Weekly Update: to

by | July 22, 2017

Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for to .

[A collage of photos of the victims of the 2017-01-29 Québec mosque shooting: Ibrahima Barry, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzedine Soufiane, and Aboubaker Thabti.]

These are the victims of the January Québec mosque shooting. If you thought the indignities they faced ended with their deaths, think again. Islamophobes won’t even let Muslims be buried peacefully.

  • [] Canada’s spy agency faces $35M harassment, discrimination lawsuit

    More and more evidence is coming out of the rot in Canada’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We’ve heard plenty about the rampant sexism and misogyny in the RCMP. Now it’s islamophobia at CSIS.

  • [] Salvation Army rehab centre faces charges for rejecting vulnerable transgender people

    The story itself is from New York, but I’m including it because it got some commentary on social media repeating the myth that this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. It does. The Canadian divisions of the Salvation Army may not be as brazenly and openly homophobic as some other places, but even a little bit of research turns up plenty of examples of their evangelical beliefs getting in the way of charity and decency.

  • [] Turkish asylum claims up 5-fold in Canada amid Erdogan’s ‘witch hunt’

    From any humanist or rationalist perspective Erdoğan is a disaster for Turkey. Now it seems the mess he’s making is starting to have effects even here in Canada.

  • [] 19 voters quash Muslim-run cemetery in Saint-Apollinaire, Que.

    As disappointing as this is, nobody is really surprised by the result. However, as mentioned in a later item (below), more information has come out about what really happened.

  • [] Female genital mutilation practitioners are travelling to Canada, border officers warned

    A few weeks back, news broke of a group of people who were performing genital mutilations on children in Detroit. Well it turns out, that news was a wake-up call to Canadian border officials, who had been on the lookout for girls being taken out of Canada to be mutilated overseas. The strategies have changed, and now the assholes cutting up the girls’ genitals are making house calls. You see, when the girls are taken to the cutters overseas, that means the girls pass under the watchful eyes of Canadian border officials, who can – it is hoped – either stop the trip from happening, or at the very least punish the parents on returning to Canada. But when the cutters come to Canada, the girls never need to be seen by any authorities at all. The cutters can come in as ordinary people on a visit, do their dirty work, and get away, all without any indication to authorities of what is going on. Now the authorities are wise to the scheme, and they are going to be more alert for signs of not just girls who might be victims, but the perpetrators themselves.

  • [] This Canadian doctor is going head-to-head with Gwyneth Paltrow over Goop

    I’ve been following Dr. Gunter’s takedowns of Goop’s bullshit for years now, and of course I’d heard of Timothy Caulfield’s book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?. What I didn’t know – and what I learned in this wonderful profile of Gunter – is that both she and Caulfield are Canadian! How about that, eh?

  • [] Two Canadians captured in Mosul: reports

    With Daesh in retreat, now comes the really depressing part of this fight: repatriating the Canadians who joined them, and dealing with them in our justice system.

  • [] Tories to blame for Khadr payout: Angus

    Angus is absolutely correct – the whole Khadr debacle start to finish is the Conservative’s fault. But what he brought up that I’d forgotten about was the Maher Arar affair… which in that case found the then-newly elected Conservative government led by Stephen Harper forced to clean up a human rights mess left to them by the Liberals. Harper’s Conservatives gave Arar and official apology and a settlement of… I shit you not… $10.5 million. Oh, the irony. I have to admit, though, that I was amused by Angus’s suggestion that we should just send the bill for the Khadr settlement to the Conservatives.

  • [] Quebec City mayor worried about far-right group linked to cemetery referendum

    As mentioned above, bigotry won the day, and the vote went against the Muslim cemetery. Here’s the thing. Whenever the issue of the cemetery referendum came up on social media, there was a gang of numbnuts who repeated the obviously bullshit claim that opposition to the cemetery wasn’t about islamophobia, it was about… dun, dun, dunSECULARISM. Because, you see, people just oppose the idea of religious cemeteries at all in Québec. It’s not because it’s Muslim, no, no – they would oppose any religious cemetery. (Except for, I suppose, all the Catholic cemeteries in Québec… or the Jewish cemeteries.) Now, though, the truth is coming out. Now we’re learning that those cries of “it was just secularism” are definitely bullshit, because the primary agitator for the referendum turns out to be… brace yourself, for what is going to be a totally unsurprising surprise… an anti-Muslim group. They were the major support behind the resident who went around stirring up opposition… the resident, who, it turns out, wasn’t even eligible to vote in the referendum. So yeah, as everyone suspected, this wasn’t about secularism or “ethics in burial”. Once again, it was islamophobia in action. But wait! There’s still more to this story in the next item!

