Home-grown hatred in North America

And the trend continues... Practially at the same time there were two terrorist threats in the news in North America.

One here in Canada, in the Sikh community. The well known and well liked (I can only speak for non-Sikhs) PM from Vancouver, Ujjal Dosanjh was threatened on a Sher-I-Punjab radio show because he criticized the fact that portraits of know Sikh terrorists were carried in their parade, thereby giving validity to violence. Of course, the RCMP takes the threat very seriously. I, as a Canadian, believe that once we become Canadian citizens we don't have the right to bring our political squabbles into this country, no matter what is behind us in our history.

But I am also very happy to see that on the Facebook website Ujjal Dosanjh is a Sikh Traitor he has a lot of support expressed both from the part of Sikhs and non-Sikhs.

The other recent event is the threat against Matt Stone and Trey Parker of the South Park cartoon fame, known for their irreverent satires, poking fun in the past even at Jesus and God. But now they dared touch The Prophet (peace be upon him)...!!!

In this instance the threat comes from Zachary Adam Chesser, aka Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee, a self-proclaimed American Jihadist. To quote: "... Trey and Matt has to be sliced ... inshallah." And the result is...? Comedy Central bleeped the "offending" parts. This, of course, means that the Jihadists won, at least in this case.

What I find disturbing is that in both cases the people who uttered these threats were born here and educated here. Are we becoming too lax and complacent...?

Antisemitism in Ottawa.

This past Tuesday there was an anti-semitic attack in Ottawa that involved several machete wielding young Arabic speaking individuals. The focus of their attack was two young Carleton students perceived by them to be Jews. Yet one of them wasn't even Jewish, he is the vice-president of the Carleton University Students' Association, but who happens to be openly sympathetic to Jews and Israel.

As someone with some Armenian ancestry in my family tree, I am very sensitive to the cause of both Armenians and Jews, both peoples from the Middle East, who both had to face premeditated genocide. As a child I grew up with horror stories, the Jewish experience still very fresh at the time. I did make a decision then and there that I will do whatever I can to support both nations in their efforts to re-establish themselves in their homelands. Israel became a Jewish country again in 1949, Armenia regained its freedom in 1991. Yet peace is still elusive in both cases. Armenians still have to iron out their differences with the Azeris, Israel still has to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians, and to at all gain the acceptance of a large part of the world.

Ideologies, memes do not die easily. Antisemitism survived under the ashes, particularly in Eastern Europe where the whole issue was swept under the carpet and not dealt with ever since WWII. In spite of some feeble efforts from the part of the state, young people there still get the old ideology instilled in them by their parents, by people around them who still believe the Nazi propaganda of Jews being responsible for all the ills of the World. As for the Muslim world...? That has even more issues piled on top of their inherited ones.

The events of the last few years make me really concerned. I keep meeting otherwise educated people, even university professors, who do not take the necessary effort to check the verity of what they read and hear. Very dangerous! We cannot allow baseless raw hatred to take hold of people's minds. We cannot sit around idly while the displaced Palestinians are still kept in squalid refugee camps, after 60 years(!), in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, even in the West Bank! Not accepted, even exploited by their Muslim brothers, who instead fill their heads and hearts with hateful propaganda, using them as living bombs against a country that they also refuse to accept.

I watch Israel with growing concern, a country that accommodated waves and waves of refugees, including those who had to flee from their ancient homelands in Muslim countries, and whose numbers were pretty much the same as the original Palestinian refugees, making up now roughly half of the country's present population. Who also lost everything when they fled, yet who never got any UN help. Israel feels more and more pushed in a corner, and as a result its despairing population chooses to elect more radical right-wing leadership, a fact which then whips the flames of antisemitism into an ever growing frenzy in the rest of the world. Very dangerous!

And now to have to read about incidents like what happened in Ottawa! Imagine a scenario in which Muslim students would get attacked in a similar manner. Wouldn't we react with utmost indignation? We cannot allow incidents like this to occur here in Canada! We cannot allow our streets to become battlegrounds! We cannot allow hatred of any kind to take hold of Canadian minds!

Religious violence world-wide

I celebrated Easter with a heavy heart. Religious tensions are growing world-wide and our coreligionists in particular are under attack at an increasing rate. In Iraq bombings and sectarian strife are a daily occurrence, but lately there were personal attacks on known Christian families. A bomb was placed next to the house of Ramzy Balbole, a painter. His wife and three children got seriously injured as a result, their three year old eventually succumbing to his injuries in the hospital. In the past few years several Chaldo-Assyrian priests were murdered and, although during Hussein's time only 5% of the population was Christian, today they make up 40% of the refugees now living in the neighbouring countries.

This past month over 500 people, mostly women and children, were killed near the city of Jos in Nigeria, although truth be told, there were prior clashes in which 150 Muslim villager got killed, so this was a revenge attack.

It is estimated that in Sudan over 1.5 million Christians have been killed in the civil wars since 1984 by the Janjaweed (the Arab Muslim militia). Also, over 200 000 people were taken into slavery, mostly of the Dinka people, about 75% of whom are Christian.

Last August in Pakistan six people, one man, four women and a child, were burnt alive in Gojra by Muslim militant. They were Christian and they were accused of desecrating the Qur'an.

The number of attacks on Coptic Christians (the earliest of Christian sects) has been increasing in Egypt in the last few decades. One year ago two men were shot dead and several injured in Southern Egypt during an Easter vigil. In September a Muslim man beheaded a Christian man in Bagour and injured two others in other villages.

This year, in January, three Muslim men in a car opened fire on a crowd of celebrating Copts near a church, killing 8 people. Unknown number of girls have been kidnapped, raped, and/or forced to convert, or marry Muslim men with the resulting children automatically considered Muslims.

In Saudi Arabia, if anyone is known to have converted to Christianity, they can be executed -- by law.

Sometimes I can't help remembering the Communist teachings of my childhood that said that "religions are the root of all evil". Could they have been right...?