Tarek Fatah's Blog

My apologies to non-Hindi/Urdu speakers as there are no English subtitles to this unethical exercise by BBC Hindi’s Muslim and Leftist journalists in New Delhi.

HYDERABAD, India: A video has emerged showing a Muslim cleric in India leading a funeral prayer for the Kouachi Brothers, where he praises and endorses the mass murder of cartoonists and satirists of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

According to Bharat Press, the video was shot in Hyderabad, the common capital of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and the cleric is Maulana Mohammed Naseeruddin, who is a well known and respected cleric and Khateeb in the old city.

In the video, Maulana Naseeruddin is seen describing the Charlie Hebdo terrorists as “martyrs” and making prayers to Allah for their afterlife. He says, “Our lives are of no meaning if someone, who has insulted the prophet, is still alive.”

The Mullah is also heard condemning the Unity Rally that took place in Paris on Sunday.

Later, talking to the reporter Abuaimal Akram, who uploaded the video on YouTube, Maulana Naseeruddin justified the act of terror at Charlie Hebdo’s office as a deed sanctioned by Islamic traditions.

In fact, he goes on to say (at 3:26 minutes onward in the video above) that Prophet Muhammad himself had ordered the executions of people who had mocked or insulted the Prophet of Islam and Allah.

The Islamic cleric further says, as per the Islamic traditions, those insulting the faith and the Prophet should not be forgiven, but killed. He adds that since there is no global leadership of Muslims, it become the responsibility of every individual Muslim to make sure that such offenders don’t go unpunished.

“What they (the terrorists) did was completely legitimate as per sharia laws,” he asserts. Concluding his interview, Maulana says that he endorses what was done by the terrorists in the French magazine office and that’s why he decided to lead this special prayer.

The Muslim group best known for carrying out Female Genital Mutilation FGM on girls in North America has now launched a campaign to destroy Toilet seats to ensure Muslims only defecate the way Arabs did in the Seventh Century and not the ‘western’ toilet seats that come standard in North America and European homes.

The Islamic sect is known as Dawoodi Bohras. They operate like a top-down secret society very similar to the Aga Khan Ismaili community who live mostly in Gujarat, India and Karachi, Pakistan.

As my friend Yusuf Unjhawala, one of the many dissidents in the community first pointed out, the community’s head priest who lives in India has issued a worldwide diktat for Bohra Muslims across the world to not use ‘western toilets’. “Individual homes are being checked and marked against their community ID number. Every house should have only Indian style.” These Red Guards also show homeowners how to get around the problem if one cannot squat on the floor while defecating.

These Bohra Red Guards are like the Islamic internal police distinguished by their red armbands who come to inspect your home, with or without your permission and go straight to the washrooms to check if the homeowner has not implemented the Islamic way of responding to the ‘call of nature.’

Just as the Ismaili Muslims have Prime Minister Trudeau as putty in their hands, Bohra Muslims have India’s PM Narendra Modi all tied up in their grip as they establish a medieval state within a state.

While the rest of the world conquers space and subatomic particles, we Muslims are busy deciding the pious ways to defecate.

O to be Muslim now that Arab Spring has died.

November 1, 2017

Jonathan Kay

Medium.com

In case you haven’t yet had a chance to catch up on today’s Indian news, a second arrest has been made in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Canadian writer Tarek Fatah. According to India Today, the suspect is a career criminal described as “Naseem” (aka “Rizwan”) who is “an exceptionally good shooter,” and allegedly a henchman for a lieutenant of Indian mob boss Dawood Ibrahim. “Fatah’s outspoken [criticism of militant] Islam and Sharia have apparently offended Dawood Ibrahim’s close aide, Chhota Shakeel,” India Today reports. “Shakeel thus wanted to kill Tarek Fatah and has hired men to do the job for him.” (For reasons unknown to me, these reports go back and forth between spelling Tarek’s name as “Fatah” and “Fateh.”)

The fact that people might be trying to kill Fatah is not surprising to me. The Pakistani-born Toronto Sun writer has been getting threats for decades. A few weeks ago, when he tagged me on one of his Facebook posts about NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, I casually scrolled through the comments and was shocked by the insane levels of hate — stuff that would make any white Canadian journalist burn their computer, quit their job, and head to grad school. But for Fatah, “die heretic scum” is just another day at the office.

