Toronto: Only Muslims allowed in cafeteria on Fridays -- prayer service in "public" school

wellington: both of your points are correct. however the second comment has a lot more to do with it.
m

Your sentence, "Islam is quite a creeping darkness all over the globe right now," is an extra fine one indeed. It's succinct, beautifully said and keenly accurate. My compliments. It warmed my heart to read it.

Every Friday my daughter's school cafeteria changes into a mosque as dozens of Muslim boys and their imams (Islamic preachers) lead Islamic ritual prayers and no one else can even walk through the cafeteria.
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"No one else can even walk through the cafeteria"—that's because they don't want their "mosque" defiled by filthy Kaffirs.

Also—"dozens of Muslim *boys*" [emphasis mine—GI] It appears they are not only showing religious discrimination in the Toronto schools, but gender discrimination, as well. Unless, of course, there are "dozens of Muslim boys" but, mysteriously, not a single Muslim girl attending this school...sarc/off

I suppose this sort of discrimination is OK—because it's Halal in Islam...

miriam rove wrote:

wellington: both of your points are correct. however the second comment has a lot more to do with it.
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Well, miriam...it has a lot more to do with *this specific case*—since Canada in general and Toronto in particular are not majority-Muslim. But since the Muslim goal is to turn everywhere on earth into a part of Dar-al-Islam, I'd say Wellington was right on both counts.

Ah, I see Minnesota on the frontiers of Islam's march in our country. Congrats(sarc.) to Minnesotans to join with the enemy -- they will be amply rewarded when Somali Muslims take over Minnesota!!

APF, sure know now why you're alarmed. Hope we can spread the word on dhimmi Pawlenti. Things are getting bad in a shocking hurry, as GB is stressing.

I'm an alarmed PB lover, both kinds, personally. (For the public, pork belly and peanut butter, not together, OK? And do your homework, look up pork belly products. Pork products are incredible mild, healthy protein, often very lean, amenable to a wide variety of prep. methods.)

I'm getting personally very disturbed by the general public's absolute apathy, and absolute sheer stupidity, in America and everywhere in the West.

The matter of the extreme, total, complete, danger to total freedom, and the absolute antithesis of islam to the historic Western fundamentals of life and philosophy of freedom, and progress of all kinds, all of which is absolutely not possible with islam, is paramount to get out to the majority.

Somehow we must determine an effective way to increase our leverage.

VJ:

Please don't summon the Devil like that (with your final word).

This legal summary is horrifying. The depravity of Canadian law vis a vis "hate offenses" is codified fascism.

It is unacceptable that a purportedly free Western nation would take these laws and weave them into a noose around their own necks and say, "What a good boy I am!"

The good pastor was "promoting hate" a.k.a. warning Canadians about Muslim infiltration BEFORE 9/11. Think he felt justified while he was sitting in jail at the behest of his people's government?

He should have support.

Thanks for your ref to the article by Eric Roher, well known Toronto lawyer who specializes in Education law. The same article, speaking about limitation to religious accommodation, states:

"It should be recognized that there are limits to a school boards' ability to provide religious accommodation. The school board will limit practices or behaviour in its schools which put public safety, health or the human rights and freedoms of others at risk. In addition, the school board will limit practices and behaviours in its schools that are in contravention of other school policies."

Monopolizing the cafeteria and excluding the minority students (non Muslims) for prayer that is completely outside of the school curriculum might be seen as contravention,or infringement of the minority students' rights.

You are welcome SISSAC.

What you say is possible. As I stated previously, a really good lawyer may be able to take this practice apart in a court of law.

The issue about the prayers being outside the school curriculum will not fly with any court because the provisions in law we are discussing actually apply to activities outside of the school's curriculum. The idea of the law is to accommodate non-curriculum religious activity within school hours.

In fact, if the activity was part of the school curriculum meaning as part of a class, then prayer might be illegal due to the freedom of religion clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It might be seen as the equivalent of the morning and ceremonial prayers I discussed in my original posting.

