"Islamophobic" English Defence League?

The English Defence League has sought, in Britain, to enlist the support of anyone and everyone, from the Asian to the Jewish community in their response to Islamist fanatics who have entrenched themselves and their religious agenda in the United Kingdom. Civil society considers the EDL to be fascist in temperament and tenor because they espouse the view that fanatic religious ideologues violently engaged in overturning classic British societal norms and values must be challenged.

The group has come to Canada, appearing in Toronto at the invitation of the Jewish Defence League to speak at the Toronto Zionist Centre so the leader of the British anti-Islamist group could address interested supporters. Mainstream Jewish groups have deplored the decision by the JDL to throw their lot in with the EDL, claiming that by so doing the JDL has aligned itself with a racist and violent group more interested in setting up walls of misunderstanding between groups than being accommodating.

How can self-respecting people be 'accommodating' to virulently racist and religiously-invested ideologues who worship violence and whose end game is to subsume Western values and culture into an Islamist one subservient to Sharia law? Leftists and unionists have allied themselves with the cause of the Islamists with their political/religious/ideological commitment to overturning democratic- liberal values inimical to Islam's need to control individuality and surrender the persona to the strictures of Islam's demands of the faithful.

No one within Canadian society is opposed to the peaceful presence of Canadian Muslims wishing to share the country's freedoms and benefits through collective aspirations to make of their futures what could not be attained in restrictive, constricting Islamic societies. All that is asked of any identifiable group be it ethnic, cultural, religious or ideological is to respect the pluralist society of which they have become a part, and to obey the laws that apply equally to all. If the prevailing social mores are found to be offensive and antithetical to religious beliefs, it should be recalled that they are indigenous and require respect.

Dominant social 'activist' groups within Canada such as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and the Canadian Arab Federation consider themselves socially progressive, but they are by their very practise socially regressive. Their claims that the EDL represent a fascist, racist, neo-Nazi organization belies the evidence of inclusion. While Muslim groups in Canada have created social and political divisions rather than integrating with the country's values and adopting its priorities as their own, their right to do so is supported by the left.

No one is supporting negative reactions or violence against Muslims as those who decry Islamophobia are so eager to claim. There are, however, those who decry rigidly fundamentalist Islamism that creates divisions and suspicion between segments of Canadian society, bringing to the country and its institutions resentment and vicious slanders that have their genesis in another geography and other cultures. Groups that oppose radical Islam and its apparent and real threat to civil societies, however, are usually branded fascist by the liberal-left.

Who cannot sufficiently go out of their way to helpfully and eagerly support the Islamists' claims they are unfairly slandered, capably playing the fundamentalist Islamists' game in psychological reverse-mode.