Michael Coren chats with Tarek Fatah on Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in Egypt

Fri, 2 Dec 2011 11:23:51 -0500

Why women are burning burkas in Yemen

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:08:21 -0400

Islamic Banking, a $300 Billion Deception

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:00:16 -0400

Tarek Fatah in The Huffington Post
The leading promoter of Sharia banking in Canada, UM Financial Inc. has gone into receivership without much fanfare. None of the nation's newspapers have bothered to report the development, despite the fact it could possibly affect hundreds of homeowners. Had it not been for a tweet by an affected Muslim homeowner looking for a lawyer, the story of UM Financial going broke would have escaped even the scant attention the news received on social media.
Tweeting under the username @UM_FinanceBROKE, the tweeter wrote:
"Sorry Toronto Muslim Homeowners, I have bad news. I just learned UM Financial is Bankrupt. I need a good Canadian lawyer"

The troubles at UM Financial did not come overnight. As far back as April 2007, the Toronto Star reported on the company's liquidity problems. The Star wrote that Omar Kalair, the founder of UM Financial, "is working hard to maintain on-going sources of funding." Kalair disclosed that the Credit Union Central of Ontario had extended an additional $50 million to the Sharia banking promoter, and "that will keep us going until the summer." Apparently, this month the money ran out and UM folded tent.
The consequences of this bankruptcy may effect thousands of Muslim homeowners. Leading up to the bankruptcy, there were quiet rumblings of discontent in the community. One indignant Muslim homeowner wrote to the Toronto Star:
"In the name of Shariah-compliant mortgages they charge extra fees... After accepting and approving our application, they refused us financing just a week before the closing of our home, thus putting us into great trouble... This last-minute refusal made us get a mortgage from an alternate source at a higher interest rate and spend an extra $2,500 for moving costs and living in a hotel with the entire family for one week."

To read the full story, click here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/tarek-fatah/sharia-banking_b_1011704.html

Ayaan Hirsi Ali chats with Tarek Fatah at the Eglinton Theatre in Toronto, Canada

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 17:34:56 -0400

On September 15, 2011, the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a guest in Toronto of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre where she was interviewed on stage by author Tarek Fatah.

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, four prominent Muslims from USA and Canada speak on NewsTalk 1010 Radio

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:18:12 -0400

Clockwise: Farzana Hassan, former president of the Muslim Canadian Congress, Kamal Nawash of the Free Muslims Against Terrorism, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, radio host Tarek Fatah and Jehad Aliweiwi, former ED of the Canadian Arab Federation.

Ten Years and a Trillion Dollars Later...

Fri, 9 Sep 2011 18:18:10 -0400

Ideas of cultural relativism have made the West hesitant to confront Islamism.

by Tarek Fatah
The Mark News

Ten years and a trillion dollars later, we are more vulnerable to our enemy’s machinations than we were on that sunny September morning of 2001 when evil rained hell from the skies.

The jihadi terrorists’ 9/11 attack on the United States shook human civilization to its core. We in the West who lived a life of privilege and entitlement, who felt invincible, were made to feel as vulnerable as the ordinary inhabitants of the Third World. The colossal amounts of money spent to defend our lifestyle and values were not enough to stop 19 Arab men armed with mere paper cutters from bringing a superpower, a nation of 300 million, to its knees.

The reaction of the U.S. and its NATO allies was swift and powerful, but ineffective. Bungled operations in Afghanistan, where billions of dollars were wasted, allowed Osama bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs, as well as Mullah Omar and his Taliban, to escape to Pakistan. While the Pakistani military gave sanctuary to the enemies of the U.S., the Americans gave billions of dollars more to the Pakistanis, who then spent that money to sustain and promote jihadi operations around the world. As if the fiasco in Afghanistan was not enough, the West invaded Iraq and managed to hand the country over to the U.S.’s worst enemy, Iran.

In a war that has pitted the 21st century against the 12th, tens of thousands of young men and women have died, or have been maimed, fighting the international jihad, but have little to account for it.

The month of September marks not just the anniversary of the 9/11 assault on freedom, democracy, and individual liberty, but is also the anniversary of another attack on these cherished principles by a far stronger enemy with similar fantasies of world domination: It was in September 1939 that Hitler’s feared Wehrmacht attacked Poland, triggering the Second World War – a war in which nearly 50 million people died to defeat Nazi Germany, and, with it, the doctrine of Aryan Supremacy that sought to enslave the rest of humanity.