There is one specific exception to all of this, and Roher's article handled it.

With respect to Catholic schools, it is recognized that the Catholic school system gives pre-eminence to the tenets of the Catholic faith, consistent with the protection afforded in the Human Rights Code, the Constitution Act, 1982 and the Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms.

That 'right' of the Catholic Church in education is a carry-over from the original constitution of Canada (British North America Act). There is no such right for Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus etc. to emulate the Catholic Church.

Regarding 'Monopolizing the cafeteria', that too will be a hard sell in a court of law.

If the prayers are done during Lunch Hours you are definitely right and I would suspect any decent lawyer would be able to put a stop to it through court action. In reality he probably wouldn't have to because a complaint to the principal of the school would result in a rescheduling of the prayer hour.

The real problem will be these prayer sessions are most likely held during the cafeteria 'off-hours'. If so, then the courts will probably see the venue of the prayers as a non-issue. Even the schools themselves can (and do) disallow students in the cafeteria at those times. In other words, no rights were infringed upon.

The exclusion of non-Muslims might be an interesting legal approach for an expert lawyer.

How this would play out in court might depend on what is the standard practice of mosques during prayer time. If the practice is to exclude non-Muslims during prayers then a law suit based on exclusion might be rejected but if non-Muslims are welcome to attend prayer sessions then the school mosque may be contravening the Muslim religion and therefore not qualify for religious accommodation.

There is one other route but I'm not sure Perry Mason could win the case.

As I stated in my first post, religious accommodation does not extend to religions that incite hatred or violence against other individuals or groups

The lawyer would have to prove this particular mosque was in contravention of the above requirement.

I don't think he could get away with using the Qur'an to prove this. In fact, if he tried to, the case might get dismissed quickly. Islam is a recognized religion in Canada and will be viewed as not falling into the 'violence and hatred' exclusion clause.

So, someone would have to keep tabs on the imams who conduct the prayer sessions and this person would have to document anything violent or hateful (speeches, prayers) that imam said in front of the students or to Muslims attending a regular mosque.

In other words, the lawyer would have to present the case not against Islam itself but against an individual or a group of individuals who were promoting hate and violence to the students.

Correction to the above. The worried Hindu dad did manage to get the Muslim 'prayer room' at school shut down, but by then it was too late for his son. And, one wonders, for how many others that no-one knows about, as yet.

Here's the story of the Sri Lankan Hindu lad who converted to Islam while at school, and finished up in the 'Toronto 18', plotting to take the Canadian Parliament and behead the PM. , News report originally copied and shared with us by one 'Jalandhar' from Canada, in 2008.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080808.wconvert08/BNStory/National

**How a devout Hindu teen became a stranger to his parents on trial in an alleged terror plot** {my emphasis - dda}

DAKSHANA BASCARAMURTY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
August 8, 2008 at 4:40 AM EDT

TORONTO —
A father's curiosity trumped all else on the day he decided to ransack his 15-year-old son's room.

He swept through the young man's desk, shelf and closet in the family's Scarborough apartment, silently praying his suspicions wouldn't be confirmed.

The smoking gun he found that day wasn't a girlie magazine or sandwich bag filled with marijuana, but a copy of the Koran on a CD-ROM.

At the time, the devout Hindu thought he'd been struck with the worst kind of parental disappointment.

But five years later, after spending $30 a day driving to and from a courthouse in Brampton to watch his son go through Canada's first terrorism trial, he has endured a worse fate - the experience of losing his son.

Although he has sat just 10 or so metres away in court from the young man, now 20, a religious gulf separates them.


In recent interviews with Muslim mentors, including an imam the young man clandestinely visited, and with his father, who believes his son was brainwashed, there emerges a picture of a muddled young man caught in an intense tug of war.

On one side, he seeks to please his strict, sometimes harshly disciplinarian father and on the other, to follow his own flawed {sic: actually, perfectly orthodox - dda} interpretation of Islam.