Tarek is not an easy guy to get along with. And his (understandable) persecution complex clearly has unhinged him to a certain extent. About a decade ago, we appeared on a media panel together at the University of Toronto. I was talking about some work I’d done in Israel, and I used the term “fixer” to describe someone who’d helped me get access to Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah. Fatah freaked out, claiming the term was racist. We all patiently heard him out as he talked about the horrible prejudice his family had endured as Pakistani immigrants to Saudi Arabia, and then he stormed out of the proceedings. At the time, I thought it was weird. But then again, I’m not sure how I’d react if I spent every day of my life watching my back for assassins. (Oh, and the guy’s been battling cancer for many years, too.)

The white Canadian journalistic establishment never tires of congratulating itself for all the “fearless” and “courageous” investigations we do.

Usually this means filing Access to Information requests, finding victims, and writing stories about sexism, racism and government scandals. These stories often have real and important consequences. And we are right to celebrate them. But notwithstanding the deluge of social-media hate we sometimes get (especially women), the risk we endure to report even the biggest blockbusters is orders of magnitude lower than what Fatah endures every day. It’s great that we know about the gas-plants scandal. But to my knowledge, Kathleen Wynne never put out a hit on anybody.

Fatah’s columns about Jagmeet Singh typify his very real courage: It is not enough that Fatah is treated as a public enemy by half the world’s Jihadis.

By calling out Singh’s silence about Flight 182, he’s also willing to take on militant Sikhs — not to mention hard-left white Twitter trolls and NDP apologists, who cynically (or naïvely) cast any mention of this issue as some kind of racist dog whistle. In 20 years in Canadian journalism, I seriously have never met anyone with fewer fucks to give about political correctness than Fatah. He’s maddening, and mercurial, and often signs on to theories and accusations about his opponents that are flat out weird. But in his willingness to speak his mind about mainstream issues, he’s an inspiration.

Here’s a thought for my fellow Torontonian journalists. Every year, we dress up in fancy outfits and attend variously acronymed galas to honour all the brave souls in our trade. Sometimes, we honour true heroes — like journalists in Africa and the Middle East who defy death to perform their trade, or Quebec journalist Michel Auger, who took five bullets after dishing on the Mob. But it would be nice if we heard a lot more about Tara Singh Hayer — the founder of the Indo-Canadian Times in the 1970s, and the only journalist ever to be killed in this country on account of the content of his journalism.

Hayer was a courageous (the term applies only too well) Sikh journalist who had the guts to call out Sikh extremists at a time when their movement was still strong in Canada. Assassins tried to get him twice. The first time, they put him in a wheelchair. The second time, in 1998, they finished the job as their paraplegic victim was getting out of his car. Unlike the case of Flight 182, this crime remains unsolved. Hayer is a true martyr in the annals of Canadian journalism. Yet his name remains obscure, and I often get quizzical looks when I mention it to colleagues. (Addendum: It’s important to note that Hayer has been honoured by the Canadian Journalists For Free Expression with a named award in his honour.)

Perhaps the next time we’re all at the Royal York Hotel, high-fiving our journalistic awesomeness as a CBC host thanks all the gala sponsors, we might like to talk more about Hayer and Fatah — even if calling out deadly extremism isn’t as fashionable a journalistic theme in this country as some might wish it to be.

October 31, 2017

By Caroline Fourest

It has taken me years to reveal the double-talk of the controversial Islamic speaker Tariq Ramadan.

Since 2009, I have known that he has also led a double life, contradicting his many sermons on the ‘Islamic conception of sexuality.’

Yet I could not write what I knew. The most serious facts could not be revealed without strong evidence, without a victim filing a complaint. Other facts were deeply troubling, revealing a hypocritical and misogynistic pathology, but I wanted to respect the principle of the right to privacy.  I had enough evidence to demonstrate the duplicity of Tariq Ramadan without entering such a sordid area. But I did, however, alert colleagues and even lieutenants of Ramadan. Nothing happened.

