A rchive Date
[ 07-01-2020 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/furey-the-soleimani-killing-exposes-problems-at-home-here-in-canada
The Soleimani killing exposes problems at home here in Canada
Anthony Furey
Published: January 6, 2020
There’s a longstanding and wrongheaded tendency here in Canada to view entire diaspora communities as one and united. For years we’ve become accustomed to reading news stories that reference, for example, the “Chinese community” or the “Muslim community”.
Sometimes the reports will be about cultural or religious celebrations that have little political angles to them. Other times, it will be about the political scene back in “the old country”.
It’s in the latter where this false and offensive narrative of the monolithic ethnic community quickly falls apart. And there is no better example of that than in the reactions to the recent U.S. airstrikes that killed Iranian government terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani.
Some may have quickly asked after the strikes: How does the “Iranian community” in Canada feel about this news? But to answer that question, you first have to unpack the complexities that come with that term.
There are many people who come to Canada because they were horrified by what their country had become, by the troubling regimes and ideologies that had come to power and they see Canada and Canadian values as a refuge from that turmoil.
Iran is one such place, where people fled the country in the years following the upheavals of 1979, a period that quickly turned the previously liberal country into the draconian Islamic Republic that it now is and continues to be if only because of the internal repression they wage against their own people.
For years, thousands of political dissidents have been executed by the state and continue to be held in the regime’s notoriously brutal Evin Prison.
But the Ayatollahs were not satisfied with conducting terror within and so insisted upon exporting their extremism around the region. This was the sinister task of Soleimani’s Qods Force – a designated terrorist organization here in Canada.
The American airstrikes against Soleimani were not acts of aggression. They were responses to repeated acts of aggression. The ledger is now returning to balance and it is up to the Iranian regime, if they dare, to escalate the situation further.
For years now, Iranian-Canadian dissidents have been speaking out against the regime that has terrorized them, their families and the Iranian people. Imagine then their reaction at seeing people taking to the streets in Toronto and other cities to not just oppose the U.S. airstrikes but to mourn Soleimani as a hero.
First, there were the useful idiots who took to the streets in front of the U.S. Consulate in Toronto for a “no war on Iran” protest over the weekend. 1) The U.S. is not threatening war, 2) If these activists are so opposed to war on principle, where were their protests against Iran on the many occasions the regime waged its own conflicts?
More troubling was the mournful vigil honouring Soleimani that took place later in the evening. The Mahdi Youth Society, part of Pickering’s Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre, posted to social media that they would hold “a candlelight vigil to mourn the loss of the heroes of Islam”.
They took down the posts after I drew attention to them online, but that didn’t stop dozens of people showing up and even erecting a shrine to this leader of a designated terrorist organization. It’s unclear how many of the attendees were even Iranian, as the Al-Mahdi website describes its growing community – they’ve successfully raised funds to build a new and larger centre – consisting of people from “Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Africa, India and Pakistan.”
The truth is there’s no such thing as the “Iranian community” in Canada in any monolithic way. What there are though are those good people of Iranian descent who stand against extremism and in support of liberty and democracy. These are the people all Canadians should be siding with and shame on those who in their ignorance have instead picked the Soleimani worshippers
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