http://www.ottawasun.com/2016/01/18/trudeaus-mosque-visit-raises-questions
Trudeau’s mosque visit raises questions
By Anthony Furey, Postmedia Network
First posted: Monday, January 18, 2016 12:07 PM EST | Updated: Monday, January 18, 2016 12:24 PM EST
Shortly after six Canadians were killed by Islamist terrorists Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a moment of silence for the deceased at a Peterborough mosque.
Either the PM doesn’t understand how awful the optics of this are or he doesn’t care. It’s hard to say which one is more worrisome.
Over the weekend, al-Qaida affiliates took hostages at a hotel in Burkina Faso, killing 28 people including six from Quebec.
They were friends and family travelling to build schools as part of a humanitarian effort.
It’s natural to assume this would garner a powerful response from our prime minister, who is our collective voice on the world stage.
But instead of political leadership, in a statement Trudeau said he was “condemning” what he called a “terrible crime” as well as being “deeply saddened by these senseless acts of violence on innocent civilians.”
This tells us how he feels as a person, but nothing about what he thinks as a leader.
If his soft statement wasn’t bad enough, the real tone deaf manoeuvre from Trudeau came Sunday morning.
The PM attended an open house at a Peterborough mosque that had been set ablaze by an arsonist back in November. Before the open house, according to his itinerary, he held a private meeting with the board members of the Kawartha Muslim Religious Association.
That’s quite the coup for the mosque - a private sit-down with the PM. And he came to them, no less.
When he later took to the podium to speak, his strongest words were not concerning the terror attack, in which six died just the day before, but for the mosque arson, in which nobody died and which took place months ago.
“I have not met a single Canadian who was not as profoundly disturbed as I was to see this kind of hate crime taking place,” he said. Back in November the PM called the mosque attack an act “of hatred and racism”.
These are far stronger words than those he used to condemn the terrorist attack. Besides, the arsonist has yet to be identified, so it’s unclear what the motives for that attack were and if Trudeau’s words were even correct.
By comparison, we know the Burkina Faso attack was an al-Qaida linked job. But Trudeau didn’t mention this in either his written statement or at the mosque.
All the six dead Canadians received on Sunday was Trudeau’s call for a moment of silence for those murdered in “a brutal attack of violent terrorism”. The lopsided optics of this whole affair certainly raise questions about the PM’s priorities.
He could have made two separate announcements. But instead he rolled them together, making the Burkina Faso statement a footnote to his pilgrimage to the mosque.
To complicate matters, the Peterborough mosque doesn’t appear to be a shining example of liberal values the PM and much of the media would have you believe.
In YouTube videos posted in 2009, entitled Marriage: Are You Ready? Shazim Khan, prior to holding his current post as imam of the Peterborough mosque, gave a lecture in which he explained it’s “a major sin” for a wife to not have sex whenever her husband wants and “there is no need for her to go out” if her husband provides for her, along with other sexist musings.
Did Trudeau and his staff know about these apparently misogynist statements?
The prime minister seems so blinded by political correctness, by a desire to appear tolerant in the eyes of the intolerant, that he has no problem visiting a mosque whose imam delivered a lecture that would likely receive an approving nod from the very people who killed Canadians only days before in the name of their religion.
