[note: the following article was meant to appear online on Monday; the Varsity apologizes for the delay]
A few weeks ago Canadians went to the polls and exercised their democratic right by casting their ballots for their choice of Canadian government. In countries that don’t enjoy the separation of church (mosque?) and state that we do, things are quite different. While we fret about Stephen Harper’s hidden agenda, Palestinians must deal with the not-so-hidden radical Islamic agenda of Hamas. While our student government worked to get Olivia Chow elected in Trinity-Spadina, students in Iran organize conferences where leading radical Islamic clerics debate whether the Holocaust really happened.
What is radical Islam? It is the perverted version of Islam that is preached by Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups, and which true Muslims reject as radicalism. Radical Islam is what you see when subways are blown up in London and Spain and children’s schools are held hostage in Russia and Israel. Radical Islam is Canadian aid workers being kidnapped and threatened with death in Iraq for being “infidels.”
Betar-Tagar and co-sponsors have put together a week-long series of lectures (Feb. 6-10) about radical Islam and its agenda of oppression and violence. Our speakers include a Middle-East women’s rights activist raised in a Jihadist family, a former Sudanese slave who was bought and sold by radical Islamists, and a former P.L.O journalist who used to participate in a genuine propaganda machine. There will also be a Muslim professor who will explore how radical Islamic terror is affecting innocent Muslims in the Middle-East and a gay-rights activist from Ottawa who monitors the status of LGBTQ individuals in the Middle East. Why are we doing all of this? So that UofT students can “Know radical Islam.”
We must also acknowledge the “support” of the Arab Students’ Collective (ASC), who will be giving us all a live-action demonstration of radical Islamic doctrine. During their second annual “Israeli Apartheid Week,” the ASC plans to call for the destruction of the Jewish state, just as they did last year.
One year ago, ASC members claimed that Palestine should extend from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with no room for a viable Israel in between. They built a “refugee tent” featuring posters glorifying suicide bombers. The ASC even presented maps of specific Jewish communities marked for ethnic cleansing and maps with Israel wiped out altogether. We expect nothing less from the ASC this year, and hopefully U of T students will be able to recognize their rhetoric as another symptom of radical Islam.
Betar-Tagar encourages all UofT students and campus groups who advocate freedom from oppression to support “Know radical Islam Week” and to say “No” to genocide by opposing the ASC’s attempts to make the radical Islamic pipe dream of a world without Israel into a waking nightmare.
