Underdog (27 page)

It is happening in the Toronto taxi industry too. Gail Beck-Souter, president of Beck Taxi, was forthright enough to tell me that a certain number of the drivers who operate the company's nine-hundred-car fleet refuse to take dogs in them. She told me that some drivers use allergies to dogs as an excuse, when she knows their concerns are really religious. While the company's owners don't like it, Ms. Beck-Souter says they do give drivers the option of not carrying a dog. I can understand Ms. Beck-Souter not wanting to stir up trouble with the drivers when every other
company is pandering to their demands. Still, no one is asking these drivers to take Kishka or any other dog home and live with them (although that might change their minds about man's best friend).

Look, I realize that whether or not Muslim cab drivers refuse fares who have dogs with them is not on the same level of importance as world poverty (and I haven't been refused since I broke the story), but the very theme of it is right up my alley: weak-kneed officials and the politicians who oversee them (in this case those affiliated with the GTAA or the bureaucrats with municipal licensing who oversee Toronto cabbies) pandering to special interest groups in an attempt not to offend anyone, rather than protecting our rights and freedoms. It's a slippery bloody slope. Another example of this was the leftist councillors' strong showing of support for Toronto District School Board trustee Ausma Malik, a Muslim woman who wears a hijab and who was elected in the fall of 2014 to represent a very left-wing downtown Toronto ward. I couldn't care less whether Ms. Malik wears a head scarf. That is her right. What I did care about, and what I exposed in the fall of 2014, were her nefarious ties to Hezbollah. During the heat of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon in July 2006, Ms. Malik was a keynote speaker at a peace rally denouncing both the conflict and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support of Israel's right to defend itself against Hezbollah's missile fire. Standing outside the U.S. consulate beside Ali Mallah – a well-known pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas activist – Ms. Malik characterized Israel's actions as “state-sanctioned murder.” She also rebuked Mr. Harper, calling on him to “get a backbone” while those around her – sporting Lebanese flags and the yellow
flag of the Hezbollah terrorist movement – chanted “shame” and jeered jubilantly when word came down that Hezbollah had killed another twenty-two Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. When I contacted her for comment, she did not deny her involvement in the 2006 rally or what she'd said, claiming at the same time that she does not “support anti-Semitism in any form.” While participating in a report on the needs of Muslim students – one sponsored by the left-wing Canadian Federation of Students – Ms. Malik suggested she'd be much happier if Sharia law was brought into Ontario classrooms. What was concerning to me about her candidacy – besides the long list of leftist councillors who endorsed her, including QuAIA's founder Kristyn Wong-Tam, Mike Layton, and Joe Cressy – was the potential for her radical political views to make it into the school curriculum or into school policy. But the more I and one of her opponents, who happened to be Jewish, pointed out her questionable ties, the more her politically correct supporters circled the wagons, characterizing her as a victim of racism and Islamophobia. Literature was circulated in the ward highlighting her questionable background at around the same time, unfortunately, that reservist Nathan Cirillo was tragically shot and killed on Parliament Hill by a radicalized thirty-two-year-old Muslim man. The shooting occurred just five days before the municipal election and that's all Ms. Malik and her leftist supporters needed. While emotions were running high about an extremist killing a soldier in broad daylight, Ms. Malik and her leftist supporters were successfully able to plant the seeds of racism in voters' minds by claiming she was only being targeted for being Muslim as well. I've got to hand it to the leftist contingent. They played the situation with skill. Mr. Cressy
even went on TV to ensure that everyone knew how terribly Ms. Malik was being treated by alleged Islamophobes. She won the election handily and I was accused of being an Islamophobe for weeks afterward. So this is what happens in Toronto when one merely tries to suggest that a Muslim with a highly questionable past might not be a suitable choice to determine policy or to set an example for schoolkids at Canada's largest school board.

