Terrorist or freedom fighter?

BY ROBERT MATAS VANCOUVER
The Globe and Mail
24 Apr 2007

Parvkar Singh Dulai, 29, was born and raised in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey. He prays at a modest Sikh temple at the end of a strip mall of mostly small warehouses.

As a Canadian Sikh, he considers those who die fighting terrorism in Afghanistan to be not much different than historic figures within his religion who fought injustices, and more recently Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was part of a violent campaign in the 1980s for an independent Sikh state that would have been called Khalistan.

“For us, they [Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan] are martyrs,” Mr. Dulai said during a recent interview about a parade in Surrey that included a tribute to Mr. Parmar.

“Why did we go to Afghanistan?” he said. “It is because of state oppression. The Taliban were going off, killing their own citizens. Other than that, there was no need for us to be there.”

In a similar fashion, many in the Sikh community consider those who were killed in India fighting state terrorism to be martyrs. They confronted the government after its forces killed people at the Golden Temple in 1984, Mr. Dulai said. They went to protect their families and villages from state terrorism, he added.

“I know it is hard to believe for an outsider, but … basically, whoever stood up against state oppression [in India] was killed,” Mr. Dulai said.

Mr. Dulai was one of the organizers of the community’s Vaisakhi parade in Surrey, an annual event to celebrate the Punjabi new year and the beginning of the harvest in Punjab. The parade, organized by the Gurdwara Sahib Dasmesh Darbar in Surrey, included two floats paying tribute to those regarded by the Sikh temple as martyrs. Photographs of Talwinder Singh Parmar and Canadian Sikhs from Toronto, Calgary and Abbotsford were among the 80 to 90 tributes on the two floats.

The Indian consulate in Vancouver has expressed concern about Canadian politicians who participated in the event, saying they were showing support for banned terrorist groups.

The RCMP continues to regard Mr. Parmar as one of the conspirators responsible for the death of 331 people, mostly Canadians, in the Air-India disaster on June 23, 1985.

“[Mr. Parmar] was very central and an integral part of the plan,” RCMP Staff Sergeant John Ward said yesterday in an interview.

Evidence in a court case in 2005 alleged that Mr. Parmar was the mastermind behind the disaster, motivated by revenge against the Indian government and support for Khalistan.

Mr. Parmar, who was born in 1944, came to Canada in 1970. He embraced fundamental Sikhism in 1977 and became a selfappointed leader of a group in a violent political and religious campaign for a Sikh homeland in 1979.

Mr. Parmar was accused of killing two policemen in November, 1981, during a visit to his home village of Panchta in the province of Punjab but he left the country before he was detained. He was arrested in 1983 in West Germany on an international warrant. German authorities subsequently let him go for lack of evidence. He had been held in custody for almost a year.

Authorities considered Mr. Parmar as a prime suspect in the Air-India bombing within moments of the explosion. Canada’s spy agency had began watching him in early 1985 at the behest of the FBI to track Sikh radicals before a visit by Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to the United States. The spy agency had him under surveillance as he tested a homemade bomb with others in the forest three weeks before the Air-India disaster and as he met other alleged co-conspirators in the days before the disaster.

The RCMP detained Mr. Parmar on Nov. 6, 1985. But he was once against released without being charged. He was arrested a third time, in June, 1986, and charged with conspiracy to commit terrorist acts in India. He was subsequently acquitted.

Mr. Parmar fled Canada in 1988 after Inderjit Singh Reyat was arrested on charges related to the disaster. He was killed by police in India in 1992. Indian authorities cremated the body without taking fingerprints to confirm his identity and without notifying Mr. Parmar’s family or the Canadian government. Despite the unusual circumstances of his death, the Canadian government never asked India for a full investigation. The Air-India disaster remains the deadliest terrorist episode in Canadian history.

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The Globe and Mail newspaper Canada

Multiculturalism, R.I.P. (1982-2007)

What started as harmless feel-goodery now reeks of hypocrisy

National Post (National Edition)
24 Apr 2007
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which also makes it the 25th anniversary of official multiculturalism. (It is Section 27 of the Charter that informs us the document must be interpreted “in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”) The doctrine has not aged well. What started as harmless Trudeau-era feel-goodery now reeks of cranky political correctness and hypocrisy. Three recent events in three Canadian cities help show why:

First to Montreal, where 40-year-old refugee claimant Désiré Munyaneza stands on trial for his alleged role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. On April 10, the court heard testimony from a Tutsi woman who described a horrific marathon of slaughter, enslavement and rape by machete- and club-wielding Hutu militia. “Those who were dead were lucky,” she testified. “My biggest problem was that they kept putting off killing me.”

