Dedicated prayer rooms at public schools in Canada and it gets worse..

“Someone’s faith is part of who they are. Accommodating them brings understanding and shows we respect them,” said public school trustee Cindy Watson.

Umm, no. Not even close. You are caving in to a political ideology that is hell bent on forcing the rest of us to bow to to their idea of 'religion' and demanding that we meet every one of their requests. If we do not they sue us at every turn. This is stealth jihad and with every attack on our freedom muslims become more bold and confident. So does this mean there will be special prayer rooms for ALL religions?

Will all religious requirements now be taken into account? No meat on Fridays, more kosher food, more halal food, and where does this stop?

"Under a provincewide policy, school boards must be more inclusive and accommodate different faiths during the school day. All faiths? Why any faiths and why does religion belong in or at school in the first place. Maybe at a private religious school.

This could mean a private place for Muslim students who pray five times a day and for students who are fasting, a modified gym class and a separate room for them so they don’t have to watch their peers eat lunch."

Read the rest below and this is from Creeping Sharia.

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atieh noori praying at school

Dedicated prayer rooms for Muslims at Canadian public schools

WATERLOO REGION — Walk through the wooden door into the secluded, carpeted room with holy books and prayer mats, and it’s hard to believe you’re in a school.

But this is the beginning of a new phase for public and Catholic schools where prayer rooms could become commonplace.

Under a provincewide policy, school boards must be more inclusive and accommodate different faiths during the school day.

This could mean a private place for Muslim students who pray five times a day and for students who are fasting, a modified gym class and a separate room for them so they don’t have to watch their peers eat lunch.

Atieh Noori, a 27-year-old Muslim student at St. Louis Adult Learning and Continuing Education Centre in downtown Kitchener, uses the prayer room each day at lunchtime to say her midday prayers.

After school, Noori doesn’t have time for prayer so she appreciates the space.

A 27-year old student? Who clearly isn’t as dedicated to Islam as she’d like some to think. If you don’t have time it obviously ain’t that important. But rather than making a personal sacrifice, Muslims like Noori want everyone else to accommodate their Islamic habits.

The newly adopted faith and accommodation policy states that each student has a right to follow his or her beliefs free from discrimination or harassment. Areas of reasonable accommodation include observance of major religious holy days and celebrations, prayers and rituals, dietary requirements and fasting, religious attire and participation in school curriculum and extracurricular activities.

“Someone’s faith is part of who they are. Accommodating them brings understanding and shows we respect them,” said public school trustee Cindy Watson.

…

 

“When you create a policy, it already reflects what you are doing,” he said.

Indeed. What you are doing is Islamizing by submitting to an intolerant ideology. Much more dhimmitude via TheRecord – Dedicated prayer rooms may be part of new approach by province’s schools….h/t @dhummi

Blazing Cat Fur highlights the severity of the problem in Canada noting the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Muslim Brotherhood are both adherents of the right of ”Hisbah” under Sharia law:

Hisbah: Allows a private citizen to prosecute any individual who commits an act he considers a breach of the Sharia even if the plaintiff himself has not been personally injured by such an act.

Original article is here.

Victor Davis Hanson: Two Californias

Victor Davis Hanson recently completed a road trip around central California. This could be a snapshot of so many areas across America and I find that quite disheartening. In numerous previous posts I have mentioned the three toxic stew of the West, political correctness, diversity and multiculturalism. Here is the result of over fifty plus years of liberal, progressive education and politics. The three toxic stews of the west have poisoned and polluted every aspect of American life. The wheels are now falling off the cart and this country is reaping what has sown over the last fifty plus years. In many regions across our country, the ticks from the time bomb are now setting off explosions. What will follow next is what is even more troubling than with what we are now dealing with. Dream Act and amnesty? No way, in ANY way shape or form.


"Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.


Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California."

Victor Davis Hanson: Two Californias


The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.


During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.


Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.


It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?


Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?


California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.


In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.


We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.
At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.


In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.


By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?


Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.


Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.


Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.


I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.


So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?


I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.


Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.


— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

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Honoring diversity and caving to islam: One unifrom at a time in Canada

Stupidity from our northern neighbor; honoring diversity, multiculturalism and political correctness. The three toxic stews of the West raise their ugly heads again. So this brave, trail blazing muslim woman wants to be a corrections officer? Well bully for her and she should have NO special uniform or accommodations, period. End of story, right? No, we know how this one goes.


