Liberals ignore Muslim imam?s performing 30 polygamous marriages in Toronto.By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | 6/6/2008
It is just one more example of liberal cowardliness leading us to Sharia hell.
A Muslim imam in the Canadian province of Ontario defiantly and openly admitted recently that he had performed about 30 polygamous marriages involving men who already had wives, thereby breaking Canadian law. Polygamy was outlawed in Canada in 1892 and comes under provincial jurisdiction.
Imam Aly Hindy, who leads the Toronto Salahuddin Islamic Center, has gone on radio and appeared in Canada?s largest newspaper, The Toronto Star, to justify why he is defying the law of the land by marrying men already legally spoken for, sometimes without the knowledge of their first wife.
?This is our religion and nobody can force us to do anything against our religion,? he contemptuously told The Star. ?If the laws of the country conflict with Islamic law, if one goes against the other, than I am going to follow Islamic law, simple as that.?
In Islam, a man can legally have up to four wives. A second wife is sometimes taken if the first wife does not produce children. But many Muslim women, according to one Muslim feminist, live ?in constant fear? of their husbands taking a second, even third, wife, who are often much younger than the first spouse.
In France, polygamy is not an insignificant problem and is one of reasons given for the Paris riots in 2005. Authorities report a higher delinquency rate among polygamous families, which sometimes consist of a husband, four wives and more than twenty children living together in a cramped apartment. It is believed between 150,000 and 300,000 people live in polygamous families in France
Hindy first appeared in Canadian newspapers for supporting the terrorist Khadr family who lived in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough where his Center is also located.
Ahmed Said Khadr, the family father, was said to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda. At one time, the Toronto family lived in the same compound as Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and socialized with the al-Qaeda leader and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda?s second in command. Bin Laden also attended the wedding of Khadr?s daughter, who, in true al-Qaeda style, was once said to have threatened Pakistani police with a rifle when they came to arrest her father.
Ahmed Khadr was later killed in a shootout with Pakistani authorities, in which a son was also wounded. Another son is currently on trial in the United States for killing an American medic with a hand grenade in separate firefight.
In a way, however, one can admire the misplaced combativeness of the Khadr family, despite the loathsomeness of their cause, when compared to the gutless response of Ontario?s liberal politicians to the polygamy issue.
The Liberal Party, which currently rules Ontario, is adopting a cowardly see-no-evil attitude toward the reported simultaneous marriages. In the provincial legislature, a Liberal member of parliament explained, in true political doublespeak, that since no marriage licenses were obtained and no registration of such marriages took place, then there is no evidence the polygamous unions ever occurred.
Only a politician could utter such useless drivel for an excuse.
But what makes this shameful blot of inaction even worse is the cold contempt in which Liberal politicians, much like Hindy, are holding their very own Canadian laws. Regarding this issue, Ontario?s provincial criminal code states that a person who enters into any form of polygamy, whether the law has recognized the union or not, as well as those who assist in the rite, can receive up to five years in prison.
But the worthless Liberal response should come as no surprise. While Hindy holds Canadian law in contempt in order to slowly spread his version of fundamentalist Islam in an infidel country, the self-serving Liberals are doing the same thing in order, as usual, not to lose votes and jeopardize elections.
The Liberal Party, you see, has been Canada?s party of multiculturalism since the days of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who unilaterally declared Canada a multicultural country in the early 1970s. The Liberals regard the ethnic groups who have immigrated to America?s northern neighbor since that time as core supporters and vote reservoirs; much like the Democratic Party in the United States views the black and union vote.
As result, the Liberals are, predictably, very hesitant to take action against a religion shared by several such large ethnic groups whose voting numbers are growing in the key Toronto and Toronto-area ridings where the majority of Canada?s 700,000 Muslims live and where Ontario elections are decided.
In all, the Liberals under Premier Dalton McGuinty, are just practising the traditional Liberal policy of seizing power at all costs and holding power at all costs, even if it means ignoring an odious aspect of sharia that goes against the rights of women they?ve always espoused. All of which goes to show that, once more, it is not the Hindys who pose the most danger to the Western way of life, but rather the appeasers and collaborators with their lack of courage and unwillingness to stand up for the values of our democratic societies and civilization.
The Canadian media have also been unhelpful regarding the Muslim polygamy issue. For years, they have hypocritically focused their attention on a small, isolated and polygamist Mormon fundamentalist community in British Columbia (a safe target), while Muslims have been practising polygamy in major Canadian urban areas at the same time. Hindy said even some imams have second wives, making one wonder why Canadian newspapers never covered this story among the hundreds they have published about Islam.
Women?s groups have been equally and hypocritically silent. And yet lost in all this is the fact that it is the women, and their children, who suffer the most from polygamy. One would think Canadian feminists would have long ago made this social blight a top priority, using their taxpayer-funded government grants to study and prevent it. Families are devastated by this archaic practice that is so unjust and detrimental to the women they claim to represent.
One woman?s life, for example, was shattered when she discovered her husband married two other women after he had sent her to Egypt with their four children for a year. Hindy told the woman, who had cried for six days after discovering the awful news: ?You should stop causing problems to him (the husband). You will not get anything by divorce except destroying your life.? But this big-hearted guy says, in a few cases, he has gone to homes with the news of a husband?s new marriage to help lessen the blow for the first wife.
Well, that certainly makes a big difference.
Unlike the spineless Liberals, the secular Muslim Canadian Congress has asked police to investigate ?the growing number of polygamous marriages? and lay charges. In a communiqu?, the MCC called polygamy ?degrading to women?, stating the original reasons for its existence, one of which was the providing for widows and orphans of men killed in battle, no longer exists.
The MCC also wants Ontario?s government to uphold the law in regard to family social benefits. While only one wife is supposed to be able to claim such benefits, some extra wives are collecting them as individual applicants, further draining the treasury. Indirectly the taxpayer, by supporting the second and third families, in other words the husband?s harem, is unknowingly supporting sharia law.
The issue of polygamy, it is generally recognized, will probably now go to court where its advocates, like Hindy, will fight for its legalization under the banner of religious freedom contained in Canada?s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court hopefully will perceive that the case is simply an attempt by Muslim fundamentalists to use our tolerance to promote their intolerance, and thus rule against it.
Failure to do so would only see the door opened to the establishment of other threatening aspects of sharia law, causing ever larger holes to be torn in Canada?s social fabric. Ontario?s Liberal government rightly killed the idea of sharia family courts in 2005, saying they would not be fair to women, but would probably have to reconsider its decision when facing a legalized polygamy.
In Islam, polygamy is reserved only for men, since it does not ?correspond to a woman?s nature.? However, it is high time to let Islamic fundamentalists know this antiquated custom from a desert tribal past and the sharia legal code that endorses it do not correspond to Western civilization?s nature, and values, either.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. A scholar and former news reporter, his field of expertise is Muslim forced marriages and honor killings. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.
