Court decision puts veil over women's rights
It is illegal for a woman wearing a face-obscuring veil to board a plane in Canada. But a unanimous ruling last week by the Ontario Court of Appeal says it’s just fine for that same woman to give testimony in court with her face covered.
There’s more. Ontario’s highest court says veiled women can ask for an order to clear men out of the courtroom — any men in the public gallery, any male court staff, even her opponent’s lawyer, even the judge himself — in return for taking off her veil. It’s paragraph 85 of the ruling.
Shariah law has come to Canada.
Face-obliterating veils called niqabs are a medieval tool for gender apartheid. They destroy a woman’s identity. They turn her into an object, a chattel owned by her master — which is why they’re the norm in Saudi Arabia, where women have fewer rights than men and only slightly more than animals.
Burkas — an even more prison-like shroud, with just a tiny beekeeper’s screen to peek through — are the Taliban variety. Those are now allowed on the witness stand in Canada, too.
Rip the Ten Commandments off the wall, because we must have separation of church and state. But when the most un-Canadian expression of radical Islam walks in the court, our judges follow the Qur’an.
But that’s not fair to the Qur’an. No verse in that book requires face-covering. But our judges now say it’s a Charter right.
To their shame, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association intervened to support this. They have demanded Bibles be removed from schools and the Lord’s Prayer be banned from legislatures. But Muslim veils — a chastity belt for the face — have their support in a secular court.
The CCLA has found religion. And LEAF, the feminist law organization built with Canadian tax dollars, has a new view on a woman’s proper place. They argued for the niqab, too.
As National Post columnist Barbara Kay points out, a survey of Muslim women in France found 77% wear the veil out of fear of men.
Australian Imam Taj Din al-Hilali put it another way, in a sermon about rape: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street ... and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.”
LEAF supports covering up “the meat.” Now our courts do too.
The Ontario ruling came about because a Muslim woman alleged she was molested as a child by her uncle and her cousin in the 1980s. It’s a horrendous accusation and, if true, the woman deserves our sympathy and the accused deserve our most punitive punishment. But before we get there, there’s the matter of a trial.
In Canada, even accused rapists have the right to question their accuser and the court has the right to observe her demeanour. It’s why we don’t allow testimony from someone wearing a mask.
But this accuser didn’t want to take off her mask.
“It’s a respect issue, one of modesty and one of — in Islam, we call honour,” she told the judge at the preliminary inquiry “It’s to conceal the beauty of a woman.”
She had only been wearing a veil for about five years and the judge found her religious belief was “not that strong.” But “I would feel a lot more comfortable if I didn’t have to, you know, reveal my face.”
Sure, she took the veil off to get her driver’s licence. But that was important, you see. Not like accusing a man of a horrendous crime.
The judge told her to take off her veil. That’s what was over-ruled last week.
This could be great, says the Court of Appeal. The reliability of her veiled testimony could actually be better.
“Without the niqab ... one could not expect her to be herself on the witness stand ... her embarrassment and discomfort could be misinterpreted as uncertainty and unreliability.”
But it’s more than law. It’s politics, they say. Allowing the niqab “could be seen as a recognition and acceptance of those minority beliefs and practices.”
That’s exactly the problem.
In heaven, Aqsa Parvez is screaming again.
There's something unseemly about a U.S. government appointee flying north (using Saudi jet fuel) to interfere in a Canadian regulatory proceeding. It's unthinkable that a Canadian political hack would fly down to the U.S. to mouth off on some domestic matter there. But that's exactly what media whore James Hansen of NASA did last week at an Alberta oilsands hearing. Funny, though; neither Hansen nor Obama has much to say about China's massive carbon dioxide emissions. I wonder if that's political correctness, ignorance, or just simple obedience to the country that owns a trillion dollars in U.S. debt?
Here's my column. I'd love your feedback.