On to Surrey, B.C., where an April 7 Sikh parade included floats honouring Talwinder Parmar — leader of the 1985 Air India bombing plot — among its list of revered Sikh saints and martyrs. Sudager Singh Sandhu, president of the Sikh temple that organized the parade, later told CBC News that Parmar is a “great man.”

And finally, to Edmonton, where 33year-old Muslim peace activist Farhan Mujahid Chak has beenn amed the Liberal party candidate in the federal riding of Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont. As Steve Janke first reported onhis Angry in the Great White North blog, Chak has published a variety of provocative political views onissues of the day. He claimed, for instance, that Israel’s policy toward Palestinians is one of “murdering children, raping women and torturing an entire populace” — and so Palestinian violence must be understood as being defensive. India, Chak claimed, is a sham democracy in which people are “pummel[ed] into stupor” by Brahmins. A book review he published gives sympathetic treatment to the theory that the Islamist terror campaign against Algeria and France in the 1990s was part of a conspiracy engineered by Algiers and Paris.

When multiculturalism came into vogue a generation ago, it was powered by the conceit that group hatred is primarily a Western pathology — an outgrowth of our warmongering, colonialist past. That’s why from the 1980s onward, multicultural agitprop in schools, workplaces and government agencies has invariably focused not on assimilating immigrants and stripping them of their old-world prejudices, but on eliminating any vestige of white bigotry.

The reason multiculturalism now seems like such a fraud is that experience has taught us that old-school racism has nothing on the sort of hatreds brought into this country by the immigrants themselves: hatred toward homosexuals, toward heretics, toward “loose” women and, most importantly, toward each other.

It’s hard to get too riled up about Don Imus or alleged “racial profiling” by cops, for instance, when I see Canada becoming home to African blacks who have been charged with murdering other blacks by the villageful for the crime of belonging to the wrong tribe. Ditto whenI watch Canadian Sikhs who are so proud that one of their coreligionists murdered another group of South Asian Canadians that they hold a parade partly in his honour. And then there’s the Liberal candidate in Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont, who will have to explain to his constituents what he meant with his attacks on Israel, India and France.

Chak isn’t a Muslim extremist: During a phone conversation yesterday, he came across more as a naïve left-wing sloganeer than a fiery hatemonger. The only reason I’m singling him out is because he happens to be a political candidate. Go to any run-of-the-mill English language Islamic Web site and you’ll find lots of folks just like him.

But that’s exactly the point: Chak, like all the rest of us, is a product of his cultural mix — which in his case includes a global Muslim culture that has become suffused with terror apologism, conspiracy theories and anti-Western animus. To the extent multiculturalism is supposed to preach “tolerance,” this unappetizing stew is what we’re being asked to tolerate. Twenty-five years after the Charter, is it any wonder most of us think the whole idea is nonsense?

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Deport radical Somalis

Australian
24 Apr 2007

I HAVE always believed that Australia should show compassion towards refugees from strife-torn areas around the world. However, it was to be expected that there would be a radical element among Somalis now living in our major cities (‘‘AFP probes terror fundraising by local Somali extremists’’, 23/4), and it comes as no surprise to learn that small groups have been raising money to fund jihad in their homeland, with the money going to al-Qa’ida.

There is a clear case for identifying those in Australia who wish to carry on the war in Somalia and deporting them. Unlike some migrant groups, Somalis cannot claim deep roots in this country and even if some have Australian citizenship, it should be revoked.
Christopher Ward Howrah, Tas

Related: AFP probes terror fundraising by local Somali extremists

Australian newspaper Australia immigration

Native protesters warn of ‘escalating’ action

DESERONTO, ONT.
The Globe and Mail
23 Apr 2007

A key organizer of an aboriginal blockade, which paralyzed passenger and freight rail traffic on the busy Toronto-Montreal corridor, is warning that the protest that ended early Saturday is just the beginning in a series of “escalating” actions.