The difference between the two September wars is stark, and the contrast of the outcomes is mindboggling. While the German Nazis and their allies boasted a technologically advanced society with the largest armies ever deployed, the 9/11 attackers were a ragtag group of Islamist jihadis, imbibed with the love of death and a contempt for life’s little pleasures.

For all the strength, determination, and militancy of the German Nazis, Italian fascists, and Japanese militarists, it took less than six years for the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. to inflict a decisive and humiliating defeat on the enemy. What began on Sept. 1, 1939 ended on Aug. 15, 1945, with the comprehensive defeat of those who sought world domination.

Contrast that with the events following the attack in September 2001. Ten years later, the Islamist ideology that was at the root of 9/11 is stronger than ever before. The question is, why were we able to defeat Nazism, but have failed to put a dent in Islamism?

Why is it that, instead of retreating under the relentless war on terrorism, the Islamists have become more influential than ever in the U.S.?

Imagine White House officials hobnobbing with American Nazis during the Second World War. It is incomprehensible. Yet, former U.S. president George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama have both bent over backward to accommodate purveyors of Islamism.

Can you imagine former president Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing a group of Nazis in an attempt to “reach out” to them? No. Yet we barely shrugged our shoulders when Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood to his now-infamous speech in Cairo in 2009, which was directed to Muslims of the world. He could’ve gone and spoken in Indonesia, which is the country with the largest Islamic population, and, incidentally, is also where he grew up. But, instead, he made a conscious decision to go out of his way to greet those who consider the U.S. their enemy.

While we in the West understood the phenomenon of Nazism and ideologies of racial supremacy, we didn’t have a clue about the societies of Islamdom, and still do not. While the fight against Hitler was fought without any guilt, the war on terrorism is riddled with white liberal guilt where leaders of the West apologize for our civilization, which has brought universal human rights, gender equality, and citizenship based on human-created laws, not inherited race or religion.

While Charlie Chaplin could make movies mocking Hitler and Nazism, no one today can mock jihadi Islamists without risking allegations of racism and discrimination. So powerful is the Islamist propaganda and presence in the West that now, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the narrative suggests it was not the U.S. that was the victim of an attack by Muslims, but the other way around.

Just prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the executive director of the Canadian Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) wrote a statement listing “positive developments” that have come about as a result of this catastrophe, and highlighting “greater interfaith” dialogue as the top accomplishment. He also reminded his audience that, “it is also vital to be vigilant and acknowledge that challenges remain.”

What are those challenges? One would expect him to indentify the primary challenge as jihad-inspired Islamists’ continued attacks on Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Instead, the CAIR official suggested the opposite. He wrote: “Among those, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric continues unabated here in Canada, Europe, the U.S., and in many parts of the world. … [T]he assault on privacy rights and civil liberties continues.”
The CAIR official did not condemn either the 9/11 attack or the doctrine of armed jihad that inspired the 9/11 jihadi terrorists. Nor did he speak out against Islamists’ ongoing attempts to sneak Sharia Law into the public domain.

Instead of rallying around the values that the West stands for, the Second Global Conference on World’s Religions After 9/11, which was hosted by McGill University in Montreal on Sept. 7, seemed to be dominated by Islamists. If the Islamists were successful in persuading attendees of their message, then such non-Muslim religious leaders as the Dalai Lama, and clerics and scholars of religious studies, will endorse the odious document that the Muslim Brotherhood is promoting, which aims to curtail any criticism of Islam by claiming it as a violation of human rights.

While the West sleeps, the Islamists cloaked in their self-promoted label of “moderation” ensure we fight the jihad as paper tigers. Leading the Islamist charge is Tariq Ramadan, who spoke at the interfaith fest in Montreal. Ramadan reflects the new sophisticated arm of the worldwide Islamist movement, which sees the West as the right place to wage a cultural and intellectual jihad. He is the darling of the world Islamist establishment, but camouflages his Islamist agenda by way of ambivalent doublespeak.

If we in the West do not wake up to the threat posed by Islamism, then, 10 years from today, we will still be engaged in the so-called war on terrorism that has made the U.S.’s corporate sector immensely profitable, but has left the country near bankruptcy – in terms of both money and ideas.

The Jihadi Hunter: A Walrus Magazine feature on the struggles of Tarek Fatah

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 17:54:45 -0400

Get a copy of this month’s Walrus Magazine. It carries a double-spread feature on Canada’s leading liberal Muslim, Pakistani-born author Tarek Fatah and his life-long war with Islamism.