In 2010, Denise and I travelled to Morocco as part of her fiftieth birthday trip that started in Spain. It was a feast for our senses but also clearly a country where all manner of dress was accepted for women. We met ladies dressed in Western garb, others wearing the hijab, and still others outfitted in the full burka or niqab. I'll never forget the day we sat in a taxi in Marrakech and, when I looked behind us, seeing a woman driving a car dressed in a full brown burka with glasses perched atop the only part of her showing – her eyes. I wondered, laughing, how that garb would affect her peripheral vision. But the point was, we fully expected to see women dressed like that in Morocco. But imagine my surprise when, upon returning to Canada, I saw a woman dressed in a full brown burka walking near the Eaton Centre, a couple of paces behind her husband. I have seen this all too many times since, more recently while jogging up Yonge Street and while conducting an interview with a female resident of Toronto Community Housing Corporation. When the woman took me up to her laundry room to show me some desperately needed repairs, there was another woman in there in full burka doing her laundry. I have to concede I found it creepy for more than one reason. For one thing, this woman is availing herself of the largesse of the Canadian taxpayer if
she is living in social housing. But clearly she has no intention of assimilating to our culture. There is something dreadfully wrong with that picture.

I am certainly not talking about women wearing the hijab. To me that is no different than Orthodox Jewish women wearing shaytels (wigs) or Jewish men wearing black hats out of respect for the Lord. I'm talking about women wearing a full burka and walking a safe distance behind their men, or hiding everything but their eyes in a black tent. It makes a mockery of democracy in this country and of presumably the reason they came to Canada in the first place – for a better life. As women, we have fought for equality in the workplace and at home. It wasn't too long ago – less than twenty years ago – that I experienced sexism in my own place of employment. As a lesbian who wrestled with her own identity and lived in a closeted relationship for twenty years, I am incensed that we are so willing to accept a religious custom that harkens back to the Dark Ages and condones the near-abusive practices of patriarchal and oppressive fundamentalism. Dress it up any way you want, but that's what it is.

The ultimate in pandering to these archaic Muslim laws occurs at Canada Customs, where Muslim women in full burkas are allowed to breeze through customs clearance and security checks without once showing their faces. It is beyond ludicrous, but few will speak up about it, particularly our politicians. Yet it is perfectly acceptable in our crazy, upside down, politically correct country to treat the average non-Muslim traveller with absolute disdain while he or she is crossing the border. I have lost count how many times, en route to my second home in Florida, I've been subjected to aggressive questioning, bordering on bullying, from U.S. Customs
officers who have accused me of everything from working in the States (even when I've shown them my latest
Toronto Sun
column) to having dog biscuits and carrots – allegedly a no-no – to feed Kishka on the plane. And that's after going through three months of screening to acquire a Trusted Traveller Nexus card. At security, we are asked to remove our shoes, belts, and jewellery, and each time I go through with Kishka in my arms, my palms are swabbed to ensure there is no harmful residue on them. While necessary, Denise and I find the whole customs/security exercise not just wearying but tremendously selective as to who is targeted.

Yet, I repeat, a woman in a full burka is often permitted to breeze through without question and without showing her face. If we are all to be treated equally, all of these women should be required to disrobe and show their faces in a special room staffed by a female customs or security agent, so we would actually know who was travelling with a corresponding passport. Or their irises could be scanned by the same machine that does ours when we go through customs with our Nexus cards. Yet by all accounts, it's hit and miss whether they are required to be checked. This has to be one of the worst cases of political correctness gone mad. I might add that it is also the custom in Ontario elections not to ask fully veiled women to show their faces before they vote. Yet I can't go into any poll and exercise my right to vote as a Canadian and Ontario citizen without first showing ID. Women in full burkas are also not required to show their faces when testifying in Ontario's courtrooms.