“We’ve identified targets as part of this campaign, one being the railway, one being provincial highways and one being the town [of Deseronto] itself,” Shawn Brant said.

“The disruption on the CN line was a first in a series of economic disruptions, the first in a campaign.” he said. “The campaign calls for an ever-escalating degree.”

The next target has already been chosen and plans to finalize the next action are in the works, said Mr. Brant, who commented Saturday morning at the site of contention in the dispute — a gravel quarry that the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte say is their land.

Though the protesters originally said they would stay at the railway blockade for 48 hours, it ended peacefully after about 30 hours at 6 a.m. Saturday, after a sleepless night of negotiations with provincial police and other officials.

Protesters said they chose to end it early over fears of a violent conclusion.

A court injunction ordered the protesters and the dilapidated school bus off the tracks with arrests warned as a consequence, but the order was never enforced by police.

No arrests have been made at this point, said Ontario Provincial Police Sergeant Kristine Rae.

“We’re pleased that it was a peaceful resolution.”

Friday also marked the oneyear anniversary of a police raid on another aboriginal occupation — in the Southwestern Ontario town of Caledonia, which has been marred by violence in the past.

Aboriginal groups have warned that a lack of political will to settle that claim had protesters considering further standoffs in Ontario.

The protesters in Deseronto want the province to revoke a licence that allows gravel to be trucked away from the quarry, operated by Thurlow Aggregates.

On Saturday, the protesters offered no apologies to commuters and businesses who were inconvenienced by the blockade.

Thousands of rail passengers were sent scrambling onto buses to reach their destinations while CN Rail shut down all its operations.

“I don’t think they should expect an apology,” said Mr. Brant, who suggested the blockade was prompted by government inaction on the Mohawk’s land claim.

CN Rail reported the tracks reopened Saturday morning at around 10:15 a.m.

Jim Prentice, the federal Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, had warned the protesters to “abandon” their blockade because it could jeopardize ongoing negotiations concerning the land tract.

The federal government has appointed a land-claims negotiator to try to resolve the longrunning dispute, but Mr. Brant has complained talks have been moving too slowly.

The protesters initially set up barricades at the gravel quarry for a day in November, and again in January. A third barricade went up last month, and the group warned at the time that the demonstration might be expanded to the town of Deseronto itself.

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Related:
Easy for natives to break the law

The Globe and Mail newspaper Canada

Government may issue sharia bonds, says Balls

Jill Treanor
The Guardian
23 Apr 2007

The government is considering borrowing money through bonds that are compliant with sharia law as part of its attempt to boost the City’s standing as an attractive place for Muslims to do business.

Ed Balls, the City minister, has also asked National Savings & Investments to look into the possibility of the government issuing financial products that retail investors wanting to comply with sharia law can buy.

The Treasury and the DebtManagement Office, which handles bond issues for the government, are to conduct a feasibility study into the costs and benefits of issuing financial instruments that are acceptable to investors who cannot accept interest. The report is expected in the autumn.

Under sharia law, making money from money, such as charging interest, is not permitted, which restricts opportunities for investing to trade and assets. The Islamic financial model is based upon risksharing between financial institutions and customers. For instance, customers are able to get credit by asking a bank to buy an item, which it then sells on to them on a deferred basis.

The market is expected to grow quickly as there are estimates suggesting that there are more than £125bn of Islamic finance assets worldwide.

The decision to consider launching government-sponsored products follows a meeting this month at 11 Downing Street when an Islamic finance experts group was formed.

Mr Balls will outline the latest plans in a speech at a Financial Services Authority conference today. “Domestically, we will do everything we can to promote new ways for British Muslims to bank, save and borrow using Islamic finance products,” he will say.

“I believe there are great potential advantages for the UK government issuing sharia-compliant government debt. The feasibility study will also be assessing the opportunity for issuing such instruments, taking into account the government’s debt-management objectives.”

The government needs to borrow almost £60bn for the 2007-08 financial year — some £1.4bn in Treasury bills and the rest in gilts.

The size of the market for Sukuk bonds — ones that comply with sharia law and are similar to securitised loans — is estimated to be about $4bn (£2bn). London has hosted the issuing of a number of these types of products — one of the largest was issued by Dubai Ports this year.

The government is changing the rules to allow Sukuk bonds to be issued, held and traded in the same way as corporate bonds to try to encourage more of them to be issued in London.