Facts oiled up
James Hansen, the head of one of President Barack Obama’s NASA labs, came to Canada last week to tell us not to allow a French company called Total to proceed with its Canadian oilsands project.
Even for Obama, that’s quite a foreign policy accomplishment: Interfering with two allies at once.
NASA used to be about exploring space — that’s what the S stands for. But NASA’s new boss, Charles Bolden, recently told Al Jazeera TV that Obama has given him new marching orders: Inspire children to learn math, expand international relationships. “Perhaps foremost. he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”
I guess that’s what happens when a “community organizer” becomes president.
But when you think about it, Hansen is following Obama’s instructions perfectly: The Saudis probably do “feel good” that NASA is trying to shut down their Canadian oil competitors.
Total is proposing to invest between $15 billion and
$20 billion in Canada over the next 10 years, creating 1,300 jobs. Total’s not just producing the oil, they’re going to upgrade it in Canada, too, adding value for export.
Hansen is upset that the Total mine will emit 1.5 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide a year. Anything with the word “mega” in it sounds big. But that works out to just 0.0038% of the world’s fossil fuel emissions.
If carbon dioxide is your worry — and Hansen says it’s his — then coal should be your focus. It emits twice the carbon dioxide than petroleum products to create the same energy.
Hansen can start in his own backyard. Take the Miller coal-fired power station in Quinton, Ala. That one power plant emits more than 20 Mt of carbon dioxide a year. One plant. The Scherer coal-fired power plant in Juliette, Georgia is even bigger. It emits more than 25 Mt a year.
But those plants are just babies compared to what China is doing. China has plenty of power plants bigger than Scherer. There’s one in Tuen Mun at a whopping 35.8 Mt. And Taiwan has one that tops 41 Mt.
The oilsands — all of them combined? Barely 30 Mt.
Individual Chinese power plants have higher carbon emissions than Canada’s 100 different oilsands companies put together.
But Hansen hasn’t flown to China with his protest.
In 2008, Hansen said CEOs of fossil energy companies should be put on trial for “crimes against humanity.” Try saying that in China and you’ll get the Tiananmen Square treatment.
Hansen doesn’t even criticize China from the safety of the United States. In a laughable essay he wrote this spring for the liberal Huffington Post, Hansen says he believes China wants to “avoid the fossil fuel addiction of the United States. They want to clean up their atmosphere and water.”
Avoid fossil fuels? Last year Chinese auto sales hit 13.64 million, more than the U.S. for the first time. The number of cars on the road in China is expected to double to 200 million in less than 10 years. Clean up their atmosphere? The World Bank says that 20 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities are in China.
But Hansen and NASA and Obama don’t criticize China. China is the largest owner of U.S. treasury bills.
When you owe someone a trillion dollars, you don’t call them “polluter.”
You call them “boss.”
Here's my column from Sunday's Sun newspapers. I wanted to talk about Geert Wilders, but I kept going back a bit, and then a bit more, to explain why Wilders is so important. I thought Pim Fortuyn was a good place to start.
So much about radical Islam is linked to sex -- burkas and gender apartheid; honour killings; female genital mutilation; virgins as bounty for suicide bombers; etc. Radical Islam is particularly disconcerted by homosexuality. This is a test for Western liberals: do they value sexual equality for gays more than they are afraid of being politically incorrect towards Muslim immigrants? So far, the answer is an embarrassing "no".
Here's the column -- what do you think?
Gay-bashers thrive in modern-day Netherlands
If you think Amsterdam is the gay capital of Europe, you’re half-right, but 10 years out of date. Today it’s the gay-bashing capital of Europe.
Because Amsterdam isn’t just gay. Now it’s Muslim, too. A million Moroccans and Turks have immigrated to the Netherlands, and sharia law rules the streets.
If you doubt it, then you haven’t been paying attention. Actually, that’s not fair. Gay-bashing is front-page news only when it’s committed by a straight, white male.
