March 29, 2005

Jared Taylor Meets Canada’s Multicultural Madrassa —Almost

By  Gavin Miles McInnes

I moved to Ottawa, Canada in 1976 as a very young Englishman with a father who was invited to help the Canucks with their non-existent high tech industry.

Within weeks I had my posh British accent pounded out of me and was able to say "How’s it goin’, eh?" with the best of them.

When Canada instituted its refugee-friendly Immigration Act of 1978, few refugees seemed to take them up on the offer. There were not, to paraphrase Pat Buchanan, a thousand Zulus set to compete for assimilation with a thousand of us Englishmen.

There were millions of East Indians though. Their well-educated parents were brought in for the same reasons mine were. Each of my classes had about three or four. Sure, we would rib Rajiv for his funny name and his accent, but he played hockey and liked Def Leppard so we quickly forgot he had difficulty sunburning.

In 1984, my brother Kyle was born into a very different Ottawa. The Immigration Act had successfully taken the emphasis away from what immigrants can do for our country and placed it all on what our country can do for immigrants. More importantly, Canada had decided "assimilation" sounded like "melting pot" and that was for those ugly Americans south of the border.

You see, Canadian identity hinges on everything that is anti-American. So it was decided that Canada would become the most anti-melting pot country the world’s ever seen.

It worked. Today it’s hard to find a Torontonian that doesn’t puff out his chest and proudly bleat his city is "literally the most culturally diverse city on earth."

Unfortunately, the only way Canadians could convince themselves diversity-based immigration works was to turn a blind eye to its downsides. Anything goes, consequences be damned! The Mounties can wear turbans, Sikh boxers can leave their beards untrimmed. And Toronto youths can carry their ceremonial daggers to school African refugees can flush their passports down the toilet on the plane ride over, make up a name when they get to the airport and they’re on the street in an hour. All they have to do is promise (cross your heart, hope to die) to come back for a hearing in a few weeks.

The local stories are more of the same. At my father’s pub, an Ottawa City Transpo bus driver tells me how maintenance often has to hose down the blood in his bus at the end of the night due to the Somali gang knife fights. "Why don’t you read about that in the [Ottawa] Citizen?" he says furiously. On September 12th, 2001 my mother (an adult education teacher whose students are about a third Muslim refugees) came in to work only to notice: "plane bomb star of David skull" spelt out in gigantic Wingdings font on several computers (QMYN). []

She wasn’t shocked. Other teachers had casually mentioned similar symbols on their computers and chalkboards every time the anniversary of the Six Day War rolled around. Canada had become so tolerant of other cultures that it now tolerates people who are intolerant. Her students made it very clear they had no allegiance to any country whatsoever. Their allegiance was to Islam.

My brother’s academic life was similar. The high school cafeteria was divided into Arab, black, Chinese and white. The Arabs (mostly Lebanese) hated the whites and fights often broke out including one incident where the police were called in and an Arab youth stabbed a teacher in the arm with a sharpened pencil. When my brother caught a Somalian (a "Mali" as they were called) stealing his skateboard a fight broke out that bled into lunch hour. Minutes later a mini van of the Somalian’s entire family roared into the parking lot. Again the police were called.

Finding documentation of all this is virtually impossible. Each incident is documented as "notes" that follow that specific teacher to whatever school he goes to next. Even when you do track down the teacher that was there, no record of ethnicity is documented because the administration is petrified of lawsuits. The understood code: "gang conflict" means "ethnic conflict."

And of course, the local papers never report anything about ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict does not exist in Canada.

My old Alma Mata, Ottawa’s Carleton University, has also been changed drastically in the past 20 years.

CKCU, the college radio station founded by Dan Akroyd used to be a place you could hear, well, college radio. Today we get at least two hours a day of shows like "Voice of Somalia," "Tinig Pinjoy" and "Asian Sounds." When I was at the school newspaper there were still traces of 70s irreverence when editor’s photos were simply a penis with sunglasses on them. By the mid 90s the only pubic hair you’d see in the paper was when they were banning my magazine, Vice, on campus. Today the paper is so sterile it reads like a multicultural trade journal.