His religious guides - at least the ones who aren't his co-accused in the so-called Toronto 18 - agreed he was ignorant of Islam {suuure - this is nothing but damage control - dda}

"He's a kid who doesn't know very much, if at all, about the religion," {RUBBISH! This is taqiyya – they’re covering their a**es - dda} said Muhammad Robert Heft {observe: *another* dangerous convert to Islam - dda}, who was approached by the young man at Paradise For Ever, a non-profit centre he runs in Toronto for recent Muslim converts.

Mr. Heft was even more dismissive of the suggestion that the young man could be a terrorist. "I think if you ask the real terrorists in the world, they'd feel insulted, that he was nothing more than a Mickey Mouse kid who was venting some of his frustrations and talking," he said. {Pull the other leg, Mr Heft, it's got bells on - dda}

At an alleged terrorist training camp in December, 2005, the young man peppered RCMP mole Mubin Shaikh with questions about Islam, but Mr. Shaikh testified later that they "never ... indicated to me any reflective thought."

Raised in the Hindu faith in Scarborough, where ethnic grocery stores stack bags of cassava chips alongside brass statues of Hindu deity Lord Ganesha, the teenager made a transition to Islam that was unexpected and tumultuous.

After emigrating from war-torn Sri Lanka in 1994, the family of deeply devoted Hindus made weekly trips to local Hindu temples, said the young man's father.

**The first sign his son was drifting away from the faith was when the school principal called, telling him his son had been asking to use the Muslim prayer room in the school.** {my emphasis - dda}

The father was baffled: Each week his son followed the family to temple, a place teeming with people kneeling before the statues of deities and spreading holy ash across their foreheads. The school principal was surely mistaken, he thought. But then he searched his son's room.

When he found a CD-ROM version of the Koran, he warned the then-15-year-old to stay away from his Muslim classmates.

"By force they were taking him," the father said in a mix of Tamil and English, a translator at his side. "At that time itself I would've alerted police and he would've been saved."
But the young man's younger sister - the only family member the father said his son acknowledges in court - sympathizes with him.
"I think he was searching for God. He was confused, I guess," she said. "My parents don't understand. It's his decision ... I just wanted him to be careful."

The young man's father persuaded the principal to seal off the prayer room, thinking that once the meeting place disappeared, so would the conversion process.

But that only made his son seek out a new hangout: the Salaheddin Islamic Centre.

It was here that an imam at the mosque, Aly Hindy, said the young man got to know many of his co-accused in the Toronto 18, including the alleged ringleader.

Mr. Heft of Paradise For Ever said the young man seemed more attracted to a group he could vent about his father to, rather than one that would train him in the religion. "He was surrounding himself with people who had never read the Koran cover to cover, who don't know Arabic, who don't know very basic minimal things about Islam." {Oh suuure - dda}.

The father's patience was drained after he found Islamic literature stored among textbooks in his son's school locker and watched his religious observance manifest itself in a long, coarse beard.

The quiet young man wandered into Paradise For Ever at 15, seeking refuge at the organization's emergency shelter and claiming he was abused at home, Mr. Heft said.
"He was complaining that his parents were beating him up because he was a Muslim ... that he had to pray in the bathroom." Mr. Heft could not allow him entrance, since visitors must be at least 16 to stay at the shelter.

The young man also visited Mr. Hindy at Salaheddin.

Kneading his forehead in his hands, the young man's father admitted in an interview that he had beat his son, explaining that he believed it was the only form of discipline left.

At 17, the young man dropped out of school and left his parents' apartment for three to four weeks without a word, the father said. Although old enough to stay under Paradise For Ever's roof and take daily lessons on Islam, he instead fled to a Toronto mosque, where his family found him.

His father pleaded with him to return home, but he refused.

It was that December that he attended an alleged terrorist training camp near Washago, Ont.

