Up the
ante
With
friends like these...
Do you know the origin of the name "Canada"? Let me
reveal a great secret: Canada is derived from Kannada, a language
spoken in Southern India. Kannada culture thrived here thousands
of years before the European advent. They (the Euro-peans)
mis-spelt it as Canada.
Do I sound like a fundamen-talist not quite
in control of his faculties? Well, to make it "official",
all that I need to do is to convince the immigrant-friendly
liberal mainstream media about its "veracity".
Some time ago, a local expert on Hinduism
declared that ancient Hindu scriptures referred to rockets
and warplanes.
"Well, why did they leave out cell phones?"
mocked moderate Hindus while the "liberal" media
lapped up the fiction as fact.
Likewise, when a mullah sang an ode
to the power of jinns to explain nuclear processes,
moderates in the audience had an amused, if bewildered look
on their faces.
The media tried desperately to discover compatibility
between the mullah's rants and nuclear physics, murmuring
something about "two faces of the same coin".
The events of September 11 seem to have clouded
the honeymoon between the mainstream media and fun-damentalists
among ethnic minorities.
Alas, there is nothing cute about minority
fundamentalism.
Under the illusion of outreaching "the
ethnic com-munities", the moderate ele-ments of the mainstream
media never reached out to their liberal counterparts in the
ethnic communities.
The only opinion that interested them was
fundamen-talist opinion, even when illogical.
Such as the interview in the Toronto Star
with a young Muslim student who extolled the virtues of the
hijab (nothing wrong there). After claiming
that wearing the hijab was a matter of "individual
choice", the young lady conclu- ded with,"I forced
my mother to wear the hijab."
Er, excuse me, forcing some-thing on somebody
when it is supposedly a matter of individual choice?
And yet, the article concluded that the hijab
is worn out of choice, not compulsion.
The more bizarre the utterances and shriller
the condemnation of Western values, the more the spotlight.
As the noted writer Nirad Chowdhury once
said, "Your opinions are not important if you don't condemn
Western culture and values".
Such as a member of the Somali community
lamenting the lack of resources for teaching Somali.
"We know nothing about Canada,"
was the gist of the letter in the Star's opinion column.,
"and we don't need to know. Its cultural values don't
agree with ours. So, we need to teach our children about Somalia
in Somali, and not about Canada in English".
It is not clear as to who is more confused
here. The gentle-man in question, or the news-paper, for convincing
itself that such addled thinking was ref-lective of average
opinion in the Somali community.
When moderates speak out against fundamentalism
in their community, they are ignored by the mainstream media
and accused by extremists in the community of forgetting their
roots.
Under the double-whammy, it is not surprising
that the level-headed opinion in the visible minorities hibernates
while extremist empty heads make the most noise (amplified
through the liberal mainstream mega-phone, no doubt).
The moderates in the ethnic communities (and
there is a fair number of them) had warned about precisely
such con-sequences.
However, their voice couldn't be heard by
our liberal, mainstream friends, adept at missing the forest
while locating the tree.
Visible minorities need to ask themselves:
"With friends like these, who needs
enemies?"
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