Juno News - January 03, 2019


The True North Report： Let's talk about the Islamic Party of Ontario


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

150.29361

Word Count

2,713

Sentence Count

158

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Islamic Party of Ontario is a new political party in Canada. They are calling for Sharia law across the province and have a platform calling for the separation of the state and religion. What does this say about the party and what does it mean for Canada?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.640 Hey guys, Candice Malcolm here. We are live. Happy New Year. Hope everyone had a very nice
00:00:07.320 and calm and relaxing holiday. This is our first live broadcast of 2019, so hope this
00:00:14.920 is finding everyone well. Let me know where you're watching from and what you did over
00:00:20.800 the holidays. I think most people are now back from holidays, although I guess some
00:00:25.680 people are still on vacation and will be back at work next week, but lots going on
00:00:31.260 in the news today. I couldn't help but do a live over one particularly concerning
00:00:37.140 item that was in the news today, so I will get to that in a minute. I'll just wait
00:00:42.480 for a few more people to jump on here on the Facebook live. It always takes a while
00:00:48.420 to get people watching on Facebook. Over on Twitter, people jump on right away.
00:00:54.800 And that's great, but I like to wait a couple minutes just while people are
00:01:00.560 jumping on on Facebook, so hope people had a good vacation. I was down in Palm
00:01:06.800 Springs, California myself, and there's a lot of Canadians down there. I was I was
00:01:13.420 pretty surprised. I've been down there before, but over the Christmas break it
00:01:16.220 just seems like that's the place to be for Canadians. So my husband and I went
00:01:21.020 hiking and we saw like four people in a row with either wearing like Edmonton
00:01:24.780 Neuler hats or Canada shirts or speaking French, obviously Quebecois French, Quebec
00:01:32.280 French, and it was kind of nice to be around a bunch of Canadians. So I hope hope you
00:01:40.020 guys had a good break. Hopefully wasn't too cold or snowy where you were. All right,
00:01:46.500 let's let's get to it here. You might have seen this link popped up over the holiday. I
00:01:53.500 myself saw it. It was getting shared on Twitter and on Facebook. And what I'm
00:02:00.940 talking about, of course, is this new political party called the Islamic Party of
00:02:05.100 Ontario. And you might have seen this. It was getting shared quite a bit on the social media
00:02:13.600 over Christmas and New Year's. And I have to admit, when I first saw it, I thought it was
00:02:19.800 some kind of a joke or a prank or, you know, just online kind of troublemakers, because it
00:02:25.760 just seemed too bizarre to be real. And especially reading through the language that they use. So, I mean, it's almost
00:02:35.100 exactly what you would expect for folks who follow and are concerned by radical Islam
00:02:41.520 and some of the sort of fundamentalist approaches that are taken within and by
00:02:47.340 those who sort of, you know, are fundamentalists within their religion. But the wording is
00:02:54.300 just kind of funny, like basically what the platform calls for here is that since the
00:03:01.080 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms recognizes that Canada is founded upon principles, it
00:03:06.700 recognizes the supremacy of God. So since our constitution is based on that line, the
00:03:12.920 supremacy of God, and since the Islamic party believes that by supremacy of God, that 0.60
00:03:19.200 means Allah for them. So therefore, basically God, Allah is the natural governing body of Ontario. And
00:03:28.080 they want Ontario to be ruled by Sharia, they spell it all out. Islam means surrender and peace. They 0.92
00:03:35.940 give you a long sort of justification and history of how it is that their God is superior. And then
00:03:44.040 they go into all of the really dicey kind of stuff that fundamentalists believe in. And I mean, just the
00:03:54.000 language, this is why I didn't really think it was real at first, because I'll give you one passage
00:03:58.140 here. It says, the relationship established under a marriage contract is a sacred union between a man