And what’s worse, my old campus pub Rooster’s has been converted into an alcohol free bar where Muslim students can enjoy the western college experience without the pesky assimilation that goes with it.

Recently, when my brother paid his tuition for the University of Ottawa he couldn’t help but notice that two pro-"diversity" student groups, OPIRG, the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, and International House, were raking in over $151,296 per semester. That means by the time Kyle graduates, he and his peers will have spent over $1.2 million promoting diversity.

Or more specifically, stifling anti-diversity. Kyle has just organized a talk wherein American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor would travel up from the Great Satan and look at the cons of this multicultural utopia we all took for granted. After all, the school had shelled out $20,000 to hear Ralph Nader talk about the joys of diversity.

Were they willing to give Jared Taylor plane fare? Or could he talk for free?

The short answer: no.

"When I first brought it up with The Community Life Board [the people who organize the talks] they were thrilled," my brother told me just after Christmas. "They said ethnic tension and diversity is the most pressing issue on campus today. Pierre Brault, the director of The Community Life Services still had a broken wooden coat hanger in his office that had been used as a weapon at a recent debate between two ethnic groups (he refused to tell me which ones). It still had dried blood on it."

We put together a flyer for the event and called it "The Problems With Diversity."

That was a mistake.

"When people found out we were not going to be blindly praising multiculturalism everything changed," my brother said. "After that I couldn’t catch a break."

Kiavash Najafi [email him] from the Political Studies student association made it clear to my brother that, even if his group approved, Kiavash would personally, physically, do everything in his power to shut the talk down.

Bob Kimberley, the president of the Communications Students association, told my brother he feared Taylor would sound too eloquent. Even if students asked questions, he argued, they wouldn’t sound as smart as Taylor and that would create an "unfair balance of power."

Caroline Andrew, the dean of the faculty of social sciences [email her], told Kyle she "can't support the talk" because she "doesn't agree with Jared Taylor's origins and links."

The strangest response however came from OPIRG member Mohammad Akram [email him], who sent Kyle a long letter. Sample quotes:

"The word diversity is given by human being. All human being wants to live not die. The immigrant came from other country same like your four fathers to live here .... Just think how you are enjoying the rainbow with seven color. The idea of Jared Taylor is not ideal for present modern, intellectual & highly advanced society … You know the German history killing of Jews by Germany/Hitler. These are all anti human act. If we will promote the Idea of Jared Taylor sure a time will come in future people will fight tog her just for color supremacy … Canada is the best country of the world. like India. where we have beauty & unity in Diversity."

Nice to know.

The University of Ottawa administration automatically assumed that discussing the downside of diversity, multiculturalism and mass immigration was tantamount to touting white supremacy.

My brother vainly asked sound questions like: Is Michelle Malkin a white supremacist for defending racial profiling in her book In Defense of Internment? Was liberal demigod Zora Neale Hurston a white supremacist for promoting segregation? Are anti-immigration activists Terry Anderson and Juan Mann white supremacists? Were the blacks at issues-views.com who rail against affirmative action, reparations, the idea of "hate crimes" and immigration white supremacists?

For that matter, If they want to attack supremacism, why don’t they talk about the fascist, racial agenda of La Raza? Or even the Islamists in our midst today who see the Jews as "dogs."  Or the patriotic Israelis that have no problem with the fact that they live in the most segregated place on earth.

When I published an article in the Ottawa Xpress [Banned in Canada, March 17, 2005] criticizing the school for making thinking a challenge instead of challenging students to think, the Ottawa U administration smugly responded that I was mistaken—they had never banned Taylor. Sure—they pulled the old Canadian bureaucratic trick of humming and hawing until the date of the talk had passed.

As I write this my brother is hopelessly trying to reschedule. And he keeps running into the same "I have to talk to this person and that person" trick. He reschedules a date and they delay him until it passes.

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was recently asked if he thought Harvard president Larry Summers’ comments about men being better at science and math were "within the pale of legitimate discourse."

He replied, "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa."

Canadian universities today lean more to the madrassa side.

There is one form of diversity they will not tolerate—and that is a diversity of opinion.