The preacher’s groupies continued to quote him as a reminder that sex outside marriage was haram. It made me smile as I listened to his puritan sermons about ‘temptation’ and the ‘duty of chastity.’ Like the tape on ‘the great sins,’ where he gets carried away with men daring to swim in mixed pools: ‘You go there and inevitably it attracts you!’

In that sermon, he urges his flock to ask for ‘places where it is healthy,’ meaning single-gender pools. The tone of these tapes is not that of Tariq Ramadan’s polished performances on TV, but that of a preacher obsessed with sexuality, betraying a more personal neurosis.

When I think of all the fundamentalist Christian or Islamist preachers I have investigated, I do not think I have ever come across a man who had a balanced sex life or simply conformed to what he preached. The world is full of homophobic televangelists with homosexual relations, paedophile priests and Islamist sex predators.

In the case of Tariq Ramadan, it seems that we are dealing with a behaviour similar to that of the disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, perhaps more violent. If I write these words today, which under French law could lead to prosecution for defamation, it is because a woman, Henda Ayari, has had the courage to file a complaint about rape, sexual assault, harassment and intimidation. Of course, Tariq Ramadan denies her charges and will file a lawsuit against her.

On social media, one of his loyal lieutenants already sees the work of an ‘international Zionist’ plot. His fans accuse the victim, a repentant Salafist, of lying and wanting to promote herself (which, as everyone knows, is tempting). I have not met her, but what I can say is that her precise and terrifying story is very similar to what four other women have told me.

It was in 2009, on the eve of my debate with Tariq Ramadan on TV.

The French press had announced the debate. A first woman contacted me to tell me what she had experienced. I was suspicious. A false testimony to push me into making a mistake? With Tariq Ramadan anything is possible.

At first, I did not answer. Her messages became increasingly detailed. To clarify the situation I ended up seeing her. She showed me text messages and pictures that confirmed her allegations against Ramadan. She also put me in touch with other girls. They had experienced the same events: a request for religious advice had turned into a compulsive sexual relationship, very violent and very humiliating, before ending in threats.

One of them had been subjected to such violence that it warranted prosecution. I presented her to a judge. But she feared Tariq Ramadan too much. She thought she was being followed. She was clearly too fragile to persevere.

My conscience refused to force her to take action that I feared would make her more vulnerable.

I am well-placed to know the violence of the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood when one stands up to ‘brother Tariq.’ I can hear the sermonizers joking about  ‘everyone knowing and no one saying anything.’ They cannot imagine the storm which would have engulfed this young woman if she had dared to break the omerta at the time.

Now that Henda Ayari has had this courage, the situation has changed. My duty is to invite all those who can testify to do so, either in the press or at his trial. We must not abandon her.  We must not leave her to confront the pack alone.

Caroline Fourest is renowned in France for her books against extremists from the right-wing National Front to Islamists. In 2004, she wrote a book in which she demonstrates for the first time the double-speech of Tariq Ramadan, « Brother Tariq » (Encounter Books).

‘Brother Tariq’ – The Book

Guru Nanak with his two companions, the Muslim Bhai Mardan and Hindu Bhai Bala.

Tarek Fatah

The Toronto Sun

Sikh Canadians and millions in India and around the world are celebrating “Gurpurab” the birthday of Guru Nanak Dev (b. 1469), founder of the Sikh religion and one of the world’s great symbols of pluralism and tolerance.

Yet few outside India know the significance of this day.

So let this Muslim introduce you to the man who founded the world’s youngest religion, Sikhism, and who had a profound role in shaping my own Punjabi heritage. Alas, one that was torn to shreds by the bloody partition of India in August 1947.

The 5,000-year-old Indian civilization, born on the banks of the Indus and nurtured for many millennia by the River Ganges, still enchants the rest of the world.

The land of Krishna and the Vedas is the natural home to Hinduism, but under its umbrella, it has nurtured the world’s major religions and provided refuge to those fleeing persecution.

Be they Zoroastrians from Persia, Thomas the Apostle, or the descendants of Prophet Muhammed escaping Arab Umayyad armies, India has accepted all without conditions and stands as a power that has never invaded its neighbours throughout its checkered history.

