Canada gets it right with veil rules

By Ezra Levant

Posted 11 hours ago

Canada's new rules forbidding women from wearing Muslim veils while being sworn in as citizens is such an obvious amendment that not even the opposition parties can muster their disapproval. Certainly not the far-left NDP.

There are few special interest groups that the NDP wouldn't favour over our own Canadian culture. But today's NDP is first and foremost a populist party of Quebec. And that is the province most frustrated with the ever-expanding definition of "reasonable accommodation."

It is not reasonable accommodation to obliterate the personal identity of a woman and to

blur the separation of mosque and state. Our liberal democracy permits people to dress as they please, but let that be in their private lives.

An oath of loyalty to our country and our Queen is not a private act that may be done behind a mask. It is a public promise, a vow that must be made for all to see — including the citizenship judge himself. Even Parliament's Shiny Pony, Justin Trudeau, knew enough to keep his mouth shut.

Trudeau learned that lesson when he denounced Jason Kenney's last move against radical Islam, a citizenship pamphlet calling honour killings "barbaric." Even a fool can

learn, and so Trudeau kept silent yesterday.

There are sputterers out there, of course, hinting that Kenney, the minister of Citizenship

and Immigration, has dark motivations of Islamophobia. Such innuendo cannot be taken seriously when leveled at the same minister who has brought annual immigration numbers to record highs, and who in the course of his business

attends mosques more frequently than most Muslims do.

No, Kenney is not an attacker of Islam, but a connoisseur of Islam — literally, one who

knows it.

Kenney knows the difference between the religion itself and a barbaric medieval cultural

custom which has muscled itself into modern life through the threats of extremist imams, usually in the pay of Saudi Arabia.

A survey of Muslim women in Paris suburbs found that three-quarters of them wear their

masks out of fear — including fear of violence.

It is not an unreasonable fear, as more than a dozen Canadian victims of so-called honour killings have learned. The prosecution of the recent quadruple homicide in Kingston — three Muslim sisters and their step-mother — suggests that the evil that demands women not show their face to strangers is a close cousin to the evil that kills those same women for doing so.

Make note of those who object to Kenney. This will be an informative moment. Make note

of the Muslim clerics who object — mark them as un-Canadian, who fail to understand that there are some non-negotiables in Canada, the equality of men and women being one.

Make note of so-called feminists who decry this decision. Don't laugh — there are some. There's an old, government-funded group of feminists called LEAF who right now are at our Supreme Court arguing for Muslim women to have the right to testify in court with their faces obscured by veils. That's the new ideal of women's liberation for LEAF — women in a cage.

Make note of those in the media who tut-tut this as intolerance. Nine out of ten of them

mock any Christian who dares utter the gentlest peep about his religion in the public square.

Their new support for Islamic medievalism isn't tolerance — it's a proxy for their own anti-Canadian, anti-Christian intolerance. Canada became a bit more free yesterday and Muslim women were the big winners.