The best example of political correctness and pandering to extremist Muslims gone mad is the whole kerfuffle over Prime Minister Steven Harper's attempts to force an
extremist Muslim woman to take off her niqab while swearing in as a Canadian citizen. Seems like a simple request, right? But in our topsy-turvy country – where pragmatism often gets thrown out the window whenever political correctness is involved – a three-judge appeal panel of the Federal Court declared in mid-September 2015 that the woman in question, Zunera Ishaq, had every right to stay hidden inside her mobile tent and not reveal her identity while engaged in a ceremony to become a citizen of a country that celebrates democratic rights and freedoms, not Third World archaic views. And many prominent feminists thought that was just fine. Clearly the desire to undermine a Conservative government and a stance that makes perfect sense trumped what should have been a strong voice against an oppressive practice. This is where the feminist movement loses me. It just makes absolutely no sense to support this archaic view of women, but Canada's bleeding hearts are adept at turning reason into ridiculousness. They repeatedly fail or choose not to see the long-term implications of allowing the door to open a little wider with each attempt of Muslim extremists to ram their religious views down our throats.

In the newly revitalized Regent Park in downtown Toronto, the publicly funded aquatic centre provides women-only swim times three times a week, which allow Muslim women to use the pool without being subject to men looking in or attending. I went one Saturday evening to see for myself what was provided and who attended. A drape was pulled across the whole glassed-in exterior of the building to guard the women from public view. As much as I went wanting to believe that this was yet another example of giving selective treatment to Muslims, I was shocked to see the pool
completely full of women – some dressed in bathing gear, others in gym outfits covering their arms and legs. But they all looked happy and free – free of their mobile tents and free of the men and a culture that keeps them hidden. I saw the hour made available to them twice or three times a week as a welcome reprieve from what I consider an extremely oppressive and repressive life.

That is, of course, unless you believe a 2013 study by the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) – funded to the tune of $191,000 by the Ontario Trillium Foundation – that suggests the women they surveyed enjoy being slaves to this archaic custom. In yet another example of political correctness, officials at the CCMW decided they needed to justify why some women have chosen to wear the niqab. This was prompted, they say, because they'd received many calls over the years from the public and the media asking why women living in Canada fully cover their faces (as if they were living in the Middle East), and they had no answer to give. Oh my. So they spent nearly $200,000 of taxpayer money speaking to and surveying eighty-one mostly Ontario women – or about $2,500 per member of their ridiculously small sample – who are “actively wearing” the niqab. Seeing as they chose not to speak to women who have actively forsaken the niqab, we can pretty well guess what their study would find.

And indeed it did. When they presented their report in February 2014 in front of a mosque in Guelph, the CCMW had six happy women there wearing their niqabs “by their own free will.” The council acknowledges in the executive summary of their study findings that the practice of covering a women's body and hair and leaving only the eyes visible with a niqab has often been “problematized as symbol of
Islamic extremism, women's oppression and lastly the failure of Muslims to integrate.” You think?

The findings were a mass of contradictions. While most of the eighty-one niqab-wearing women who responded to the study possessed a “high level of education” and worked in a range of fields, most did not believe in dating and found homosexuality an unacceptable practice. And get this: most of those who chose to continue wearing the niqab after arriving in Canada did not do so because their husbands said they had to. In fact, many of the women claimed they faced opposition from their spouses to the idea. According to the findings, most of the participants expressed a “strong affinity” to Canada, praising its multiculturalism and its “freedom and life changing opportunities.” I repeat. They praised the freedom and life-changing opportunities they have in Canadian democracy,
but
they continue to hide their identities in a mobile tent, as if they should be ashamed of who they are. You've got to ask yourself what kind of pressure is felt by daughters born in Canada to mothers who still wear the niqab. Do they turn against their mothers' strong beliefs carried over from the old country or do they feel ostracized among their peer group, or at school? How many stories do we hear of girls who leave their homes in the morning dressed in a head scarf and, just before they arrive at school, change into typical Western dress just to fit in with this new world of freedom and democracy?