Tarek Fatah, an author, a weekly columnist for the Toronto Sun and host of a weekly Sunday afternoon talk show on Toronto’s CFRB NewsTalk 1010, posted a 2:28 minute video on his website. Fatah includes his personal comment on the video, which is entitled “Sparks Fly as Liberal Senator Mitchell Attacks Liberal Muslim Tarek Fatah”:
This exchange illustrates everything that is rotten about the Left and Liberals in Europe and North America. They’ve embraced the Islamist agenda as being one of Rosa Parks and Rosa Luxembourg. The truth is these guilt-ridden, bleeding heart White liberals are naive, and are being taken for a ride, worse than the one Chamberlain took as [he] sipped wine with Hitler.
In the YouTube video of Tarek Fatah’s presentation to the Senate committee on November 24, 2014, Fatah’s exchange with Senator Grant Mitchell begins @44:00:
The fact that Tarek Fatah identifies as a Muslim illustrates a spectrum within the Muslim communities which is what the left has been saying. The right-wing, on the other hand, tends to define groups in essentialist simplistic terms. As we have seen with U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria, such simplistic analyses may make things worse. ISIL would not exist today were it not for failed U.S. policies in Iraq and Syria and, yes, Saudi Arabia.
Some definition of terms are in order. The Islamists are not radical. Their movement is a reaction to forces of modernization and secularization and they appeal not to a new vision, but a medieval vision. They are, therefore, right-wing and reactionary in the same sense that Christian fundamentalists and fascists are right-wing.
It is only with the rightward lurch of the NDP that the terms “left” and “liberalism” has become synonymous. Liberalism is generally open to allowing communities to define themselves and that would include defining themselves medievally. Conservatives are not so tolerant privileging on certain medieval self-definitions. Socialists define themselves as progressives favouring modernist or post-modernist self-definitions. As a secularist and modernist Fatah would be on the left in his Muslim community irrespective of his economic views which has traditionally been used to define the spectrum in a Euro-American context.
Godwin OP.
Tarek delivered the best critique of our enduring intellectual failures.
Our government, both elected and professional, view everyone as a religionist.
Most of us are not! We are secularists. Supporting the non-religionists is the only moral way forward.