Missionary Zeal

The Arab world is in turmoil as its citizens, so long accustomed to living under repressive, totalitarian governments never permitting them freedoms or recognition of their basic human rights, rebel. The rebellion apparently brought about not because they have been so deprived of their rights, but because the vast majority of those populations are desperately poor, and they can no longer afford on their meagre incomes, rising food and cooking oil prices, even when they're state-subsidized.

Those food-price demonstrations turned into bold assertions of their right to be respected as human beings, as a growing tide of opposition to their governments' ongoing casual disregard of peoples' aspirations to live decent lives and plan for their children's futures, was steadily ignored. Suddenly inspired by the protests of the indigent, the educated and largely unemployed youth of those countries began to join the demonstrations and made them their own.

Long before all this suddenly flamed out on the world stage, Muslims and Arab Muslims began to migrate away from their countries of origin in a search for opportunity - educational and economic to match their aspirations - elsewhere in the world, slowly and steadily declaring their status as refugees and would-be emigrant status throughout Europe and Australia, North America and Latin America.

The steady influx grew and the migrants, ensconced as permanent residents in their chosen countries of safe haven and economic opportunity, and as citizens, were fruitful and multiplied. And then the world was awakened to the stunning emergence of a radical, violent wing among fundamentalist Muslims who view other religions, other societies, other cultures, as inferior and ripe for conquest.

In Canada, the current level of Muslim Canadian density stands at about 2.8% of the entire Canadian population. The projection for the next 30 years, by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life now hazards the theory that it will rise substantially from 940,000 to 2.7-million, representing 6.6% of the overall population. Through ongoing immigration and natural increase of childbirth.

Tarek Fatah, the outspoken honest broker between Canadian social and cultural mores and values and those of the greater Muslim population, and one of the co-founders of the Muslim Canadian Congress, while explaining that most Muslims wish to be inclusive and part of a pluralist society with equal opportunities extended to all (their search for economic security, education and freedom from oppression satisfied within Canada), stressed that an underlying problem looms of a minority Islamist subgroup.

Who vigorously infiltrate society at all levels for the determined and covert purpose of undermining the values and the culture they have invaded. Those who actively seek to create divisions between various groups within society. And who cultivate a larger agenda of substituting by any means possible, the prevailing mores and culture with their own religious-based mores and culture.

"...what is different from other immigrant groups is there is a subgroup among Muslims, I call Islamists, who come here with the intention of destroying the social fabric of the country. That is very unusual for an immigrant group and will be more of a problem in the future." We have been forewarned. Not that we were completely unaware, given the rising number of episodes surrounding Islamists in the West.

From violently destructive attacks by jihadist recruits entranced by political Islamist ideology, to the more subtle, covert attempts at the undermining of our institutional values, our justice system, our government departments, and replacing them with values filtered through the lens of fanatical Islam.