During target practice at the camp, the young man unflinchingly fired at pictures of Hindu deities, a bold move to prove to the others he was committed to Islam, Mr. Shaikh, the RCMP informant, said in court. "[What] I told him was, 'Go home. Go to your parents,' " he said.

In January, 2006, the family finally coaxed the young man to return home.

In a last-ditch effort to draw his son away from what he saw as a dangerous brand of spirituality, the father brought Hindu priests, Christian pastors and other religious leaders to the apartment to counsel his son. The young man dismissed them all: "Everything you're saying is a lie."

The turning point came later that year, in early June.

Two weeks after attending another alleged terrorist training camp, the young man was arrested in the spectacular finale to a long RCMP and CSIS investigation that rounded up 17 other suspects, 11 of whom still face charges.

The young man spent months in custody, and his religious conviction appeared to wane - or so his father thought. After he bailed him out of jail, it seemed as if a fruitful new father-son relationship was being born, the father said.

While shopping around for a house a short while after the young man had returned home, the family stumbled upon one in Markham that seemed worthy of a serious offer. But after noting that it was right beside a mosque, the young man vetoed it.
"He ran back to the car and said, 'I don't want to live there any more,' " the father said.

But according to Mr. Hindy, the young man had only hidden his faith.

He secretly visited the Salaheddin mosque every week, peppering the imam with questions. "Sometimes he'd run away fast because he said, 'I don't want my father to find out I went to Friday prayer,' " Mr. Hindy said.

The seeming grace period at home unravelled as the months passed and this summer's trial date neared.

By April of this year, it seemed as if a stranger had moved in. The young man appeared to be stitching together his own rules for living from literal translations of the Koran.

After reading about how the Prophet Abraham circumcised himself at the age of eight, the young man wanted to emulate him.
"He said he wanted to circumcise himself. I said, 'Are you crazy?' " Mr. Hindy said. "If I open a book in medicine, I can't do surgery."

He told the young man to consult a doctor about the procedure, which the young man's father said his son was serious about. Eventually, any form of communication with his son became an ordeal.

"He was almost mad-like. ... He would go into the closet and sit down like this," he said, closing his eyes, a blank expression setting in over his face. "I'd say, 'Put on the TV,' and he'd say, 'No, everything's corrupt on TV.' "

His parents had spent $3,000 on brand-name clothing to win their son's favour after his release from custody. One day they came home to find a mountain of shredded fabric and their son beside it, tearing through shirts and pants with a pair of scissors.

After several months at home, the young man was reduced to a gaunt version of his former self, declaring that most of the food was not halal. He even turned away water, his father said.

In that last 1½months in his parents' custody, life was bleak. "He said, 'I want to kill myself, I want to kill myself,' " his father said.

At his son's preliminary hearing on May 6, the young man tried to walk out on his own trial. "I want myself out of this," he said. "...This is not sharia court, that's the problem."

He was rearrested and taken to Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton where he has since remained.

Disturbed by news reports of what happened that day, Mr. Hindy spent 45 minutes with the young man in jail, urging him to return to court, explaining that Canadian law and Islamic law were not contradictory. While the young man has remained in custody for three months, he has been co-operative in court, acknowledging the judge, but ignoring his father.

His father said that, during clipped phone conversations every two or three weeks, the young man tells his family that he doesn't call more often because he doesn't want to burden them with collect-call fees.

Mr. Hindy said he has become a stand-in parental figure and religious tutor for the young man, guiding him on the phone every two or three days. If the young man is acquitted, he plans to move into an apartment with his sisters, Mr. Hindy said.

Although the young man's father said he understands that his home may not be the right place for his son, he won't give up on him. His plan is to send his son, if acquitted, to England to live with his brother.

"He's an innocent kid," the father said. "He was cheated, he was forced."

{Not quite. Seduced...by the Mohammedan mob. And one wonders whether and when the boy found out that if he *did* try to leave his new faith, he could be executed..- dda}.

- Posted by: Jalandhar at September 25, 2008 6:01 PM