The high-street banks are also devising products for Britain’s two million Muslims. HSBC, for instance, offers an Islamic mortgage and current account.

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The Guardian newspaper Financial

Native double standard

National Post (National Edition)
23 Apr 2007
Related:
Easy for natives to break the law

AFP probes terror fundraising by local Somali extremists

Australian
23 Apr 2007

Overlooked in Mideast turf battle: The Christians

Joseph Farah
The Washington Times Weekly
23 Apr 2007

Christians are fleeing the Middle East in droves. They are packing up and leaving because it is unsafe for them in an increasingly hostile Muslim region.

They are leaving even countries formerly hospitable to them — including a country currently occupied by the United States and its allies.

Christians represent only about 3 percent of Iraq’s population. And because they are a tiny minority, without their own militia, their interests have scarcely been considered in rebuilding Iraq’s political and social structure. In the meantime, they are the easiest targets for radical Sunni and Shiite Muslims who don’t believe there is any room for Christians and Jews in the Middle East.

Some 2 million Iraqis have fled the country because of terrorism in the last three years. That’s nearly 8 percent of the overall population. And of those refugees, Christians are represented disproportionately.

Ironically, many are fleeing to Lebanon, formerly know as the one Christian state in the Middle East. But Lebanon has its own problems with a Christian exodus. In a recent survey, half of Lebanese Maronites, the largest group of Christians in the country, said they would like to leave for a better life elsewhere.

Even Christians in Lebanon are under siege, fearful of being caught in the middle of a Sunni-Shiite civil war.

About 100,000 Lebanese Christians have submitted visa applications to foreign embassies. Another 60,000 already left following last summer’s Hezbollah war.

Christians, who once shared power constitutionally with Muslims and who represented about 50 percent of the population in the country, now make up just 22 percent.

The other stronghold of Christians in the region was in the Arab communities of Judea and Samaria, often referred to as the West Bank. But they have been virtually liquidated through Islamization, terror and an official policy of religious cleansing practiced by the Palestinian Authority.

Bethlehem, once a 90 percent Christian town, now claims only 12 percent of its population of 60,000 Arab residents as Christians. The number drops day by day, month by month and year by year. Last year, for comparison purposes, the town was 35 percent Christian.

The massive exodus from formerly Christian towns like Bethlehem and Nazareth began seven years ago, coinciding with the escalation of terror that came with the 2000 that continues today. It’s not just a war on Israel. It’s a war to impose Islam as intifada the law of the land.

Muslim terrorists have intentionally placed Christians in the crossfire between them and Israel. They did that when they seized the Church of the Nativity, nearly destroying it, defecating in the hallways, smashing statues and stealing precious objects. When the Israelis withdrew from these communities and handed over the reins of power to the Palestinian Authority, they opened the door for what has become a jihad against the Christian community in which women are raped, businessmen are extorted, so-called “collaborators” are lynched and homes are seized. What’s the solution? Is the Middle East destined to become a Christian-free zone?

How can this stabilizing minority be persuaded to stay?

It seems like every political, ethnic and religious group in the world today wants — and eventually gets — its own country.

Since we’re redrawing the map of the Middle East, I propose we start planning for the creation of a Christian state. That would truly serve the interests of peace and freedom in the region.

Muslims have their claims to the Middle East, all gained, by the way, through military conquest.

Jews have their claims on the Middle East, their only real homeland, rich in historical and spiritual heritage.

Christians, too, have their claims on the Middle East. It was there that Jesus was born, ministered and died on the cross. It was where His gospel was first preached. It was there His followers found their first converts. It was from there that they turned the world upside down in a way that ultimately led to the birth of Western civilization.

Should we just forget about the Christians of the Middle East? Should we simply allow them to be tormented and persecuted? Should we stand by while they are driven from their homes?

Or should we do what we have done for so many other people in recent years — recognize their right to self-determination, freedom and safety and help them to build their own homeland in the Middle East?

Joseph Farah is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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Tech Tags: The Washington Times Weekly newspaper Middle East

Swastika-like symbol upsets Jewish ferry riders

The Province
22 Apr 2007
VICTORIA — The international propeller symbols painted on B.C. Ferries’ new German-built Super-C-class vessel will be replaced with softer, rounder versions — in hopes no one mistakes them for swastikas.
The company says it received about 10 calls from people who saw media coverage of the launch of the Coastal Renaissance’s hull and thought the symbols were swastikas, most recently associated with Second World War Nazis.

