly become more tangibly "Western." It won't, for example, mean that Islam will separate mosque and state, or will accord women and kafirs the same rights as Muslim men, or will shun core doctrines that are inherently--and eternally--supremacist.

But let's return to 2010, a momentous year for the imam. For while it's true that one of his speeches was summarily cancelled back then, another one, included in an RCMP "outreach" conference, went ahead as scheduled. Here's what invaluable anti-jihad blogger Point de Bascule had to say at the time:

The program of the conference features Imam Zijad Delic, the executive Director of the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) as well as Tehran University representatives. Imam Delic’s scheduled appearance at the Canadian Department of National Defence was cancelled recently by the Defence Minister as the Imam and his organization were deemed too radical. 

The CIC is also a member of the Mecca-based Muslim World League in Saudi Arabia, which propagates Wahabism around the world. This lobby promotes values that are contrary to Western liberal, pluralist and democratic values. It is an Islamist lobby that holds radical, fascist, antisemitic, totalitarian, and segregationist views. 

The event will be held at the Government Conference Center in Ottawa. The Conference Center appears to require, among other things, that the list of visitors be submitted three days prior to the event for security reasons. This is noteworthy given that the Canadian government just announced that it had ceased its activities with the CIC because of its extremist nature. 

Disturbing aspects of certain RCMP Community Outreach initiatives invite questions about whether the unit has drifted away from fulfilling its counter-radicalization mandate. The RCMP could now be perceived as catering to Islamists by pressing upon its affiliated community members an event with troubling implications and connections.  

This appearance of formal government support might well encourage attendance of those who would otherwise have quite sensibly kept their distance from the conference and its creators. 

The record of RCMP Community Outreach points to an Outreach unit that may have become an inadvertent Islamist-legitimizing platform In other words, the unit and those responsible for its general direction – including RCMP Assistant Commissioner Gilles Michaud^{1 & 2 & 3}, Commissioner William Elliott and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews – are, despite their best intentions, undermining national security...

In today's NatPo article, the imam insists that "Canada is more Islamic that any so-called Muslim state"--and he means that as a complement to Canada. He also hopes to use that argument to persuade the young'uns to remain in situ instead of running off to Syria. All of which may make him sound like the voice of moderation to reporter Brean, but which does nothing to allay fears about "homegrown" radicalism and Jew-hate, metastasizing cancers that go hand-in-hand, and that cannot be tackled by bromides and platitudes (from "moderate" imams) and wishful thinking (from sympathetic journalists).

Update: Re the aforementioned NatPo piece by Afsun Qureshi, Mark Steyn writes:

In a bizarre column even for the post-Conrad National Post, Afsun Qureshi suggests the best thing you could do to lessen the likelihood of being set upon by Muslims is to learn to recite the shahadah, "a testimony to the identity of Allah as the one true God, and Muhammad as his prophet". She might be right. Wearing a burqa might help, too. Or the shalwar kameez. On the other hand, most of those Syrian men paraded through the desert in their BVDs to their rendezvous with death knew the shahadah, and a fat lot of good it did.

I tend to feel the same way about Imam Delic's "anti-radicalization" message about Canada being Muslim to the core: a fat lot of good it'll do. And by that I mean that it won't stop the young-uns from being radicalized, nor will it put the brakes on the remorseless Islamization of Canada (which looks like this).