Among the great philosophers and thinkers that India gifted to the world are two who tower above the rest — Buddha and Guru Nanak Dev, the founders of Buddhism and Sikhism respectively.

While Buddha is well known in the West as a result of his creed and followers, Guru Nanak, whose birthday we celebrate on Thursday, is yet to be discovered by many.

Today, the place where Guru Nanak was born in 1469 is a city that was ethnically cleansed of its entire Sikh population during the bloodbath of 1947.

Nankana Sahib, a place where the Guru spent his childhood with Muslim and Hindu friends, is today a Bethlehem without Christians; a Medina without Muslims.

For a few days the town will bustle with Sikh pilgrims from Canada, India and all over the world, but soon they will depart and then, nary a turban will be seen until the Sikhs return next year.

It’s sad because Sikhism was historically intertwined with Islam and Muslims.

The Guru’s closest companion was a Muslim, Bhai Mardana.

It is said when Mardana was dying, the Guru asked him, “how would you like to die? As a Muslim?” To which the ailing Muslim replied, “As a human being”.

After the bloodbath of 1947, Muslim Punjabis lost their Sikh neighbours and family friends for generations.

Most of all, they lost their language that today languishes as a second-class tongue in its own home.

We Muslims kept Nankana Sahib, but lost the Guru.

The essence of Sikhism, where God — termed Vahiguru — is shapeless, timeless, and sightless, can be summed up by these words of Guru Nanak: “Realization of Truth is higher than all else. Higher still is truthful living.”

“We are all brothers,” he once said. “So there is no Hindu and no Muslim,” leaving these profound words of wisdom for his Muslim friends:

“Make mercy your Mosque,

Faith your Prayer Mat,

what is just and lawful your Qur’an,

Modesty your Circumcision,

and civility your Ramadan Fast.

So shall you be a Muslim.

Make right conduct your Ka’aba,

Truth your Pir (saint), and

good deeds your Kalma (oath of a Muslim) and prayers”.

March 7, 2014

By John Goddard

TORONTO—When her baby got a heart transplant at Sick Children’s Hospital, Bano Shahdady threw away her burqa.

At twenty years old, after years of religious training, she also decided to return to public high school. With help from her son’s doctors and a social worker, she arranged to rent an apartment to leave her parents and husband.

It was there, two weeks after she moved in, that police found her strangled to death, her son left alone with the body for 15 hours, murdered by a man hiding his identity behind a burka.

On Wednesday, the husband Abdul Malik Rustam was sentenced to life in prison for the murder with no chance of parole for 17 years.

“A woman has an absolute right to end any relationship,” Judge John McMahon of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice told the court. He said that Rustam planned the attack, disguised himself in a burqa to gain access to the apartment, and justified his actions to police. The judge also said that the victim’s father forgave Rustam and pleaded for mercy in court on his behalf, without once mentioning the loss of his daughter.

Honour Killing

The facts, as the judge outlined them, pointed to an “honour killing,” a crime distinct from other murders because its motive is to cleanse perceived family dishonour caused by a wife’s or daughter’s behaviour. “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate… ‘honour killings,’” says the federal Discover Canada guide issued to new immigrants.

But the judge never said the two key words.

“Man gets life sentence for murdering wife,” read the Toronto Star’s headline, relegating the crime to a domestic abuse case.

The Toronto Sun went with, “Man who wore ‘burka’ sentenced in estranged wife’s killing.” Not a single other Canadian news outlet reported the story.

Bano Shahdady deserves better. Not only did she fight her attacker — by clawing at him and surviving his strangulation attempts for a full 30 minutes — but she also fought the Islamist social ideology that had kept her a vassal in her own home.

This is the story nobody else will tell.

Eleven days after Bano’s death in July 2011, a relative and a family friend, both of them men, spent two hours telling it to me. Both asked that their names not be used, saying that they could not officially speak for the family. Further information comes from an “agreed statement of facts” that Judge McMahon read aloud at the sentencing.