  • [] Defaced Qur’an, hateful note sent to Quebec City mosque where January shootings occurred

    This story is just un-fucking-believable in and of itself … but it gets far worse once you start putting the pieces together to see the whole story. Okay, from the start. This story goes back to the Québec mosque shooting in January, when one islamophobic asshole gunned down six innocent Muslims. That was horrific enough, but it was just the start of the shit the Muslims at that mosque would have to deal with. You see, turns out there’s not nearly enough Muslim burial space in Québec. Of the six victims, five had to be shipped out of Canada to be buried elsewhere. Only one could be buried in Canada. To alleviate that problem, the Muslims tried to create a new Muslim cemetery. Yes. Yes, that Muslim cemetery. The one featured in two other items this week. The one that just got shot down by islamophobic bigots. Do you grok that? An islamophobic bigot murders a half-dozen Muslims from this mosque … five of whom have to be shipped out of Canada to be buried due to lack of Islamic cemetery space … and then when the Muslims try to obtain more cemetery space so that won’t have to happen again … more islamophobic bigots disrupt that plan. And then! And then! To top the whole fucking shitpile off with a nasty little cherry on top, some islamophobic asshole sends the mosque … the same mosque that was the victim of the deadliest non-gang-related shooting in Canada in the 21st century only six months earlier … the same mosque that wasn’t even able to bury 5⁄6 of the casualties of that incident in Canada … some islamophobic asshole decides to send that mosque a slashed up Quran and a suggestion to use a pig farm as a cemetery. What. The. Fuck? And you know the worst part of it? It was the response of the mosque representatives: “There was silence because [everybody] inside was upset. They thought to themselves ‘Again? Again?,” Labidi told CBC News. Apparently they’ve been getting hate packages regularly even after the shooting. In fact, they got this package a few days before the vote, but decided to keep it quiet so as not to influence the vote.

  • [] Losing our religion: How anti-Muslim sentiment threatens religious freedom

    This is a depressing piece describing how Muslims are being forced underground by fear of discrimination in Canada. This is not what an open, free, rational society looks like.

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9 thoughts on “Weekly Update: to

  1. Stephen Oberski

    There seems the be some fundamental law at work here, the more authoriy an organization has the less accounatable it deems it self.

    Reply
  2. Tim Underwood

    “Now it’s islamophobia at CSIS.”
    I know a few people who went into this service. They were all conventional English and French speaking Catholics.

    If you are any kind of a practicing Christian, Islam is an affront to state the obvious. In an ideal Canadian world we would have an over abundance of purely secular minded people who want to serve in our intelligence agency. There just isn’t enough purely secular people to go around. In the meantime we will have to rely on admonishments and threats to curtail the inevitable aggressive Christian reactions.

    Reply
  3. Randy

    “sexism and misogyny”

    Please demonstrate an example relevant to the story where you have the former without the latter, and then repeat with the latter without the former, or just admit that you’re only stringing words together to signal your virtue and high moral character.

    Reply
  4. Randy

    “even a little bit of research turns up plenty of examples of their evangelical beliefs getting in the way of charity and decency”

    And yet, it was too much for you to do…

    Reply
  5. Randy

    “But when the cutters come to Canada, the girls never need to be seen by any authorities at all”

    Wow! Just like boys!

    Reply
  6. Randy

    “Some Muslim women in our circles are now seeking religious edicts that deem it acceptable to remove the head scarf in order to feel safe.”

    OR…

    OR…

    Some Muslim women are finally seeing freedom within their grasp, and are using the cover of so-called “Islamophobia” to achieve it, without having to bear the burden of it being perceived as a choice they made.

    Reply
  7. Randy

    “children between the ages of 5 and 9 years old are internalizing this zeitgeist. According to the findings, one in three children did not want to tell anyone they are Muslim”

    Let’s be clear. There is no such thing as a Muslim child, or a Christian child, or a Sikh child. These people have their individual religious rights violated by their parents and their communities, to force a religion onto them, that they would never develop independently, and would almost certainly reject as an adult.

    Reply

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