STEYN, Mark "Multiculturists are the real racists, " (National Post, August 20, 2002).

by Robert Brow  (www.brow.on.ca)


Steyn begins this important article with the report from Sydney, Australia (August 14, 2002) that the leader of a group of Lebanese Muslims (Australian citizens) was sentenced to 55 years in jail for the gang rape of a Australian woman. He then quotes a letter from Monroe Reimers who commented that the lesson to be learned is that Australians had better take a good look at the racist practices of their country.

In early September 2001 the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of the country's rapes were committed by "non-Western" immigrants -- a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. Mark Steyn reports that a professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native lands "rape is scarcely punished" because it is generally believed that "it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor went on to comment that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men as inappropriate. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

Steyn then quotes the paper Islam for All, which rejoices in the fact that at the present demographic rate the majority of Holland's children will be Muslim within 20 years. And Steyn wonders how soon Shari'a law will replace our laws in Europe, and then here in Canada. The article will certainly be condemned as alarmist and racist, but the plain fact is that Islam intends to become the law of the land in every country of the world.

Steyn quotes Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Goettingen University in Germany. "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them"  Bassam Tibi explained "The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought." Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or "House of Peace."

When I voted for Pierre Trudeau I thought multiculturalism meant people in Quebec should be speak French, Scottish Canadians would be allowed to wear kilts and eat haggis, and our Caribbean friends could celebrate Caribana down Yonge Street in Toronto. I still think those are good ideas. But if multiculturalism is going to result in Shari'a law for my great-grandchildren in Canada, I was horribly and very dangerously wrong.

I might add that this morning (August 20, 2002) the New York Times, which I read online, reported that according to Shari'a law "an Islamic high court in Untua, northern Nigeria rejected an appeal yesterday from a single mother sentenced to be stoned to death for having had sex out of wedlock."


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