Free Republic

Tarek Fatah: Islamists who have a problem with free speech should leave June 10, 2008 Tarek Fatah When Mohamed Elmasry declared a few years ago that there was more press freedom in Egypt than in Canada, it took me some time and effort to lift my jaw up from the floor. However, since then I have become accustomed to the outlandish statements and claims of the good science professor from Egypt. Now, he has managed to pass on his rare talents to his political apprentice Khurrum Awan. An Islamist law student, known for his exaggerated and forced sense of victimhood,...

The charge levelled against Maclean's by the Canadian Islamic Congress is that, in publishing an excerpt from my book, this magazine exposed Muslims to "hatred and contempt." Alas, at the first day of the Great Maclean's Show Trial at the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal, the well of my book excerpt's "hatred and contempt" pretty well ran dry in the first hour. So Faisal Joseph, counsel for the plaintiff Mohamed Elmasry, was forced to bus in a huge pile of miscellaneous generic "hatred and contempt" from all kinds of other sources. And even then much of it seemed less like...

Today the US Treasury designated three entities as financiers of terrorism under Executive Order 13224 and will ask the United Nations to add these names to the list of those whose assets must be blocked by all member nations under UNSCR 1390. The financial accounts of the principal entity, Benevolence International Foundation, were blocked pending investigation in December 2001. The three closely linked but separately incorporated entities designated today are Benevolence International Foundation, Benevolence International Fund (Canada), Bosanska Idealna Futura (Bosnia), and their branch offices. “UN designation of these financiers of terror will cut off their access to the global...

"... hateful, inflammatory and unworthy of a respected large circulation daily newspaper..."These were the words of Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, in a complaint filed with the Ontario Press Council earlier this year. The complaint was directed towards a column in the Toronto Star — which I wrote — after Israel's targeted assassination last March of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, the terrorist organization he co-founded at the start of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. And these are Elmasry's words, during a discussion of terrorism on The...