When she was 18 months old, Bano came to Toronto from Pakistan with her parents, the relative said. They settled in Scarborough, where her father joined the Islamist movement Tabligi Jamaat, meaning “Proselytizing Group.” He took a religious title, calling himself Mullah Abdul Ghafoor.

Harry Potter

“She was very bright,” the relative said of Bano. “I remember her reading a thick Harry Potter book. She said, ‘Go to any page and read the first two sentences and I will tell you the rest.’ I thought she was bluffing. I went to page 20 and read the first two lines, and she told me the rest.”

When Bano was 13 or 14, her father pulled her out of her Canadian school and enrolled her in a Muslim religious school in Karachi, Pakistan. When she turned 17, he arranged for her to marry her first cousin, an illiterate tailor, who was 25. Almost right away, Bano got pregnant and quit school. She returned to Canada to have the baby at a Canadian hospital.

“When she came back she was completely indoctrinated and completely covered,” the relative said. “You could not see her face. She wasn’t allowed to talk.”

Heart transplant

In August 2009 Bano’s son was born with a heart defect and a few months later underwent a transplant.

“It was very emotional,” the relative recalled. “We were all waiting in the waiting room when the doctor said the heart was coming. The government sent a plane to Arizona, got the heart, returned to Pearson, and a helicopter was bringing it to Sick Kids’.

“I was crying,” he said. “Here was a Muslim family that believed that Muslims are supreme, and everybody else will go to hell because they are not Muslim, and some Christians in Arizona are giving them their child’s heart.

“They phoned to see if everything was all right,” he said. “In the Muslim world, nobody gives a heart to anybody.”

After the operation, Bano visibly changed.

Throws Burka and Hijab

“She opened up,” the relative said. “She threw away her burqa. For a while she wore the hijab, then she threw away the hijab. She joined Facebook and organized a website called Balouch Entertainment. She was openly showing her reaction against the mullahs and fanaticism.”

In March 2011 husband Abdul Malik Rustam arrived in Canada as a landed immigrant and saw his son for the first time. He moved in with Bano and the boy in Bano’s parents’ basement. By then, the relative said, Bano wanted to move out.

“She said she wanted a divorce,” Judge McMahon said picking up the story.

Bano went on social assistance and on July 1, 2011, rented an apartment on Eglinton Ave. E. After fixing it up, she moved in.

Two weeks later, on July 22, shortly after 1 a.m., Rustam arrived at her building “planning to cause her harm,” the judge said. “Security video showed him dressed in a full burqa, only his eyes showing, and wearing female white wedge shoes.”

Rustam got off at the sixth floor. Still wearing the burqa, he tilted up the security camera pointing at his estranged wife’s door and knocked. Bano let him in. Within minutes the downstairs neighbour, who was awake texting, heard furniture scraping the floor and muffled screams, as though the screamer had a hand over the mouth. After 30 minutes the noises stopped.

The autopsy showed cuts and bruises around the face, neck, clavicle and upper back. Whether Rustam strangled her with a scarf, or a soft belt, or while wearing gloves, or with his bare hands could not determined. He left the body on the bathroom floor and his two-year-old son screaming in the living room. The strangulation had taken place in front of him. On his way out Rustam broke a heel and had to carry the shoes, still wearing the burka. “He did not panic,” the judge said.

Morning prayers in Mosque after Midnight Murder

Rustam went home to his in-laws’ basement. At 4:30 a.m. he got up with his father-in-law to attend morning prayers at the mosque, then went to work. When somebody asked why his face was badly scratched, he said he got into a fight with “some black guy.”

Later that day, when his brother asked about the scratches, Rustam replied, “I finished her by the throat.” The brother understood. At about 5 p.m., more than 15 hours after the murder, the in-laws rescued the boy and Rustam went to the police at 43 Division.

“He said he killed his wife and had justification for his actions,” the judge said without elaborating. Police charged Rustam with first-degree murder. Ten days before the trial, the judge accepted a guilty plea to second-degree murder of the young woman who once delighted in Harry Potter stories.

“Vote-banks,

expensive suits,

coloured socks and

ethno-religious identity,

not policy, drive today’s politics.”