00:04:03.900 and a woman. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. That's a direct quote from their platform. So,
00:04:11.580 I mean, that just doesn't really seem like something that a serious political party would write. It seems
00:04:17.000 like the kind of silly argument, I guess, that was sort of made by the Christian right like 20 years 0.75
00:04:25.720 ago. And you don't really hear that anymore. And so here it is right out in the platform of this
00:04:32.240 political party. And that's just sort of one example. There are many. And so basically what these folks are
00:04:40.940 calling for, like I said, is Sharia law in Canada. And my colleague over at the Toronto Sun, Tarek Fattah,
00:04:48.660 had an article out today about this group. He's done some digging and some research into it. And
00:04:56.400 someone's saying on Twitter that they're also trying to advocate for Sharia across all of Canada,
00:05:02.320 not just Ontario. Yeah, that's right. Because it's based on their principle that they believe the
00:05:07.920 Charter of Rights and Freedom in Canada is actually talking about their religion. Of course, you know,
00:05:13.040 when Charter was written, that the Charter of Rights and Freedom was written by Pierre, when Pierre
00:05:17.880 Trudeau was in power, he was a devout Catholic. And so presumably, you know, they're talking about a
00:05:24.340 Christian God. And Canada was founded by Christians, and it was founded as a Christian nation. So a little 0.96
00:05:33.300 bit of confusion. But yeah, as my colleague Tarek Fattah points out, basically, the principles that
00:05:38.640 they want are to establish Islam as a natural religion of Ontario, to quash LBGT rights, because 0.99
00:05:46.060 quote, God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. They call for a complete ban on abortion. They call 0.51
00:05:52.660 on an end of the concept of gender identity. And they call on a complete ban of liquor, drugs, adultery,
00:06:00.680 and gambling. There was also sort of a creepy passage in here, let me see if I can find it.
00:06:07.020 I forgot to highlight it. But it was something along the lines of, you know, all people are the
00:06:14.200 children of God. However, Muslims are the sort of chosen people of God. And so they sort of outline
00:06:23.480 the idea that there would be different rights for people of different religions, which is pretty 0.91
00:06:29.600 counter to life in Canada. So anyway, my colleague Tarek Fattah wrote this piece today in the Toronto
00:06:38.360 Sun. And he unveiled an interesting tidbit. So according to the Sun, and according to this article,
00:06:48.680 the Islamic Party of Ontario was officially reserved with elections Ontario in October 2018,
00:06:54.380 and more steps with more steps required to become a formal party. So this is this is real. This isn't
00:07:03.320 some kind of a twisted joke. This isn't, you know, a group of sort of renegades or a group of people
00:07:12.020 who have created this as a joke. This is real. They're registered. And they actually are proposing
00:07:18.660 this. They want this to be a thing in Canada, which is kind of, you know, concerning. Is this
00:07:25.420 where our country is headed? The idea that there will be political parties who are openly advocating
00:07:30.480 for very illiberal ideas, for religious governance, for Islamic law in Canada, not just for Muslims,
00:07:38.920 but for all Canadians. That's sort of seems to be where we are headed as this this thing is real. 0.76
00:07:46.300 Interesting, too, when I first stumbled upon this, this page, this Islamic page, Islamic Party of
00:07:53.560 Ontario, the comments on the bottom, because there's a comment section, and they were, they were
00:08:01.220 actually all pretty, you know, positive. It wasn't people, you know, making fun of how offside and
00:08:09.720 how outside the norm this is. You have people saying, you know, good start, good job, interesting,
00:08:15.640 intriguing, outstanding, peace be upon you. You know, there's, there's still a lot of these
00:08:21.940 comments up there, but now it's mixed with Canadians who have also found this page and are
00:08:27.820 questioning, you know, why this actually exists. People saying that Islamic Sharia law is not
00:08:36.020 welcome in Canada, etc., etc. So there is now a mix in the comments section, but it's still
00:08:41.480 surprisingly positive, given how offside these are. And that, I guess that's part of the thing