The Correctional Services of Canada is designing ONE special uniform to make sure this muslim woman does not touch the skin of the male prisoners she is going to be working with. How dumb is this, how PC and libtardedly progressive is this moronic move by the CSC? I have no problem with a woman wanting to be in this field but I really think women should be relegated to being with only female prisoners and men should be relegated to working with male prisoners. Call me a sexist, male pig and lets get that out of the way, OK? She is playing the cards that we have let muslims play so well here in the West. If anything goes wrong or one wrong word is said to her she will be screaming discrimination and islamophobia.


What will happen when she DOES come in contact with a male prisoner? It will happen, protective uniform or not. Then she will sue Canada for failing to 'protect' her and you can bet every islamic organization will be tripping over each other to assist this 'trail blazer' in her mission to pave the way for more islamic infiltration, to wage stealth jihad upon the fools of the West who allow this to happen in the first place. There is nothing positive that can come out of this.


"Wherever possible, you want to see diversity in the workplace and to have a broad range of perspectives represented," he said. "Within the correctional service, that can often be an important part of rehabilitation when you have different people working in prison who will understand different cultural and religious backgrounds. That absolutely can provide great benefit in dealing with different situations that might arise within those prison walls."


Holland said the employee is blazing a new path, and hopes employees in all facets of the public service understand the benefits of a diverse work force.


Nermine Barbouch, executive director of the Canadian Muslim Forum, called the employee "courageous" to accept the job of a correctional officer. From cnews.canoe.ca.

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Canada designs special hijab for token Muslim prison guard

Criticism, applause for prison guard accommodations
By Kathleen Harris

OTTAWA — Correctional Service of Canada is drawing both criticism and applause for taking steps to accommodate the religious and cultural practices of a female Muslim prison guard — the first ever hired in the country.


The Muslim Canadian Congress called it “apologist” and “politically correct” that CSC is designing a special hijab for wearing inside the men’s federal penitentiary where the recruit will be posted after completing a nine-week training program. MCC vice-president Salma Siddiqui declared it "nonsense" that the employee is permitted to wear long sleeves and gloves to avoid skin-to-skin contact with males and worked out prayer times with the employer.


Siddiqui insisted religious faith should not be a factor on-the-job for any employee who chooses the profession of a correctional officer.


"I don't think there should be any emphasis on Muslim or not," she told QMI Agency. "They are being Canadian and politically correct. We do not have to live with that guilt."


The recruit will wear a hijab designed to come off easily if grabbed by an inmate to gain physical control. Siddiqui said there is no religious requirement to cover one's head - that it is the "uniform" of the Muslim brotherhood and international Islamist movement - and worries it may fuel rising concerns about the "penetration" of Islamist ideology into society.


But Liberal MP Mark Holland sees no problem making certain allowances to accommodate cultural and religious practices as long as institutional security and quality of work are not compromised.


"Wherever possible, you want to see diversity in the workplace and to have a broad range of perspectives represented," he said. "Within the correctional service, that can often be an important part of rehabilitation when you have different people working in prison who will understand different cultural and religious backgrounds. That absolutely can provide great benefit in dealing with different situations that might arise within those prison walls."


Holland said the employee is blazing a new path, and hopes employees in all facets of the public service understand the benefits of a diverse work force.


Nermine Barbouch, executive director of the Canadian Muslim Forum, called the employee "courageous" to accept the job of a correctional officer.


"If both sides are OK and they have reached an agreement, there should not be a problem. She is capable of doing what any other person is doing," she said. "I don't like to look at it as reasonable accommodation or any other accommodation."


CSC formed a working group to figure out ways to ensure the employee's religious and cultural needs were accommodated within the parameters of the overarching requirements for safety and security of institution, staff and inmates, said national spokesman Graham Andrews.


In past, CSC has worked with Sikh employees to develop special turbans suitable for the prison setting. Special allowances have also been made to wear replica kirpans.

Original article is here.

Multiculturalism is a mistake. Especially for women

This is right from Gates of Vienna. First is the Baron's introduction to the article itself which you can find at ANNAQED. I will not waste your time with my take on this except that Baron Bodissey has nailed it right down. as I have stated many times before; we have three toxic stews in western society, Political Correctness, Diversity and Multiculturalism. Enough said.

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Aqsa Parvez: A victim

From Gates of Vienna:

A reader from California recommends an article from Annaqed about the opponents of Multiculturalism. He says:

Your European GoV readers will be able to take advantage of some books mentioned in the attached article, as they are not available in English. The article summarizes the conclusions of a couple of immigrants who faced the most awful abuses due to the multicultural blindness of their host countries.

