Canadian Muslim Group Invites Al-Zarqawi Supporter as Speaker

Well, I see my colleague Mohamed Elmasry is at it again.

Elmasry, you may remember, is the Electrical and Computer Engineering professor who claimed that Israeli citizens were fair game:

COREN: So everyone in Israel and anyone and everyone in Israel, irrespective of gender, over the age of 18 is a valid target?

ELMASRY: Yes, I would say.

Elmasry later apologized for his remark.

Now, in his role as "Chair and National President" of the Canadian Islamic Congress, he's bringing Al-Zarqawi supporter and general froot loop Yvonne Ridley to speak in Montreal, Toronto, and Waterloo. Yes, that's certainly the way to improve relations with the Jewish community.

A convert to Islam, Ridley has urged British Muslims not to cooperate with the police and has been an apologist for both Al-Zarqawi and a Chechen terrorist involved in the Moscow theater hostage crisis.

Recently she has blustered that "However if any of those Zionist idiots continue to try and paint me as an anti-semite I must warn you ... one of my closest friends is one of Britain's best defamation lawyers." Let's see, the last British journalist that blustered about libel in the same way was David Irving... and that didn't work out so well for him, did it?

In response to accusations of anti-Semitism, Ridley writes "Well a semite is a person who can be an Arab or a Jew ... hmm, so these dingbats are accusing me of hating the entire Jewish and Arab world?" Except that, as Robert Wistrich points out in Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, "`Antisemitism' is a problematic term, first invented in the 1870s by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr to describe the `non-confessional' hatred of Jews and Judaism which he and others like him advocated... `Antisemitism' -- a term which came into general use as part of this politically motivated anti-Jewish campaign of the 1880s -- was never directed against `Semites' as such.... ...As a result, for the last hundred years, the illogical term `antisemitism', which never really meant hatred of `Semites' (for example, Arabs) at all, but rather hatred of Jews, has come to be accepted in general usage as denoting all forms of hostility towards Jews and Judaism throughout history."

I don't like the fact that B'nai Brith "would have supported" a ban of Ridley from Canada. By all means, let the attention-seeking froot loop speak. Her own words demonstrate her intellectual bankruptcy and the dangers of mixing religion with politics.