00:08:49.040 that really just surprised me about this, this page is, you know, usually people who have these
00:08:53.640 sort of fundamentalist views, don't broadcast them out in the open in Canada, they sort of keep them
00:08:59.340 hidden within their own community, they deny them when accusations are made in the media,
00:09:03.660 or if a quote is taken out of context, like someone records a sermon in a mosque, and then it's
00:09:10.880 interpreted into English, they'll usually say, you know, it's taken out of context within the broader
00:09:15.820 context of what we're talking about. Whereas this is in plain English, spelled out for all to see
00:09:22.280 exactly how extreme some of the ideas are that come from extremists and fundamentalists in the Muslim
00:09:29.440 community. So back to Tarek Fatah's story, he not only confirms that the party is real, and that they
00:09:39.100 have officially registered under the Elections Ontario, but also that the leader of the party,
00:09:47.740 the head of the party, individual called Jared Anwar, had previously threatened Tarek Fatah. So back in
00:09:54.880 October, he wrote a column that was written about American Jewish activist Laura Loomer. He described
00:10:02.640 Tarek Fatah of the Toronto Sun as an Islamophobe, an Islamophobe. So that is, someone's saying there's
00:10:12.540 no fan of Islam, but you have zero proof of these ridiculous claims. A website means nothing. It's not
00:10:18.460 just a website here, folks. This is an official political party that has registered in Ontario. So
00:10:24.360 it's not just a random website. That was my point that I made earlier, if you were listening. When
00:10:30.120 I first saw the website, I thought it was just a random kook running a website. The story in the
00:10:34.600 newspaper today confirms that this is a real political party, and it's run by an individual
00:10:40.680 who's actually pretty high profile and influential in the Thorncliffe neighborhood, Thorncliffe Park
00:10:47.800 neighborhood in Toronto, which, as people might know, that's the same area where the Danforth shooter
00:10:56.120 was from. So anyways, this is not just a website. This is a political party. And so the individual who
00:11:04.920 runs the party had once called Tarek Fatah Islamophobe. That's an odd accusation because Tarek is
00:11:12.120 himself Muslim and not just that, but he is a Muslim activist. He's a crusader. When I say crusader,
00:11:18.120 I mean he is a strong, steadfast defender of Muslims in the West and defending Western values. So he's an
00:11:27.560 advocate for modernizing Islam and progressive sort of liberal Islam that fits within the Canadian context.
00:11:36.040 And he's very critical of radical Islam. So it's bizarre and stupid to call him an Islamophobe.
00:11:43.480 He doesn't just get called Islamophobe by this group. He gets called an open enemy of Islam and a hate
00:11:49.880 purveyor, which is a pretty harsh criticism of a pretty remarkable individual. Tarek Fatah is a hero. He's
00:12:00.360 no stranger to controversy. He's had death threats and fatwas against him in India and Pakistan in the
00:12:06.760 past. He was actually, there was two individuals in Toronto that were arrested outside of his home.
00:12:13.240 And he, you know, he was the subject of many death threats. So he's used to this, but I think it's
00:12:21.960 pretty alarming and concerning that this is all happening in Canada and that the head of a political
00:12:27.560 party would openly issue a threat, a veiled threat, an open threat to a journalist and a Muslim activist,
00:12:35.000 a dissenting voice within the Muslim community in Canada. That's really counter to, I think, Canadian 0.96
00:12:43.400 rights and freedoms in our democracy, the norms that we operate in. Political parties shouldn't be out
00:12:48.600 making threats, especially against journalists. And if you claim to be the Islamic party of Ontario,
00:12:53.960 you shouldn't run around calling critics Islamophobes and targeting dissenting Muslims and name calling
00:13:01.640 them. So it's all pretty interesting and alarming. Whoops. Sorry about that. And I think that this is
00:13:12.440 going to come as quite a concern to most people because this is sort of where we are, where we're at in
00:13:19.000 2019 is that Canada is a free and open society where people can say and do what they want. We don't