Below are some excerpts from “Deceits, Mistakes and Victims of Multiculturalism” by Valentina Colombo:

Two recent books by Muslim women define multiculturalism as “a deceit” and “a mistake.”

“The Multicultural Mistake” published in Germany in 2007, is by Seran Ates, a lawyer, born in Istanbul and raised in Germany.

“The Deceit: Victims of Multiculturalism,” published in Italy in 2010, is by Souad Sbai, and Italian MP born in Morocco and living in Italy. And grown in Germany; Souad Sbai, an Italian MP born in Morocco and living in Italy.

Both, in different ways, have been working with immigrant women. And both declare that multiculturalism is not only outdated, but mainly that it is against women’s rights.

Seyran Ates, increasingly stifled by her authoritarian home environment, decided to run away from her family when she was seventeen, and sought refuge in a women’s shelter where she lived in a community of battered Turkish and German women. An ultra-nationalist band of Turkish youths invaded the women’s center in 1984, guns blazing. Ates was shot in the throat and severely wounded; the woman next to her was killed.

It took Ates five years to recover from the wounds and the trauma of the attack. After this attempt to kill her, she decided that no man had the right to destroy her dream of becoming a lawyer and fighting for women’s rights. She decided to stop her activity as a lawyer defending Turkish immigrant women in 2007 after receiving another death threat. Her engagement, however, did not stop: She started writing to change the situation in Germany; her book, “The Multicultural Mistake How we in Germany Can Live Better Together” is a clear analysis of the situation there.
- - - - - - - - -
Ates considers left-wing activists particularly culpable for the mistakes made in the current integration policy: for a long time they hindered any debate. Despite all that left-wing activists aspire to, she maintains that they never look closely enough at what is actually happening in the communities that have settled in Germany.

[…]

Souad Sbai, the Italian MP who has been working for years with immigrant women, agrees. She sees the condition of Muslim women in the West as failure of the “multicultural society” as a whole.

Multiculturalism, in Sbai’s opinion, is a terrible monster with multiple faces, and embodied in two main phenomena:

The instrumental use of religion by fundamentalists to pursue their political will and their submission of women, and

The abolition of civil liberties and dignity of the human being.

The subtitle of her book, “Victims of Multiculturalism,” identifies the main problem as the outcome of a legal and political abdication both to promote universal human rights and to respect the centrality and inviolability the person.

Although the word “victims” can sound as if it refers to immigrant women in the West and their segregation in a world of ignorance and violence, the term has a universal value: The message of her book is that any person, man or woman, of any religion can be a victim of fundamentalism and fanaticism.

In Sbai’s opinion, deceit is the dazzling illusion of multiculturalism — the refusal to recognize the nature of an ideology and its disastrous consequences, and people’s tendency to confuse it with “positive multiculturalism.”

[…]

Another author, Susanna Moller Okin, in a 1999 article, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” wrote: “Suppose, then, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life). Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities of power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests. Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist. They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can. […] When a woman from a more patriarchal culture comes to the United States (or some other Western, basically liberal, state), why should she be less protected from male violence than other women are?”

We cannot accept that some women in the West are discriminated against in their homeland, or, as Sbai puts it, that women in Europe get sent “back to the Middle Ages.”

Original article for Gates of Vienna can be found here

------------------------------------------------

Now here is the article from ANNAQED, which BTW has some great articles.

Deceits, Mistakes and Victims of Multiculturalism
By Valentina Colombo
May 01, 2010

The Netherlands in the late 19th Century developed a Dutch version of multiculturalism called “Pillarization,” with the aim of enabling peaceful cooperation between the leaders of the various "pillars” but with their constituencies remaining largely segregated. Even If some of these strategies could become a policy, those regarding dress and different codes of law, such as sharia, invariably lead to a deep and dangerous discrimination towards women.

The problem is the belief that these atrocities are a matter solely for immigrants more unfortunate, and do not involve society as a whole.

Multiculturalism can be defined as the acceptance of multiple ethnic cultures - both for practical reasons and for the sake of diversity -- and applied to the demographic make-up of specific places, such as schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations.

Multiculturalists advocate extending equal status to differing ethnic and religious groups, but without promoting any ethnic, religious, or cultural values.

Government multicultural policies usually include: recognition of multiple citizenship; support for newspapers, television and radio in minority languages; support for minority festivals, holidays and celebrations; acceptance of traditional and religious dress in schools, the military and society in general; support for music and arts from minority cultures; the study of programs to encourage minority representation in politics and the workforce in general; and the enforcement of different codes of law on members of each ethnic group.