“We didn’t see it that way. To us, it’s an international prop symbol,” spokesman Mark Stefanson said Friday. “But if people are concerned about it, obviously we are concerned about it, so we will make sure it’s changed before she leaves Germany.”
Mira Oreck, director of the Canadian Jewish Congress in the Pacific region, told The Province yesterday that concerned calls received by the group’s office were passed along to the company.

“I think the concern was legitimate,” Oreck said, adding that her office contacted B.C. Ferries, which “called back right away” to assure the group that the symbol would be repainted to appear “significantly” different.

Stefanson said he has no idea whether the fact the new ferries are being built in Germany played a role in the swastika perception.

The Flensburger SchiffbauGesellschaft shipyard, where the ferries are being built, constructed U-boats for Adolph Hitler during the Second World War.

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The Province newspaper Canada

‘We have 3 different targets, . . . and we will escalate’

Native protest that paralyzed railway called off early but leader says next target set unless land dispute is settled

MATTHEW CHUNG STAFF REPORTER
Toronto Star
22 Apr 2007

DESERONTO, ONT.— The leader of a native blockade that paralyzed rail traffic between Toronto and Montreal for more than 30 hours warned yesterday of more “economic disruptions” ahead.

“Believe it or not, it was the first soft step of the campaign,” Shawn Brant said around 8 a.m., two hours after the group removed a school bus that had been blocking the tracks at Deseronto, near Belleville. “We have identified three different targets ... and we will escalate the degree of severity as is necessary.”

Those targets are the railway, provincial highways and the town of Deseronto, Brant said at the quarry that lies at the heart of the dispute.

The next target has been selected and plans for the action are being finalized, he said.

Protests will continue until the provincial government revokes a licence that allows gravel to be trucked away from the quarry, Brant added.

Thousands of rail passengers were affected by the blockade. VIA Rail loaded them onto buses Friday night and cancelled its service yesterday morning while CN Rail shut down traffic on the route. CN Rail reported the tracks reopened yesterday around 10:15 a.m. and VIA resumed ticket sales.

The protesters had said they’d stay at the blockade for 48 hours but decided to call it off, Brant said, because some community members feared a violent conclusion.

“Yesterday, there was a series of exchanges. ... It was escalating into a standoff type situation,” Brant said.

“Some people were bringing concerns forward that this was to be a first step of a series of steps.

“The first stand wasn’t to be the last stand.”

Brant said the group left on its own terms after defying an injunction, obtained Friday by CN in a Toronto court, that ordered the blockade removed.

The order was never enforced by police.

Kristine Rae, a spokesperson for the Ontario Provincial Police, said an “ongoing dialogue,” between the OPP, CN police and Donald Maracle, chief of the Bay of Quinte Mohawks, led to the protesters dispersing. No arrests had been made, she said.

“We’re very pleased it’s a peaceful resolution,” Rae said.

Federal Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice said yesterday the blockade was mounted by a splinter group in the Mohawk community — against the will of its chief and council.

The blockade and others like it do nothing to speed such talks, he added.

“What they do is they contribute to an erosion of goodwill towards aboriginal people and land claims. And I don’t think that is in the interest of First Nation communities.”

Prentice says he understands the frustration of native bands that saw the tally of unsettled land claims balloon from about 250 in 1993 to more than 800.

“I’m aware of that, and that’s why I’ve been insistent that we need to change the process,” to accelerate settlement of certain claims, he said.

Almost exactly a year ago, the same group of Mohawks led by Brant erected a blockade using bonfires and old school buses that disrupted rail traffic from Toronto to Montreal in solidarity with land-claim protesters in Caledonia, Ont.

For the past month, the band members have maintained barricades around the stone quarry just west of Deseronto.

A developer plans to build condominiums using material from the quarry, which is on a section of land given to the Six Nations in 1793. The Mohawks contend they never relinquished any part of it.

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Toronto Star newspaper News Canada Ontario

Merchants of mayhem

New York Daily News
22 Apr 2007

Students' white site stirs rage

New York Daily News
22 Apr 2007