CANADIAN DELUSIONS

Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar recently attended Calgary's largest mosque for a funeral. At one point in the proceedings, a man Kanwar has known for more than three decades led the prayers. "He was saying in Urdu (the official language of Pakistan): 'Oh, God, protect us from the infidels, who pollute us with their vile ways,'" recalls Kanwar, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal College in Calgary.

"I stood up and grabbed him by the lapels, which was shocking even to me because I have never done anything like that in my life and I said: 'How dare you attack my country.' And then I addressed the crowd and said: 'I have known this man for more than 30 years and he has been on welfare for almost all of those years.' " Kanwar chuckles at the memory. "Then I said to this semi-literate man, 'you should thank me and those you call infidels.' "He asked me why and I said: 'Because the taxes I pay are putting food on your table as are the taxes of the so-called "infidels.' "

Most Canadians and many Muslims would applaud Dr. Kanwar's righteous outburst. But guess which of the two men is no longer welcome at the Sarcee Tr. S.W. mosque? Not the intolerant, hate-spewing semi-literate. No, it's Dr. Kanwar who's persona non grata. That, says Kanwar, is just one of numerous instances he has experienced as a result of the culture of ignorance and intolerance that permeates so many mosques in Canada and throughout the world.

In light of the arrests two weeks ago of 17 young Muslim Canadian men who are alleged to have planned terrorist attacks against their fellow Canadians that included attacking Parliament, seizing the CBC and beheading the prime minister, Kanwar says it's vitally important for Canadians to start making more demands of those who immigrate to this country. Kanwar says we now know one of the 17 accused was allowed to spew hatred and calls to violent jihad at a Toronto-area mosque and he was never once told by the leadership there to stop. Six of the young men who listened to him are also charged in the plot.

Kanwar is pretty certain, if he spoke up at that mosque, however, with his message that Canada's culture is better than the culture found in any Islamic-based country, he'd be kicked out. "The policy of official multiculturalism is a disaster," says Kanwar, who ironically once headed a government-funded multicultural organization in Calgary in the early '70s.

Every year, Kanwar's organization would host a large food and crafts festival in the basement of the Jubilee Auditorium. "There were 52 tables, each with two flags on them -- Polish and Canadian, Ukrainian and Canadian etc. When the Alberta minister in charge of funding the festival showed up, I asked him, 'why is there not even one table here with a single flag -- why is there no Canadian table?'"

Kanwar has been questioning the government-funded official multicultural model ever since -- most recently through his 2002 book: Journey to Success, which is used as a sociology textbook at Mount Royal College and other post-secondary institutions. "Multiculturalism creates nations within a nation and divides the loyalty of people," says the 65-year-old Pakastani-born Kanwar, who immigrated to Canada in 1966. "It allows people to marginalize themselves. It endangers us all as these recent arrests show."

Because of Kanwar's open and published opposition to Ontario's proposal last year to consider allowing sharia law for arbitration purposes in that province, Kanwar says he has been issued with fatwahs -- not the death-threat versions made famous by the one issued against Salman Rushdie for writing the novel The Satanic Verses -- but more like a shunning. Kanwar, a devout Muslim, says he has essentially been excommunicated by Calgary's mosques because he is too tolerant of others.

Homa Arjomand, who lives in Toronto and headed Canada's successful campaign of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada (www.nosharia.com), says like Kanwar, she too once embraced the idea of multiculturalism. Arjomand, who calls herself a "victim" of sharia law -- a strict set of rules based on Islam's holy book, the Qur'an, that subjugates women, as well as allows for the chopping off of hands for theft etc. -- says part of the reason she decided to immigrate to Canada was because she had heard about official multiculturalism. "I thought how wonderful, but not anymore," she declares. "I came here for Canadian values, not sharia values. I fled Iran on horseback because the values there threatened my very life. If people want to live under sharia or the way they lived back home, let them go back," she said.

Kanwar agrees. He says the time has come for the Canadian government to tell new immigrants "once you're in Canada we expect you to be totally devoted to Canada -- no divided loyalties." "This country," added Kanwar, "is a democracy and democracy is founded on Christian principles. "Canada is -- like it or not, take it or leave it -- a country founded on Christian principles where the vast majority of citizens are Christians," said Kanwar. "Yes, there's separation of church and state but even that was a principle founded by Christians and Christianity. "If Muslims, or anyone else, doesn't like living in a land filled with Christians or in a democracy they should get the hell out."

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Homosexuals Have Emerged as the New Protected Class in America

The governor of Maryland fired one of his appointees to the Washington Metro transit authority board for stating a negative opinion of homosexuality on a cable TV talk show. The board member, Robert Smith, had said: "Homosexual behavior, in my view, is deviant. I'm a Roman Catholic." The governor, Robert Ehrlich, said Smith's remarks were "highly inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable."