October 22, 2017

Tarek Fatah

The Toronto Sun

Just over 11 years ago, then-British foreign secretary Jack Straw wrote about his discomfort with the Islamic face-covering niqabs and burkas his constituents chose to wear while meeting him.

What followed his article in the Guardian was a raging controversy around the Islamic World and the West in 2006-07 that is an illustrative guide to how far western society — led by its liberal and left-wing politicians, feminists and academics — has regressed.

Has the fear of Islamic terror made them all into latter day Chamberlains who dreaded Hitler’s Nazi Wehrmacht?

Eleven years ago, the times were a bit less politically correct. Even the liberal Toronto Star allowed for criticism of the Islamic veil. Its columnist Rosie Dimanno wrote this on Oct. 25, 2006:

“Bible-thumping is repellent, whether applied to women or children or homosexuals or any other group whose behaviour is construed as sinful. Qur’an thumping should be no less unsavoury. So spare me what that holy book has to say about veiling women, especially when even Islamic scholars are divided on it.”

Today, a dozen Islamist MPs in the prime minister’s caucus are in the driving seat while the NDP — under a new leader — has a desire to accommodate medievalism as the new modernism. Both would consider such writing as “Islamophobic.”

Dimanno went on to write:

“(L)et’s not be disingenuous here. There is ample evidence, overwhelming evidence, of religious and cultural pressures, those steeped in a firmly patriarchal code of conduct, for the marginalizing of adult (Muslim) females, practices that are fundamentally at odds with basic concepts of gender equality.”

How could a piece of cloth used as a facemask — declared not to be Islamic and unnecessary by no less a figure than the head of the Al-Azhar University in Egypt — become the rallying cry of white feminists, gay activists, left-wing academics and even Premier Kathleen Wynne of Ontario?

I raised this question with two Muslim women from Quebec, one a Saudi refugee in Sherbrooke, and the other a Bangladesh-born academic in Montreal.

Ensaf Haider arrived in Quebec in 2013 escaping the Arab world and its tyranny hoping to find freedom in Canada. Her Saudi husband, Raif Badawi, is still serving a 10-year jail sentence and awaiting 1,000 lashes on charges of Islamophobia.

Reacting to Premier Wynne’s denunciation of the anti-Burka law of Quebec, Haider said:

“I am shocked that Ontario’s premier and women from Ontario’s NDP and (Progressive) Conservative Party attacked the new Quebec law banning face-covering, particularly the burka that was passed near unanimously by the Quebec National Assembly.”

Haider told me that on Wednesday when she heard the news of the passing of Quebec Bill 62, she was thrilled with joy. “I felt all of Canada had finally recognized the tyranny that is the niqab and burka and would follow Quebec’s courage in standing up to the oppression of women.”

“But listening to Anglophone men and women attack Quebec’s new law shocked me,” she added. “Are Kathleen Wynne and NDP women like Nikki Ashton and Andrea Howarth plain anti-Francophone or guilt-ridden white feminists?” she asked.

Seeking other voices, I got in touch with Montreal resident Professor Roksana Nazneen, a Muslim Quebecker of Bangladeshi origin, who is currently working on her husband’s municipal election campaign in Notre Dame de Ile Perrot.

I asked her if she felt Quebec’s new law was discriminatory against Muslims. “No, not at all. As a Muslim woman, I applaud Quebec’s Bill 62.”

“Niqab or Burka should have no place in a civil society. It is neither religious nor cultural. It is an anti-west political statement introduced by radical Islamists all over the globe,” she added.

But what about the right to choose, I argued.

“Nonsense. burka is not a choice. If a person chooses to be a cocaine addict, will our society sit still and do nothing to stop him or her from the addiction?” she asked. “What next? Will we allow suicide jumpers to jump to their death just because they made the ‘choice’ to take their lives?”

Back in 2007, the doyen of Indian English journalism Khushwant Singh nailed it best when he wrote:

“Burka is (the) single most reprehensible cause for keeping Muslims backward … it is synonymous to ‘jahalat’ — ignorance and backwardness. The sooner it is abolished, the better.”

They don’t make men like Jack Straw and Khushwant Singh anymore. Vote-banks, expensive suits, coloured socks and ethno-religious identity, not policy, drive today’s politics.