Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has shared his belief that one of the most important values we have in Canada, the value we ought to be celebrating on our 150th Birthday, is diversity. So he said on Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan
“Canada’s cultural diversity is one of our greatest strengths and sources of pride.”
The weekend of June 24/25 is a prime example of diversity in action, especially in Toronto, the capital of the province of Ontario and the most diverse city in the world.
.On June 24 Toronto celebrated Quds Day with a Parade.
Diversity proudly on display as Muslims call for the destruction of Israel “Palestine from the River to the sea!”
Similar parades took place across Canada and around the world. The annual Quds Day was initiated by Iran in 1979 as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people while opposing Zionism and Israel’s right to exist. Each year in Iran support for the Palestinian Territories includes burning blue and white Israeli flags and chanting “Death to Israel!” This parade also celebrates Hezbollah- a terrorist organization. I wrote about the 2013 Parade. I don’t think it was as big back then but the content hasn’t changed. I reported on the statement made by Elias Hazineh, the former president of an organization called Palestinian House, who stood at Queen’s Park, the home of the Ontario Parliament, in the midst of the most diverse city in the world, and called for the death of the Jews in Jerusalem. And not a peep from any authority.
But this is how we celebrate diversity in Canada.
And in Calgary, Ontario. The police and the mainstream media were worried about the safety of Muslims when they are calling for the genocide of Jews.
The day after Al Quds is the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto. The Prime Minister and his family attended the Parade in Toronto.
IMAGE: GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
This year the police, who have participated for many years, were not invited to participate. Divisiveness amongst the diverse? Black Lives Matter (BLM) lodged a complaint about the police and Gay Pride gave in as did the city. Janaya Khan, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto said:
“Black Lives Matter Toronto has said it opposes police presence in the parade because it could discourage marginalized communities from participating. What is missing is a real understanding of what it means to be a racialized person in this city, and the fear that exists in your body when you are around a police officer.”
(Mark Blinch/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
I guess the feelings of racialized people are more important than the feelings of the LGBTQ2 community . Long-time gay activist Rev. Brent Hawkes told the annual outdoor Pride church service that Pride should strive for unity, warning that Pride Toronto as an organization is “vulnerable” to “divisive” issues.The police who have worked so hard with the LGBTQ2 community to make amends for the years of harassing gay people are now prevented from marching because of BLM. Police who are gay will not be there in uniform-if at all.
This is diversity in action in Canada,
An then there are the Indigenous students who are refusing to attend the 150 Celebration.
Quinn Meawasige, an Indigenous Algoma student explained
Those policies at the time of Confederation were designed to eliminate the Indigenous people. What it was founded on was broken treaties, and it was founded on, essentially, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, because they needed to make way for settlement . . .
(The university’s Sault Ste. Marie campus used to be the site of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School)
Congratulations Canada . We have turned away from the ethic that makes pluralism possible to one of valuing diversity. And it is working. We’re now divided more than ever before along lines of race, colour, creed,religion & sexual orientation!
Diversity; our Prime Minister’s most important value, has led to the cannibalization of the extraordinary ethic that underpins our Constitution of 1960 and the Charter of Human Rights and Freedom of 1982. The ethic upon which our country sits; apparently not as firmly as I had believed, states that all people are born with equal intrinsic value, that all life is sacred and that we must care for the other. It is an ethic that is meant to bring people together under one umbrella. Yet, we now live in a country that is more divided than I can remember, despite the years of protest to make us more welcoming of the other. We witnessed the rise of women’s rights and gay rights and the rights of so many in between because of that ethic. Diversity is the new mantra, the new ethic. But instead of coming together under the value of diversity, we are coming apart.
This is diversity in action.
When we should be celebrating Canada’s 150 with an unabashed slap on the back “WOW!” as the most successful, pluralistic country in the world by taking selfies, all of us, in our rainbow of colour incarnations,from black to white and everything in between, we are fighting with each other. Each”diverse” group vying for attention. And our Human Rights Tribunals are busy deciding whose rights take precedence.
This is diversity in action.
There was time when we were proud of our Western heritage based on the Judeo/Christian ethic of care for the other because all people are born with equal intrinsic value. But over the decades we have moved away from this powerful and absolute ethic to one that is based on “feelings.” The problem is deciding whose feelings.
We have allowed liberals to connect the word “values” with white racist, fearmongering xenophobes. A magazine publisher refused to review my book Back to the Ethic:Reclaiming Western Values because she assumed the book was racist because of the word “values,” as if these values came to us from white people. Nothing could be further from the truth. The values upon which our country sits come from a dark skinned people, the Jews, who more than 3500 years ago gave us these values, that were shared around the world by Christians. Countries that celebrate democracy all sit on that ethic.
Look around you Canada: You won’t see these rights accorded in any of the 60 Muslim majority countries in the world or in North Korea, China, Russia and far too many countries in South America and Africa. And now these same liberals are turning us against each other in the name of diversity.
Camille Paglia recently said:
“But today’s liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: It’s all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology. Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.”
Canadians have been blessed to live in such a remarkable country. Millions of our men and women died to protect our values from attacks from those who do not accept our way of life; from Communism to Nazism. It is our responsibility to continue to protect and defend our values, our culture, to stand up for freedom and against oppression and suppression, and this perverse notion of diversity, so that we can continue to be a light unto the nations.
Happy 150 Canada
