Archive for category Uncategorized
Time to get real on religious ‘rights’
Posted by Unmasker in Uncategorized on October 16th, 2009
That's not a knife... now THIS is a knife.
I make no bones about my frustration with religion and the fact that we as a society often turn a blind eye to behavior that we would otherwise see as unacceptable if it’s veiled by ‘religious rights’. What it comes down to is this: no one cares much what you do in your home, church, temple etc., but when ‘religious rights’ infringe on our right to be free of religion there’s a problem. Let me be clear here, I have nothing against immigrants or any other people for that matter. My issue is with religion and I have no urge to change my life or behavior to accomodate someone’s religion. It’s time to get real with this; whatever their religion, no one should be allowed to carry what amounts to a big knife into a secure venue at the upcoming Vancouver Olympics. The claim is that the kirpan is not a weapon. Perhaps it is not intended to be, but the reality is that it has been used as such. Check out the attached story about the kirpan at the Olympics and then be sure to keep reading about just one of the examples of it being used as a weapon.
Sikh daggers allowed at Olympic venues
Baptized Sikhs will be allowed to carry their ceremonial daggers, called kirpans, into venues at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the RCMP announced Thursday.
A kirpan is one of five symbols of faith that must be worn by baptized Sikhs according to their religion.
The RCMP’s Integrated Security Unit held discussions with members of the community to come up with guidelines, said Sgt. Mike Coté.
“Because of the security measures at the venues, access would entail going through a metal detector. We thought we would be proactive and deal with this prior to the Games, and in fact we reached out to the Sikh community and sought their input to come up with some type of consensus,” said Coté.
Only a baptized Sikh wearing all the five articles of faith will be able to wear a kirpan into an Olympic venue, and the blade can not be more than 10 centimetres long.
Kirpan incident raises questions about court ruling
Teen accused of using it as weapon could rekindle kirpan-in-school debate
HENRY AUBIN
(The Gazette, September 16, 2008)
The controversy over the kirpan is back. Police say a 13-year-old Sikh boy last week used a religious dagger to threaten another student outside a school in Montreal. Police say the knife was wrapped in cloth at the time. No one was injured.
What was hurt, however, was the case for allowing Sikhs to take the symbolic weapon to school. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that right in 2006.
The kirpan was hugely influential in the whole debate over the accommodation of cultural differences. In its report last May, the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodations noted that the Supreme Court’s decision had “contaminated” that debate and also “discredited the courts.” Indeed, an SOM poll in La Presse a year ago suggested that an overwhelming 91 per cent of Quebecers opposed the court-sanctioned right of young Sikhs to wear the bladed object to class.
Does the wearing of the ceremonial dagger, seen by many Sikhs as a purely symbolic weapon in the fight against evil, compromise public security? That question has dominated each of the many deliberations on the kirpan.
Administrators at L’École Ste. Catherine Labouré reached an agreement in 2001 with the parents of a 12-year-old boy, Gurbaj Singh Multani, to let him wear the dagger if it were sewn into his underclothing to impede impulsive removal. The school’s governing board then reversed the decision, banning the object. When the Marguerite Bourgeoys School Board upheld that ruling, the parents went to Quebec Superior Court: That court said the boy could wear the knife so long as he kept it in a cloth envelope under his shirt.
The Quebec Court of Appeal overturned that. It said that barring the kirpan contravened the Charter of Rights’ guarantee of religious freedom, but it said the question of safety made the ban reasonable.
What’s significant in light of last Thursday’s incident is the Supreme Court’s logic in overturning the Court of Appeal and dismissing safety as a problem.
The court said that the evidence “reveals that not a single violent incident related to the presence of kirpans in schools has been reported.” Now we have a report of such an incident in LaSalle. Granted, according to police it did not take place “in” a school but on the street just outside of one, the Cavalier-de-LaSalle school, during lunch break.
The Quebec Court of Appeal had said it was “not hypothetical” to suppose that in a tight situation a Sikh youth might make use of his kirpan. If the police are to be believed, that court was right.
The Supreme Court acknowledges three violent incidents involving kirpans in metropolitan Toronto. One case involved use of a kirpan in an attempted murder. Another time one was used to stab someone in the back.