The media is terribly uncomfortable writing about gay-bashing by minorities. It’s the same reason why Canadian feminists are so eerily quiet about honour killings of Muslim girls.
According to an “offender study” by the University of Amsterdam, there were 201 reports of anti-gay violence in that city in 2007 — and researchers believe for every reported case there are as many as 25 unreported ones. Two thirds of the predators are Muslim youths.
The violence couldn’t be more brazen. It’s not in the back alleys in the dark, it’s in the heart of the city, often in broad daylight. It’s a direct dare to the Dutch government to show who rules the streets.
In 2008, 10 Muslim youths broke into a fashion show, dragged gay model Michael du Pree off the stage and beat him bloody. Last month, several lesbians were hit by beer bottles thrown at their heads as they marched in a parade of thousands to protest violence against gays. There’s a gay community centre in Amsterdam — you’d think that would be safe. Wrong. It’s a target, with home-invasion style beatings. No one is immune. Last year Hugo Braakhuis, the founder of Amdsterdam’s gay pride parade, was attacked.
In 2005, Chris Crain, former editor of America’s leading gay magazine, Washington Blade, was swarmed by seven Moroccan youths. “I was really surprised,” Crain told reporters at the time. “I felt comfortable because it is San Francisco times 10.” Or it used to be.
This didn’t happen all at once. Ten years ago Pim Fortuyn rang the alarm. “I don’t hate Islam,” he said. “I consider it a backward culture.”
He wanted to halt Muslim immigration, at least until those in the country accepted Holland’s liberal values, such as its acceptance of him as an openly gay political leader. “How wonderful that that’s possible. And I’d like to keep it that way.”
Fortuyn was a Marxist professor, a champion of gay rights, women’s rights, liberal drug laws and euthanasia. Yet, because he opposed Muslim immigration, the CBC called him “right wing.”
Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002 by a leftist radical opposed to his views on Islam.
Next came Theo van Gogh, a descendant of artist Vincent van Gogh. He made a movie about Islam’s treatment of women, called Submission.
A 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri shot him eight times and tried to cut his head off. Then Bouyeri stabbed a knife into van Gogh’s chest with a letter threatening Western governments, Jews, and van Gogh’s collaborator, a liberal Muslim named Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Hirsi Ali was placed under police protection, until a judge ordered her out of her safe house. She now lives in the United States. Fortuyn, van Gogh and Hirsi Ali are gone from Holland, but the Moroccans and Turks aren’t.
Now comes Geert Wilders. Wilders is the leader of the Party for Freedom, the third-most popular party in Holland. The party joined the new government coalition in return for immigration cuts and a ban on burkas, the face-covering shrouds worn by some Muslim women.
His ideas are mainstream enough to become government policy. But this week, Wilders stood trial for “hate crimes” for those very same ideas.
Prosecutors say it’s a crime to compare the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as Wilders has done, and that he has caused too much of the human emotion called hate.
Mohamed Rabbae supports the prosecution. He’s the chairman of the National Moroccan Council. He wants a judge to order Wilders to apologize. “We are for correcting him,” he said.
Rabbae is for a coerced apology and forced political re-education. And the Associated Press calls Rabbae a moderate.
These days, in Holland, unfortunately that’s true.
Here's Mel Wilde's friendly review of Ethical Oil in British Columbia's Lake Country Calendar. Some excerpts:
...Ezra Levant, Canada’s free speech warrior takes on the militants of both the environmental movement and the manipulated media in his latest book, Ethical Oil, the case for Canada’s oil sands.
Levant tells how organizations such as Greenpeace along with the Sierra club and other militant environmentalists have gotten away with the most vitriolic attacks against the existence of Alberta’s oil sands—all with the help of big media.
Levant points out in his book how one sided the debate about the oil sands has been.
...My conclusion, after reading Ezra’s book is that the militants attack Canada, and in particular Alberta’s oil sands, because they can. The fact is, we live in a free and peaceful society and the militants take great advantage of that reality.
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