Mullah Harper should follow our secular law
One tried and tested Republican dirty trick is to place an emotional issue, such as abortion or same-sex marriage, on the ballot as a referendum. Worked-up voters get diverted from the economy and other more relevant issues. The party’s conservative base gets motivated to turn up on election day.
The dynamic works even better if wars coincide with elections.
Stephen Harper has implanted his war on the Muslim jihadists and the notun-related issue of a Muslim woman’s niqab into national consciousness in this election year. With a real war in Iraq and a phony cultural war at home, the NDP and the Liberals are having a hard time getting the economy, and the missing federal budget, back on the agenda.
With the niqab, the Harperites are scaling new heights of hypocrisy.
Standing on guard against the Islamic hordes, Ayatollahs Harper and Jason Kenney are reciting the sharia to argue that the niqab is not Islamic. Kenney says he has it on the authority of the grand mufti of Egypt, “the most preeminent sharia authority in the Sunni world,” and also of “a vast majority of Muslims that I’ve spoken with.” Harper cites “the views of the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims.”
Egypt’s mufti is a paid employee of a police state. It’d be useful to know how many of the one million Muslims Kenney has spoken to, given that his govern- ment boycotts that community and pursues a policy, copied from the old colonialists and contemporary authoritarian states, of cultivating a handful of pliant people, some of whom it funds and uses as props at press conferences and parliamentary hearings.
It would also be interesting to know who, in Harper’s book, qualifies as a “moderate Muslim,” given that he classifies adversaries as enemies and has characterized two leaders of Her Loyal Majesty’s Opposition as terrorist sympathizers. But none of that is pertinent. Nor is the fact that a majority of Canadians agree with Harper on the niqab. If a majority believed in some anti-Semitic nonsense, would he oblige?
Mackenzie King’s internment of Japanese-Canadians and others in the Second World War was also popular. He did it, as Justin Trudeau said this week, “because people were afraid” — just as Canadians are about Muslims today.
It does not matter that Harper believes that the niqab is “rooted in a culture that is anti-women.” Several Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other practices, right here in Canada, are anti-women.
Even more irrelevant is whether or not the niqab is a religious requirement (Muslims have been arguing that for 1,400 years). It is of as little value as the proposition floated by some in the 1990s that a turban for Sikh males was not a requirement of the Sikh faith.
What matters in democratic, secular Canada is the rule of law — our law, not the law of some sacred text.
For the purposes of public policy, a religious belief is not what a mullah or a rabbi or a priest or a Harper or a Kenney dictates. It is what a believer sincerely believes it to be, according to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In Canada, it matters not whether the niqab is Qur’an-compliant but whether banning it would be Charter-compliant.
It is strange to be invoking theocracy to uphold secular values.
It is ironic in the extreme that a law- and-order government is refusing to accept a Federal Court ruling that Ottawa’s ban on the niqab is “unlawful.”
But it’s a mistake to look for logic or consistency with this gang.
In 2009, the Prime Minister’s Office said of the niqab: “In an open and democratic society like Canada, individuals are free to make their own decisions regarding their personal apparel and to adhere to their own customs or traditions of their faith or beliefs.”
On Wednesday, Treasury Board President Tony Clement said that federal civil servants can wear the niqab.
But no one can become a Canadian citizen wearing one.
That the Harperites are getting away with this nonsense testifies either to their brilliance in brainwashing a majority of Canadians or our collective culpability in being so easily manipulated because we have been whipped into anti-Muslim hysteria.
Muslims cannot be maligned any more than they already have been in the post-Sept. 11 era. What Canadians should worry about is the erosion of Canadian values by a government that’s displaying the same fascist tendencies as did the Parti Québécois with its charter of Quebec values and as do the Republicans with their bouts of bigotry against African Americans, Latinos and others.
I felt ashamed as a Canadian Tuesday when our prime minister thundered against a sole niqabi woman in the Commons and his trained seals on the Conservative benches bobbed up and down in delirious approval — the ugly moment transmitted on national television.
But there’s always a democratic antidote. Justin Trudeau’s speech on Monday skewering Harper’s dirty tactics was a refreshing enunciation of the remarkable Canadian balance between “individual liberty and collective identity. We have created a society where both thrive and mutually reinforce one another.”