Two recent books by Muslim women define multiculturalism as “a deceit” and “a mistake.”
“The Multicultural Mistake” published in Germany in 2007, is by Seran Ates, a lawyer, born in Istanbul and raised in Germany.

“The Deceit: Victims of Multiculturalism,” pubished in Italy in 2010, is by Souad Sbai, and Italian MP born in Morocco and living in Italy. And grown in Germany; Souad Sbai, an Italian MP born in Morocco and living in Italy.

Both, in different ways, have been working with immigrant women. And both declare that multiculturalism is not only outdated, but mainly that it is against women’s rights.

Seyran Ates, increasingly stifled by her authoritarian home environment, decided to run away from her family when she was seventeen, and sought refuge in a women’s shelter where she lived in a community of battered Turkish and German women. An ultra-nationalist band of Turkish youths invaded the women’s center in 1984, guns blazing. Ates was shot in the throat and severely wounded; the woman next to her was killed.

It took Ates five years to recover from the wounds and the trauma of the attack. After this attempt to kill her, she decided that no man had the right to destroy her dream of becoming a lawyer and fighting for women’s rights. She decided to stop her activity as a lawyer defending Turkish immigrant women in 2007 after receiving another death threat. Her engagement, however, did not stop: She started writing to change the situation in Germany; her book, “The Multicultural Mistake How we in Germany Can Live Better Together” is a clear analysis of the situation there.

Ates considers left-wing activists particularly culpable for the mistakes made in the current integration policy: for a long time they hindered any debate. Despite all that left-wing activists aspire to, she maintains that they never look closely enough at what is actually happening in the communities that have settled in Germany.

She writes that a close look at the third generation shows the results of what Germany has failed to accomplish in the past decades: a large part of her book is devoted to women and violence -- forced marriages, honor killings and violence in general.

Ates writes that “we need to recognize forced marriage as a criminal offense, and in the area of domestic violence we need to acknowledge what has been proven by many studies. The studies show that migrants who are exposed to violence need a different kind of victim protection. They need facilities that respond to their special situation”.

As an immigrant who has experienced on her flesh what integration means and the consequences of a bad model of integration, Ates is firmly convinced that “multiculturalism, as it has been lived until today, is just organized irresponsibility, since it is an unrestricted tolerance towards the others.”

Her words sound like those pronounced by most Dutch people after Theo Van Gogh’s murder in Amsterdam several years ago, and even more true when referring to a multicultural approach to immigrant women.

Souad Sbai, the Italian MP who has been working for years with immigrant women, agrees. She sees the condition of Muslim women in the West as failure of the “multicultural society” as a whole.

Multiculturalism, in Sbai’s opinion, is a terrible monster with multiple faces, and embodied in two main phenomena:

◦The instrumental use of religion by fundamentalists to pursue their political will and their submission of women, and

◦The abolition of civil liberties and dignity of the human being.

The subtitle of her book, "Victims of Multiculturalism," identifies the main problem as the outcome of a legal and political abdication both to promote universal human rights and to respect the centrality and inviolability the person.

Although the word "victims" can sound as if it refers to immigrant women in the West and their segregation in a world of ignorance and violence, the term has a universal value: The message of her book is that any person, man or woman, of any religion can be a victim of fundamentalism and fanaticism.

In Sbai’s opinion, deceit is the dazzling illusion of multiculturalism -- the refusal to recognize the nature of an ideology and its disastrous consequences, and people’s tendency to confuse it with “positive multiculturalism.”

Deceit, according to Sbai, is the promotion of abstract ideas and ideologies of human rights and universal brotherhood so that ironically they degenerate into perverse indifference and the denial of rights.

Deceit is a legal and cultural relativism that absolves the guilty and leaves defenseless women beaten, raped, burned, and exploited.

Both Ates and Sbai invite people in the West to open their eyes and look without ideology at immigration and integration in order to give immigrants in general -- and immigrant women in particular -- a chance in their new land.

Another author, Susanna Moller Okin, in a 1999 article, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” wrote: “Suppose, then, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life). Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities of power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group's beliefs, practices, and interests. Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist. They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can. […] When a woman from a more patriarchal culture comes to the United States (or some other Western, basically liberal, state), why should she be less protected from male violence than other women are?”

We cannot accept that some women in the West are discriminated against in their homeland, or, as Sbai puts it, that women in Europe get sent “back to the Middle Ages.”

Original article for ANNAQED can be found here