00:13:26.280 have restrictions on speech. We don't have restrictions on political parties that say that you can't be a
00:13:32.920 political party if you believe in certain things. And so this is sort of the inevitable consequence and
00:13:39.160 outcome of our sort of free and open society juxtaposed with the sort of cultural relativism and mass
00:13:47.480 migration and reluctance to call out and criticize other cultures. So, you know, you have liberals who
00:13:54.920 want to celebrate diversity and want to celebrate things like, you know, having plenty of Muslims in
00:14:02.520 Canada. But at the same time, you know, a lot of the positions and the ideas and the values that this
00:14:10.200 Islamic party of Canada is presenting are incredibly counter, you know, to a free society, but also to 0.99
00:14:17.320 just sort of liberal progressive values. I mean, they want to outright ban homosexuality. They want to 0.95
00:14:24.200 outright ban alcohol use, outright ban abortion, ban drug use, marijuana, you know, all of the things that
00:14:34.280 the left advocates for. And it's going to be interesting to see how these two competing forces
00:14:44.200 come together. And, you know, who's going to speak out about this? What will Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
00:14:51.240 have to say about a political party like this? I'm sure that many of the people who potentially might
00:14:57.240 support this party are allies of Trudeau, maybe voted for Trudeau. And yet at the same time, you
00:15:05.400 know, the progressive sort of values that Trudeau champions are not at all represented in this vision.
00:15:11.720 And, you know, if it were a conservative group, if this were the, you know, the Mormon, the Mormon 0.54
00:15:18.680 Party of Ontario, and it had the exact same platform and the exact same views, you can you can imagine how
00:15:25.000 quickly and easily it would have been condemned, would be condemned and the subject of sort of
00:15:30.040 mockery and investigative reports and all that kind of thing. And yet, you know, because it's the
00:15:36.200 Islamic Party of Ontario presenting very liberal ideas and views, there hasn't been any news stories
00:15:42.040 written about it yet in Canada. There has been that one story that I mentioned by Tarek Fatah,
00:15:47.400 which was an opinion column. I saw something quickly written up about it
00:15:52.120 in the Post Millennial. Here it is, Elections Ontario grants Islamic Party of Ontario first step towards
00:16:00.360 registration. So this is the first news report I've seen from independent website source, the Post
00:16:07.720 Millennial. And then there's some stories out of Israel about it, Canadian journalists threatened by
00:16:14.760 Islamic Party. So nothing yet from the mainstream media. We will have to wait and watch
00:16:21.960 what their reaction is. But yeah, you know, this is this is sort of something that you could see
00:16:30.120 coming. It was inevitable in Canada that eventually there would be these political parties that break
00:16:37.160 off and have the sort of fringe ideas. It's interesting that they promote them out in the open.
00:16:43.240 Because again, usually Islamists and fundamentalists try to hide their views and they're not so coy about it.
00:16:49.560 They don't put it in writing. They don't put it in plain English. And yet here we have a political
00:16:54.040 party doing just that. So are they emboldened? Are they ignorant? Are they naive? Or, you know,
00:17:00.600 this is just what they believe and they think that they might there might be a political appetite
00:17:05.560 for it. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. And yeah, we'll leave it at that. I'll do an update
00:17:12.440 if there are more stories or if we learn more about this political party and as the story progresses.
00:17:18.440 But I had to just jump on and talk about it because I think it's pretty alarming, pretty interesting
00:17:25.480 and pretty disheartening, especially the fact that the leader of the party is allegedly threatening
00:17:31.800 and name-calling a journalist and a dissenting Muslim voice, my colleague Tarek Fatah, the Toronto Sun.
00:17:39.480 So I'll leave it there. Thanks so much for tuning in. Again, happy 2019. Hope everyone's doing well.
00:17:46.440 And I will be back live again on Friday. So take care. Please like and share this video.