"Insensitive" sounds like a fair comment. "Deviant" is a harsh word for expressing one's non-approval of homosexuality. The governor is on less firm ground with "inappropriate." Smith's comment certainly was apropos of the talk-show topic, gay marriage. He was explaining why he opposed it. "I'm Catholic" was shorthand for "I take my religion seriously and, like millions of other Christians, my views on marriage and my non-approval of homosexual sex are biblically based."

Ehrlich's third adjective, "unacceptable," is surely debatable. Did he mean that all members of Washington-area boards are required to approve of homosexuality, or just that they must suppress any non-positive views during TV discussions of same-sex marriage? The governor, a Republican who is up for re-election and is trying to move from the right to the center, clearly hasn't thought the issue through. He certainly seems to be banishing Smith for a thought crime. Perhaps he did so because he knew his Democratic opponents would come after him for tolerating "hate speech" if he let Smith stay on. Smith argues that his social opinions have "absolutely nothing to do with running trains and buses" and that they haven't affected his actions or decisions on the board.

Maybe it's not a good idea for government transit specialists to be pronouncing on divisive social issues. But they clearly have a right to do so. The Supreme Court says the First Amendment protects the right of public employees and appointees to speak freely on matters of public concern. So if Smith wants to sue over his firing, he seems likely to win. At any rate, liberals routinely argue that people should not be fired for behavior or speech unrelated to their jobs, such as professors who make loony remarks out of class, or schoolteachers who have children out of wedlock.

Why didn't Gov. Erhrlich simply say that he disagrees with Smith, but considers him an excellent public servant, which the Washington Post coverage of the story makes clear he is? The answer is that in Washington, and among the elites everywhere, approval of homosexuality is now mandatory. In the old days, employees were fired for being gay. Now they are far more likely to get fired for failing to approve homosexuality or for some remark that the gay lobby resents.

In colleges and schools, regulations on "hate speech" now protect gays from criticism as well as meaningful debate. Andrew Sullivan, the prominent blogger and a gay man, says he is troubled by attempts "to prevent or even criminalize the expression of hostility to homosexuality, or gay rights, or indeed any another form of gay speech." Criminalizing such criticism, and even biblical citations against homosexuality, are no longer unusual in Europe and Canada.

Sullivan cites the case of Lynette Burrows, a British writer on children's rights, who drew an inquiry from Scotland Yard for saying on a radio talk show that she did not believe male homosexuals should be allowed to adopt boys. "It's a risk," she said. "Would you give a small girl to two (heterosexual) men?" She said it was "sinister" to have a police investigation of a comment that hurt the feelings of gays. Also in Britain, Anglican Bishop Peter Forster drew a police investigation after telling a newspaper, "Some people who are primarily homosexual can reorientate themselves." In Canada, criticism of homosexuality is essentially illegal. An ad in a Saskatchewan newspaper listing biblical citations against homosexuality was ruled a human-rights offense. The man who placed the ad was directed to pay $1,500 each to three gay men who were offended by the text.

In the United States, though speech control usually runs afoul of the First Amendment, schools routinely support the pro-gay Day of Silence and ban the Day of Truth, set up by Christians to counter what they believe is organized use of public schools for gay lobbying. A prominent intellectual, talking about gays, complained about "the fascist policing of public discourse in this country by nominal liberals." That was Camille Paglia, who can avoid the speech police because she is brave, candid and lesbian.

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NOW "CORRECT" TO DEMONIZE THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The tulwars and assegais were out for Niall Ferguson in last Monday's Start the Week. They were deftly wielded by four critics of the British empire and the result was a spirited exchange. It was another skirmish in that old war of words as to whether the empire was a good or a bad thing. Ferguson thinks on balance that it was good, and I agree. Our antagonists do not. At times they seem intoxicated with their own moral outrage, and they express it stridently. Caroline Elkins's account of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya during the 1950s has the provocative title of Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.

Mike Davis's version of 19th-century famines in India goes a step further along the path of moral remonstrance by calling his book Late Victorian Holocausts. These authors' acolytes swell the indignant clamour. In The Independent, Johann Hari alleged that during the famines of 1876-78 and 1895-97 the rulers of British India adopted a "conscious policy of mass starvation", which places two obscure Victorian viceroys on a par of wickedness with "Stalin and Mao".

This is twaddle. The rulers of India were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate administrative machinery and limited resources, they made a determined effort to feed the hungry. In 1897 more than 33m Indians were being sustained by the government, which had allocated œ4.3m (about œ200m in today's money) to relief operations. By this date, the railway network (a British innovation) was sufficiently advanced to distribute rice and grain to regions of dearth. There was no "holocaust": between 1871-1901 India's population increased by 30m.

As for the Mau Mau campaign, Elkins's figures of 300,000 interned and a further 50,000 killed are contentious. David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire calculates that 150,000 were imprisoned, between 12,000 and 20,000 insurgents killed in action and just over 1,000 executed for sedition and murder.

