Angry in the Great White North

Here is an excerpt of the National Post editorial highlighting Farhan Chak's views, adding to our understanding via a phone conversation, and linking it all to Pierre Trudeau's legacy to Canada, multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism, R.I.P. (1982-2007)
Jonathan Kay, National Post
Published: Tuesday, April 24, 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 examples...

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• And finally, to Edmonton, where 33- year-old Muslim peace activist Farhan Mujahid Chak has been named the Liberal party candidate in the federal riding of Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont. As Steve Janke first reported on his Angry in the Great White North blog, Chak has published a variety of provocative political views on issues 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.

Chak isn't a Muslim extremist: During a phone conversation yesterday, he came across more as a naive 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?

The irony is, of course, that Chak will be trotted out as an example of just how tolerant and multicultural the Liberal Party is. Every major party is a cultural and racial mix, which means the only thing that makes the Liberal Party different, I suppose, is the extent to which it is tolerant of the sort of dangerous nuttiness Chak represents.

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