Indeed, were Abigail Esman surveying the Canadian scene, she might wonder why certain prominent Muslim jihadists are nowhere to be seen on Little Mosque. Where are Misbahuddin Ahmed, Hiza Alizadeh and Khurran Sher who were planning to blow up buildings and public transit systems? Where are the so-called Toronto 18 who conspired to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange and behead the Canadian prime minister? Or Said Namouth involved in an international terrorist plot or Momin Khawaja convicted of terrorism-financing operations and building a remote-control detonating device or Montreal resident Ahmed Ressam of the thwarted LAX strike? This is only an abridged list.
Little Mosque on the Prairie is a fable in bad taste. (I have just now watched an episode in which one of the characters flaunts a gleaming razor-sharp box cutter to disembowel a sofa chair. Have they forgotten so soon?) Canadian viewers who enjoy this program and chuckle at its fusty and inappropriate humor are in a state of denial or, in Andrew Bostom’s apt phrase, “Islamically perplexed.” But at some point reality must intervene. The genuine issue has nothing to do with the canard of “Islamophobia,” which is nonexistent, or a supposed “backlash” against Muslims, which is frankly undetectable. Media entertainment initiatives intended to neutralize what does not exist do far more harm than good since they effectively obscure what does.
The real issue, whether in Canada or the United States or anywhere in the West, has to do with the infiltration of Sharia-compliant usages and customs throughout the culture, and especially with the proliferation of Islamic schools featuring a jihadist curriculum, all too often winked at by our public authorities. For example, the Dar al-Imam school in Montreal sports an affiliation with the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) and the Muslim Brotherhood, both jihadist organizations. According to Marc Lebuis, editor of the website Point de Bascule (Tipping Point) which diligently tracks the inroads made by stealth jihad and Shari’a advocacy programs in Canada, the school’s program is anti-Semitic, anti-Gay, anti-Women, pro-suicide bombing, and endorses noted Islamic apologists like Salam Elmenyawi, Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Waleed Najmedinne and Sheema Khan—the latter Chair of CAIR-CAN, who believes that Muslims must “fortify” themselves against Islamophobia.
Nor are institutes like Dar al-Islam merely localized phenomena. Lebuis informs us that in Edmonton, “some public schools offer an Islamic Studies course to ‘expose’ their students to Sharia,” without the slightest “challenging view” of what Shari’a entails. The curriculum is “developed by MAC’s representatives in Alberta, and only MAC approved books are being studied.” The Islamic syllabus is going national.
The same is true in the U.S. As Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and prolific author on the subject of the history and politics of Islam, points out, “the Islamic groups that vet American public school textbooks…make sure that the Islamic instruction in these textbooks presents a picture of Islam that is so pristine…it sometimes crosses the boundary from mere pro-Muslim bias into outright Islamic proselytizing.” Spencer continues: “Of all the arenas in which the stealth jihad is advancing, the most crucial is in our schools, where stealth jihadists have found a welcoming environment among teachers deeply steeped in the multicultural ethos.” These credulous or partisan pedagogues “present a view of Islam that whitewashes its violent history and intolerant religious imperatives.” We might designate these schools as representing the higher sit-com. The Islamic academies go much further, bordering on the status of domestic maddrasas inculcating “an unequivocal hatred toward non-Muslims and a deep suspicion toward Western culture.”
The sandstorm bearing down on us is no desert mirage. It we do not learn to practice the discipline of political meteorology, we will eventually find ourselves buried under the turbulent changes in the world’s ideological climate. Certainly, promoting sit-coms that suppress the Islamic agenda and somnolize the public is not the answer we are looking for. Monitoring or closing down Islamic schools that indoctrinate Muslim youth in favor of Islamic advances into the heritage culture would be far more useful, as would the defusing of the curricular bomb being primed and armed in our own mainstream educational system.
Sit-coms or no sit-coms, this is no laughing matter.
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