Of course contrary statistics cannot hide the fact that British forces and Kenyan auxiliaries behaved savagely at times. A temporarily paralysed government was stunned by the uprising and exaggerated the capacity of the rebels. This does not exonerate acts of brutality, but it should prevent them being portrayed as on the same moral level as the planned, sustained and secret policies of mass extermination that were practised over decades in Stalin's gulags. Even to hint at parity is grotesque.

Unlike Stalin's Russia, the British empire was always an open society. Enoch Powell slated the government for the deaths of Mau Mau detainees in Hola camp in 1959. His reproof was a reminder of what T E Lawrence had observed in 1920, when Britain was suppressing an insurrection in Iraq. In a democratic nation, the public expected the empire to be decently run for the benefit of and with the consent of all its subjects.

What happened in every part of the empire was reported in the press and debated in parliament. Much of the evidence of the torture of prisoners in Kenya was aired in the Commons. Proconsuls and generals were called to public account. They also had their own codes of humanity: in 1919 Lord Chelmsford refused to employ poison gas against North-West Frontier tribesmen on the grounds that it would be a gross denial of Britain's "civilising" mission. This mission had a powerful hold over the public imagination throughout the last hundred years of the Empire's existence. British society was intolerant of injustice, cherished individual freedom and believed that the world was moving onwards and upwards. It is easy to jeer at this optimism, easier still to sneer at Britain's wish to remake the world in its own image. Enemies of the empire do both and simultaneously speculate as to what might have happened had the British never appeared.

Alternative histories of India and Africa abound and tend towards fantasies about peaceful evolution and economic self-sufficiency. This is historical self-indulgence; nations can never be permanently quarantined. From the earliest recorded history there has been an impulse for peoples to explore, trade and acquire territory for prestige and power. It was always a competitive business. If the British had not exploited the internal divisions within India, the Russians would have tried.

Empires of one sort or another have been a constant of history. They grow, wither and leave their legacies. I believe that on balance the British empire was a force for good and should be a source of national pride. It provided an interlude of stability in which countries divided by race and religion could develop and, in the case of India, discover a national identity.

Alongside railways, schools, universities, hospitals and sanitation projects, the empire introduced political and social ideas dear to the British. These included extending civil rights to women, a free press and, most important of all, a culture of popular consent and reasoned debate. English spread as the language of learning, law and commerce.

After 1945 a combination of domestic exhaustion, American pressure and local nationalisms, which we had neither the will nor the wherewithal to resist, led to the retreat from empire. Unlike the French, Portuguese, Russian and Yugoslav disengagements, the process was largely good-natured and involved little bloodshed. The turmoil and casualties in Kenya were small beer compared with those in Algeria, Angola, Chechnya and the Balkans.

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AMUSING: ONE LOT OF SELF-RIGHTEOUS LEFTISTS VERSUS ANOTHER

Hopefully with a less bloody outcome than the Stalin/Trotsky rivalry

Starbucks Corp. may be next on the target list of a consumer-health group that this week sued the operator of the KFC fried chicken restaurant chain for frying foods in oils high in harmful trans fat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest said it is planning to campaign against the global cafe chain because of the increased risk of obesity, heart disease and cancer associated with high-calorie, high-fat products it sells.

And the possibility of legal action against Starbucks, similar to the case it is taking against KFC owner Yum Brands Inc., has not been ruled out, said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson. "Regular consumers of Starbucks products could face Venti-sized health problems," Jacobson said, referring to Starbucks' use of the 'Venti' designation for 'large.'

The group is primarily funded by newsletter subscribers and individual donors. It has support in the campaign from the small IWW Starbucks Workers Union, which has members in three stores, all in New York. They would like Starbucks to list nutrition information -- which is currently available online and in store brochures -- on its menu boards. "Customers can ask for nutrition information, but when you're talking about a transparent business in a busy world, that's not enough," union organizer and Starbucks "barista" staff member Daniel Gross said in an interview. He said the company should use healthier shortenings without trans fat, and publicize its smallest size, "short," which is available but does not appear on the menu.

The union contends that Starbucks staff gain weight when they work at the chain. They are offered unlimited beverages and leftover pastries for free during their shifts. A 20-ounce Venti banana mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream contains 720 calories and 11 grams of saturated fat, and a banana cream crunch bar weighs in at 630 calories and 25 grams of saturated fat. By comparison, a McDonald's Corp. Big Mac has 560 calories and 11 grams of saturated fat.

A Starbucks spokesman said in a statement it is "actively researching" alternatives to high-fat products. The company said it plans to eliminate trans fat from seasonal baked goods -- but not necessarily other products -- by this fall. "In our beverage ingredients, we have reformulated any component that contained significant artificial trans fat content," the spokesman said....

Jacobson said Starbucks may have been spared the scrutiny fast-food chains received recently because of its health-conscious image. "People expect foods from Dunkin' Donuts to be unhealthy, but Starbucks has more of an upper middle class, healthy, hip, politically correct facade," Jacobson said. "But the food is just as harmful to your arteries."

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