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Terry Glavin: The Liberals are funding hate. How else to describe the speakers at this Toronto convention?

Speakers at Muslim Association of Canada gathering will include one who advocates the death penalty for homosexuality and another who says it's OK to beat your wife

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Homosexuality is filthy, and homosexual acts warrant the death penalty. Christian Arabs who protect Jews from murderers are traitors. A man should be permitted to beat his wife.

These are among the obscene ideas promoted by several of the individuals who will be featured speakers at a national three-day conference beginning on Canada Day in Toronto, hosted by an organization that the Trudeau government has provided with more than $3 million in federal “anti-hate,” youth engagement and security funding over the past three years.

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Muslim human rights activists and Jewish advocacy organizations say they’re appalled that the Trudeau government continues to fund the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), which has taken a turn in recent years to an unambiguously reactionary and heavily politicized version of Islam embraced by only a small minority of Canada’s Muslims. The MAC leadership, however, says it’s the MAC that’s entitled to be appalled. The association insists that it is being unfairly singled out by the Canada Revenue Agency, for instance, alleging a systemic Islamophobic bias in the bureaucracy. The CRA has been conducting an ongoing audit of the organization since 2015. Even so, federal funding keeps pouring in.

Federal funding keeps pouring in

Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested that the organization’s “Islamophobia” allegations may have some merit. In his opening comments to a mostly closed Islamophobia summit in Ottawa last July, Trudeau said the CRA should abandon practices that “target” Muslims. “Institutions should support people, not target them,” he said.

Among other things, the CRA’s ongoing audit has identified what the MAC calls a wholly specious link between the association and foreign entities. Two months ago, the association launched a Charter of Rights complaint against the CRA, seeking a court order to have the audit shut down. But the presence of several featured speakers at the MAC’s upcoming national conference, set for the Enercare Centre in Toronto, suggest the association is rather less sensitive to human rights concerns than it makes out.

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A Syrian speaker, Mohammed Rateb Al Nabulsi, best known for his “Nabulsi Encyclopedia of Islamic Science,” has defended the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality on the grounds that being gay “involves a filthy place, and does not generate offspring.” The citizens of certain Muslim states that stipulate the death penalty for gay people are “extremely lucky” that those laws are in place, he says.

Last March, while hundreds of residents of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of Bnei Brak in northern Israel were mourning the death of Arab-Israeli police officer Amir Khoury, who was killed defending the community from a terrorist attack, MAC’s upcoming featured speaker Muhammad al-Shinqiti took a different view. Khoury, a Christian Arab, was a “traitor,” Shinqiti wrote. “Nothing destroys nations more than treason from within.”

Featured speaker Jamal Badawi, a co-founder of MAC billed as a well-known author, activist and preacher, has expounded on the proposition that Islam permits wife-beating, and has defended suicide bombings as heroic acts.

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Messages left with MAC’s head offices in Mississauga and the MAC convention office on Wednesday and Thursday were unreturned.

Gail Adelson-Marcovitz, national chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said MAC’s lineup of speakers is disturbing, owing to several speakers’ habits of proselytizing “misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ+, antisemitic, and often violent beliefs that stand in stark contrast to cherished Canadian values.”

Human rights activist Kaveh Shahrooz, a former Global Affairs Canada policy adviser and prominent voice in Canada’s Iranian diaspora, agrees. “It is disturbing that the Muslim Association of Canada would host speakers who hold and express such noxious views. The announced speakers have spoken out against women, the LGBT community, and Jews. I believe that people should be allowed to express even abhorrent ideas. But our government should not fund those bad ideas. … and (it) should bother all other Canadians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”

It should bother all other Canadians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike

Human rights activist Kaveh Shahrooz

Reza Banai, a human rights activist who helped lead Canada’s focus at the United Nations on justice for the victims of the Khomeinist regime’s massacre of thousands of liberals, leftists and political prisoners in 1988, says there is nothing especially unusual about the speakers’ list for this year’s annual MAC convention. “This is not a surprise that they are also using their convention as a platform to bring in people to preach these kinds of hate lectures and providing a platform for them to spread these kinds of things in Canada,” Banai said. “But what are they going to add to Canadian values? By bringing these questionable people, what is their main intention here?”

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Says CIJA’s Adelson-Marcovitz: “We believe that most Muslim Canadians reject these ideologies, but considering some of the speakers the organizers have invited to speak to our neighbours in Canada’s Muslim community, we are concerned that this is something the leadership at the MAC might be trying to change.”

The MAC has, in fact, been undergoing a change in recent years. The organization has become more openly and explicitly devoted to the political theology of Hassan Albanna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Financed by the Nazis in its early years, the Muslim Brotherhood has inspired jihadists worldwide. The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas was founded as the military wing of the Brotherhood in Palestine.

The MAC describes itself as a “wholly Canadian organization that operates only in Canada” and has “no organizational link or affiliation with other organizations,” but it also explicitly identifies with the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. The MAC says it “strives to practice Islam as embodied in the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and as understood in its contemporary, comprehensive, and balanced context by the late Imam Hassan Albanna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

National Post

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