You might think this would discredit Sikh authorities’ claim that a kirpan would never be used as actual weapon. But, no, the high court split hairs. It indicated that these incidents were not relevant to the Multani case because none of them took place in or near a school.
The Supremes were quite impressed by Gurbaj Singh Multani’s character. “The risk that this particular student would use his kirpan for violent purposes seems highly unlikely to me,” said the writer of the judgment, Justice Louise Charron.
Score one for the Governator…
Posted by Unmasker in Uncategorized on October 16th, 2009
I can't understand how someone could mistake this for a big KNIFE 
Schwarzenegger Vetoes ‘Kirpan’ Bill
SACRAMENTO, CA – A bill to educate law enforcement officers about the religious significance of ‘kirpans’ has been vetoed by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who found it “unnecessary,” drawing angry reaction from the Sikh community in the US.
The decision came as a shock to the organizations, individuals and lawmakers who supported the bill.
The veto was particularly surprising given bipartisan votes in favors of the bill in both houses of legislature, advocacy group Sikh Coalition said in a statement.
The bill was passed unanimously in both Houses, by 77-0 in the Assembly and by 36-0 in the Senate.
“This loss for the Sikh community is a reminder of our serious lack of political clout in this state. After months of hard work and 100 per cent support from our lawmakers, the Sikh voice was still not strong enough to overcome the whim of one man,” said Prabhjot Singh, Sikh Coalition Board chairman.
The Bill AB 504 was introduced in February 2009 by Assembly member Warren Furutani to use education to help stem the arrests of Sikhs for carrying kirpans in California.
Over the last few years, there has been an increase in the arrests of Sikhs nationwide for carrying kirpans in the absence of an understanding among law enforcers.
Police mistakenly believe them to be in violation of concealed weapons laws, the Sikh Coalition said.
“AB 504 was our first attempt to change this,” the statement said.
Though the bill did not touch the legality of the kirpan, it said police officers be trained about who Sikhs are and learn about the significance of the kirpan, hoping that religious understanding would decrease arrests.
The Governor decided to veto the bill as “unnecessary” though it was endorsed by groups ranging from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and party consultants from both sides, as well as several religious and civil rights groups.
“We suspect that the final veto was the result of law enforcement’s strong desire to avoid promoting the acceptance of Sikhs with kirpans,” the coalition said.
“The Governor’s response is very disappointing. It shows his lack of support for promoting religious understanding in California,” said Neha Singh, Western Region Director of the Sikh Coalition.
Another prime example of religion messing up a perfectly good government…
Posted by Unmasker in Uncategorized on October 16th, 2009
Religious extremism is not exclusive to Islam
It was a masterful piece of self-deception.
Benny Begin, Israel’s fiercely secular Minister Without Portfolio, turned up to Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on Tuesday to brief the foreign press corps on the threat to Israel posed by the fusion of religion and politics in Lebanon and Iran.
Noting that the Middle East was a region that rarely produced ”good days”, Begin said that June 7 of this year had in fact been one such good day.
It was the day Lebanon’s pro-Western March 14 alliance won that country’s parliamentary elections, defeating the March 8 coalition that includes Hezbollah, the Shiite ”party of God” that is strongly backed by Iran.
”The June elections were a triumph for the good guys,” enthused Begin.
Putting Saudi Arabia at the top of his list of ”good guys” that had provided support for March 14, Begin said the Lebanese election results proved at least one thing.
”It showed us that when you really make an effort, the good people can win.”
Since when did Saudi Arabia top Israel’s list of good guys? – but more of that later.
Despite the ”good guys” triumph, Begin lamented that it had all been downhill since then.
Hezbollah had succeeded in retaining its power of veto over all cabinet decisions in a new government of national unity.
Worse still, Hezbollah had managed re-arm itself and now 40,000 rocket heads pointed towards Israel.
”Where do Hezbollah’s real loyalties lie?” Begin asked, getting to the meat of his argument.
In Iran, of course, the country that tops just about everyone’s list of bad guys, and where, said Begin, ”religion and politics go together”.
