Sharia is gone but fear and hostility remain

Confronted with a problem created by some Muslims, George W. Bush attacked Iraq. Cornered by a request for “ sharia” law, Dalton McGuinty killed Christian and Jewish religious arbitration. Iraq had no connection to 9/ 11 and had no weapons of mass destruction but Bush bombed it anyway. The existing religious panels pose no danger to Ontarians but McGuinty wants them gone. Bush cited the phony story of nuclear cake going from Niger to Iraq. McGuinty bought into the fear-mongering that Muslim barbarians are knocking on the gates of Ontario. Ending religious mediation is, of course, not the same as waging war. McGuinty is not Bush. But the parallels do suggest a creeping irrationality in our own public discourse, public opinion and public policy when dealing with Muslims. Many Ontarians remain agnostic about whether a few dozen believers can or cannot have religious arbitration, so long as there is one law for all. McGuinty has happily confirmed the principle in banning the practice for all. But the greater truth is that we have been battling phantoms no more real than Bush’s WMDs.

Faith- based arbitration for Muslims was not going to be sharia, even if one proponent said so. The term suited the critics just fine. They raised the red herring and the platitudes flowed: Multiculturalism was eroding common values. The line separating church and state was being erased. Theocracy was being grafted onto Canada. As amusing as some of this has been at one level, at another it has been Islamophobic and deeply divisive, as Tory leader John Tory said Sunday.

That some Muslims also opposed religious panels does not detract from that conclusion. In fact, it augments it. After all, many Jews and Christians, especially women, have also been opposed to religious arbitration in their communities. But neither they, nor any government on their behalf, robbed the right of those who wanted it. From such a Canadian “ live and let live” proposition, we have entered a new era, of not only denying Muslims that right but also taking it away from Christians, Jews and others. The latter are to pay the price for prejudice against the former.

This is clearly not what the government, or even the critics, set out to do. The critics were fixated on sharia, as was their right. It was only after the government could no longer avoid sounding racist by singling out one faith that it added the other faithbased panels to its hit list.

This is not to say that some were not concerned about all religious arbitrations. But they used the lightning rod of sharia to torch the others.

In either case, here we are celebrating McGuinty’s “ one law for all,” and patting ourselves on the back for separating church and state.

Yet neither virtue graces the provincial funding of Catholic schools — but not other faiths.

McGuinty’s rhetoric can be invoked by Jewish, Islamic and other schools to ask for funding parity, and by others to get the state out of the business of subsidizing faith- based schools altogether.

Still others may question the aboriginal sentencing circles operating outside the courts.

There is an historic logic to the parallel native and Catholic systems. I mention them only to point to the vacuity of some of the current declarations.

Faith- based mediation or arbitration is no more banned now than before McGuinty’s Sunday sermon. They will continue in commercial disputes and more informally on family matters. The latter will no longer be enforceable by the courts. But this, too, is more symbolic than real. No one seems to know for sure how many, if any, faith- based arbitration rulings have been brought to the courts to be enforced.

So, here’s the sum total of a year- long debate that has left Ontarians polarized: We will ban faith- based rulings from going to the courts where they were not going anyway. And we won’t allow the sharia that was not coming. We are into this la- la land because we are engendering an atmosphere of fear and mutual hostility that we used to consider un- Canadian.

That, more than anything else, should be of the greatest concern to all Ontarians, regardless of which faith we belong to, or none at all. Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca.