Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Tomorrow, an intensive Day of lobbying at Parliament by the Canadian Arab Federation, by Jessica Leblanc
Tomorrow, the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF), whose president Khaled Muammar recently came under the spotlight for calling several federal ministers “professional whores”, will coordinate a day of lobbying in Ottawa, trying to influence members of parliament.
Yesterday, we sent all MPs the message reproduced below to remind them of their duty to exercise due diligence in allocating public funds. CAF is largely dependent on taxpayers’ money and has been awarded more than two million dollars over the past two years.
We believe that CAF does not deserve our money and is not a credible group for the government to engage, for the following reasons :
CAF offers training sessions to new immigrants that are aimed at easing their integration into their adopted homeland. According to a Muslim woman who attended a course, as quoted by Margaret Wente, newcomers are told that Canada is “deeply flawed by racism and injustice”. This is defamation, not to say hate speech targeting the host society. Such an approach is not conducive to fostering social cohesion in our country ; it is rather the opposite.
In 2007, CAF celebrated its 40th anniversary. To mark the event, CAF hosted a gala dinner where it paid tribute to Zafar Bangash, then editor of a radical supremacist Islamist newsletter. Bangash once described his adopted homeland as "mafia" ; he refers to the vast majority of Canadians - that being non-Muslims - as "kuffar or kufr", which means non-believers and infidels whom Muslims must fight or become like the loathed kuffar ; and he advocates the establishing of Iranian-style theocracies around the world. Is this the vision of a society free from pervasive "racism and injustice" that CAF is striving to build ?
In terms of political agenda, CAF is nearly entirely focussed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as shown by its Web site developed with a grant of $60,000 from the federal Department of Heritage. In a recent column in the National Post, Jonathan Kay wrote : « Last year, the National Post editorial board hosted Mouammar and a CAF colleague for an editorial board meeting. To our collective shock, they laid blame for virtually every problem the world faces on Israel — including the alienation of Arab-Canadian children in Canada’s public school system. (One explained that he had sent his daughter for education overseas — because the inclusion of Israel in Canadian textbooks was too traumatic for her to endure.) »
We invite you to write to MPs to share your concerns regarding the diligence they exercise in selecting groups with whom they interact and which they fund. The list of emails of MPs is here : Address for Members of Parliament. And please distribute the present article to the largest possible number of citizens.
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LETTER OF POINT DE BASCULE TO FEDERAL MPs
Islamists’ Day at Parliament on Wednesday
This Wednesday, March 4, representatives of the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) will spend a day in Ottawa, trying to lobby Canada’s parliamentarians. For many years, operating in the guise of an Arab rights’ group, and more recently, one with immigrant-settlement funding, CAF has actively promoted a radical Islamist agenda. Funded by unwary governments, CAF has often been criticized by the very people it falsely claims to represent.
Consider CAF’s record. In 2007, the group paid tribute to Zafar Bangash, founding editor of a publication advocating the establishing of Iranian-style theocracies around the world and celebrating 9/11. In 2006, Ali Mallah, CAF Ontario vice-president, lamented the overthrow of the Taliban regime. In January 2009, CAF issued a bulletin featuring links to videos glorifying terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as acts of “martyrdom” against civilians. Recently, raging about international affairs, CAF President Khaled Mouammar startled official Ottawa by damning several federal Liberal and Conservative politicians as “professional whores”. The list goes on...
CAF is a hypocritical organization. It strives day and night to radicalize Arab and Muslim Canadians and alienate them from other citizens and mainstream values. Yet CAF lives off the public purse, scooping up two million dollars in federal grants in just the last two years. The Ontario and Quebec governments also fund this disturbing group, and Canadians of conscience are dedicated to changing this.
Our politicians must diligently investigate the true nature of groups with whom they engage. CAF, an organization openly supporting the banned Hamas terrorist organization, actively agitates among Canada’s Muslim population, encouraging an alienated and dangerous victim mentality – and CAF does all this on the taxpayers’ dime. No wonder the moderate Muslim Canadian Congress asked that any future CAF funding be made dependent on that organization’s not behaving as a Hamas or Hezbollah mouthpiece, and on its embracing Canadian values, not Iranian ones.
In 2007, in the context of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation, Quebecers from Arab countries filed briefs dissociating themselves from intolerant Islamist front organizations that claim to represent Canada’s Arab and Muslim communities. For example, the Association de la communauté copte orthodoxe du Grand Montréal wrote about the Islamist movement in Quebec (translation) : “They are a cancer spreading in the community. They do not present themselves as Islamist groups, which in reality they are, but as Canadian observers of human rights ! One can only be shocked by the degree of sophistication these groups have achieved.”
Last October, Point de Bascule hosted a national conference in Montreal that heard three brave Canadian Muslims denounce the growing Islamist campaign to influence and manipulate Canada’s politicians and political institutions. In the name of enlightened pluralist democracy, Point de Bascule calls upon citizens and politicians to do their due diligence, expose the Canadian Arab Federation for what it is, and recognize that the engaging or funding of any such radical group is a betrayal of the national interest and the public trust.
Labels: CAF, Canada, Jessica Leblanc
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 9:49 PM 
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