”This theology is not something we are used to anywhere in the free world,” warned Begin. ”This is something else.”
Quoting a few choice examples of vitriolic extremism that often punctuate the speeches of Iranian leaders and their Hezbollah clients, Begin asked what other country in the world would tolerate such a threat on its doorstep.
”Actually, we live a mad house,” said Begin, with the clear implication that Israel was the only sane nation among them.
Yet where else in the Middle East is there such a fusion of religion and politics?
The lines between the two are so blurred in Israel that it has prevented the country’s legislators from formally adopting a constitution for the past 61 years.
Begin himself, in almost his very next breath, then did what every Israeli politician – secular or religious – does when they start defending Israel’s right to occupy the West Bank: he weaved together history as told by the Old Testament, with facts on the ground.
The land of the West Bank, which he referred to exclusively by the biblical names of Judea and Samaria, was the ”cradle of Jewish civilisation”, Begin argued.
Therefore no Israeli leader, Begin reiterated, should ”relinquish” this land to the Palestinians, and no one had any right to demand that Jews should stop settling this land.
The mixture of religion and politics may well be a dangerous thing in the hands of Shiite clerics such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But religious extremism is not exclusive to Islam. Israel has its own Jewish extremists that Begin is happy to ignore. People who are settling the land of ”Judea and Samaria” because they believe they are acting on God’s explicit wishes.
Are these people dangerous?
Last Sunday it was reported that Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, had recently received intelligence on the existence of an ammunition cache in the West Bank settlement of Beit Hagai.
A year ago, religious extremists detonated a pipe bomb at the front door of the distinguished Israeli historian Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a longtime campaigner against Jewish settlement of the West Bank.
How far would such people go if Israel ever moved to evacuate the West Bank and start evacuating settlements?
When I asked Begin if he was concerned about the fusion of religion and politics in the settler movement, he simply dodged the question.
His bottom line was that because Jews have a strong historic link to the land of West Bank, they have a perpetual right to live there.
As Begin indicated in his earlier blessing of Saudi Arabia – an Islamic monarchy that is one of the world’s most repressive regimes – the fusion of religion and politics is not his real concern.
What Begin really demands of movements like Hezbollah, and countries such as Iran, is obedience. An unswerving commitment to the West’s geopolitical strategic vision.
If secular moderates were what politicians like Begin were looking for, then the one person they might embrace is Salam Fayyad, the Western-educated former World Bank economist who is now the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister.
But instead of moving to strengthen Fayyad and set the course towards a just and peaceful resolution to the conflict, the Netanyahu Government prefers to weaken the Palestinian Authority by encouraging more settlements, and maintaining the restrictions that make the occupation intolerable for Palestinians.
Two days after Begin appeared before the foreign media in Jerusalem, Salam Fayyad did the same at the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah.
Time and again Fayyad repeated his affirmation of the pro-Western mantra of rejecting armed resistance as the only way to achieve the goals of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state.
But as the recent weeks of rioting across East Jerusalem, and the bitter backlash against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ mishandling of the Goldstone Report suggests, the grass roots of Palestinian society seem to have reserved their perceived right to use armed resistance to achieve their national goals.
Ignoring the effects of 42 years of military occupation with specious arguments about religious extremism is a good way to prolong the Israel-Palestinian conflict, not end it.
Horses for Hutterites
Posted by Unmasker in Uncategorized on October 15th, 2009
Alberta Hutterites lose bid for second hearing over photo ID
(CP)
OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada will not let a group of Alberta Hutterites re-argue their case against photo drivers licences.
The high court gives no reasons for refusing the appeal, but such a second chance is rarely granted. The Hutterites went to court after the province required in 2003 that all licence holders be photographed for a provincial facial recognition data bank.
They said the requirement violated their religious beliefs and their rights under the charter.
The high court agreed that the requirement is an infringement, but said it’s a reasonable one and thus is allowed.
The religious group then sought permission to re-argue the case.
The province tried to accommodate the Hutterites, offering to leave the photo off the licence itself, while requiring a picture for the data bank.
They rejected that, saying their beliefs prohibit them from voluntarily having their pictures taken.
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