Letter from a Kabyle man in Quebec.
Besma TV is one of many tools currently being used to form a community of North African believers. I think this TV, which only exists online, has stopped broadcasting. It’s a TV that deceives and tricks people into thinking it has a large audience. It was basically a conservative, reactionary and pro-fundamentalist Arab Muslim TV. To fool people into believing that North Africans are strongly religious, fast in Ramadan and are very communitarian, they film fanatics at the exits of mosques. The attempt to unite all North Africans in a congress was also a flop (http://www.congresmaghrebins.ca/) before it gained a single member. The dispute between Algerians and Moroccans over leadership has torpedoed the project. Koranic schools and mosques also became empty. I know of a school in Montreal sponsored by government funds from Algeria and Quebec that has only 17 students in four levels. Another, housed in a mosque, has only 22 students.
The most amusing happened in Granby where the Algerian consulate and the local mosque (Moroccan) had identified 150 Arab-Muslim families (understanding North Africans) out of a total of 617 children. 513 of them were under the age of 5. Probably they used the consulate registers and telephone directory. Moroccan Islamists have opened an Arabic and Islamisation school in the mosque (pompously called Islamic Cultural Centre http://www.ccigranby.org/aliman.html . It accepts 29 children, a good number of whom are Asians or Africans. Hamas Islamists have opened a new Arabic and Islamisation school in the town of Granby. It accepts 30 students http://www.ambalgott.com/html/livre_gramby.html
With two of my Amazigh friends from Rif and Atlas in Morocco, we spent a day calling 150 families by addressing them in Kabyle, Rif and Amazigh. We managed to reach 122 families. Only 13 of them said they didn’t understand any of these languages.
To obtain a grant from the Quebec government, the Islamists have presented a list of 513 Arab-Muslim children whose parents are eager for their children to learn Arabic and the Koran.
The head of Présence Musulmane Canada (Tariq Ramadan’s Canadian chapter) also struggled to create “his” demanding and vocal Muslim community. Tariq Ramadan has made regular appearances in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto to encourage his local lieutenants and give talks to raise mayonnaise. It’s not closing yet. The Muslim Brotherhood is aware that small soldiers must be recruited from North Africa (as in Europe), but this is impossible without a ghetto area (like “drabant cities” in France or other “sensitive areas”). Subsequently, they advised North African Islamist activists to create a ghetto in the city of Montreal. The most appropriate district was Saint Michel, near Jean Talon Est street. The Arab Islamists have approached the mayor of Montreal to name this neighbourhood “Little Maghreb” (Little North Africa in Arabic). The aim is to make this designation official and public in order to attract more North Africans and gradually drive Italians, Greeks, Latin Americans, Haitians, and Vietnamese away. The first to protest to the municipality were Kabyle associations. The Italian and Greek ones followed suit. The project remained at a standstill. The Arab Islamists have realised that they are not yet strong enough and they need to create more incidents in public places and institutions, increase provocations to gain respect and above all be feared as in Europe. They will engage their grassroots activists to increase the level of conflict (Niqab incidents, scandals related to halal food in kindergartens, conflicts in municipalities, sexist conflicts in hospitals, social behaviour on the subway, graffiti on buses, prayers in university halls, the occupation of training halls for prayer in colleges, foot washing everywhere ….).
The Arab Islamists in Canada are jealous of the success their own have achieved in Europe and are eager to achieve the same “achievement”. Quebec is a good battleground for them, because social assistance is greater. The social assistance can make potential recruits more accessible. The unemployed, young people and newcomers are targeted solely because they are available. Social assistance for newcomers, double child benefits (provincial and federal), unemployment benefits for the unemployed and scholarships for apprentices all save this beautiful world of existential worries and other financial pressures that would have pushed them to find a job quickly.
In my opinion, Arab-Islamist militants will have to work ten more years on both the federal and provincial governments and the Arab-Muslim immigrants, before they reach the results achieved by their European counterparts. After trashing Europe, Tariq Ramadan thought of settling in North America to be closer to his future construction site so that he can manage it better. The Bush administration managed to read his mind and denied him a visa. With Obama, I bet he will soon find a cover job in North America.