Pro-regressives masquerading as "progressives"

Tarek Fatah's recent article characterized mainstream Muslims as "fundamentalist Muslim groups draped themselves in 'moderate' garb." (Fatah is a member of the dwindled PMU NA board of directors.)

Lets take a look at where the pro-regressives get published these days:

The Fatah article was published in the Canadian "news"paper The National Post. This happens to be the same paper that recently published neo-con Amir Taheri's lies about Iran. And this is the same newspaper that has earned the dubious distinction of being a repeat ‘worst offender’ in its characterization of Muslims and Islam.

With its frequent use of phrases such as ‘Islamic terrorist,’ ‘Muslim militants,’ ‘Islamic fundamentalists,’ and similar wordings, the Post was found during the study period to contain more than 230% as many negative references as the average of other media examples, even when the same stories were covered by other newspapers.

And

From the beginning the Post has had a strongly conservative editorial stance, and has an editorial page featuring the writings of many prominent neo-conservatives and libertarians from the United States and Canada, including Diane Francis, Andrew Coyne, Mark Steyn and David Frum. This stance is typically mocked by those who refer to the paper as the "Fascist Post" or the "Zionist Post". A number of newspaper stands in Toronto holding the National Post for sale have been vandalized with these statements.

Given the kind of regressive politics the Progressive Muslim Union North America advocates, it is not at all surprising that they have taken the neo-cons as their not so strange bedfellows...

The Fatah article, along with the usual nonsense against mainstream Muslim organizations, is a rant against multiculturalism. Amongst other things, he says:

That is not all. If we do not reform multiculturalism to promote integration and civic secular society, we risk creating a fragmented nation, divided into 21st century religious and racial tribes, suspicious of the other and longing for the home we left behind.

It is interesting to note that this is exactly the kind of paranoid slippery slope thinking that characterizes the extreme right - that if there is not a single uniform value system, we're all doomed to becoming divided into racial tribes.

But the Pro-Regressives do not stop at this - Pamela Taylor, chair of the Progressive Muslim Union, in a gushing tribute to Fatah also expressed how the family members of the 17 accused in Canada "were wearing burqas which Tarek (like many of us) positively hates." Taylor claims that Fatah was helping the family... that maybe true... But it is a strange form of help, given his anti-Muslim rants elsewhere. And it is stranger choice of words: "positively hate" regarding the clothing that the family members were wearing.

This is the so-called "Progressive Muslim Union North America" --- their extreme rightward shift, and the use of words such as "hate" should not come as a surprise to any of us who have been following the trajectory of these individuals. But it does look like the neo-cons have found their native informants.

see also a Sunni Sister blog entry titled: Isn't It Funny:

The difference is that the racist “conservative” is a little more open about his / her views. The racist “liberal” talks a lot of talk about lifting everyone up, but it’s an equality and uplifting as defined by him / her / the dominant culture. Why are so many liberals, here and in Europe, wringing their hands over “multiculturalism,” and some now talking as though it can be reversed? Because they don’t realize that our country (the US) is by default and always has been “multicultural.” Even many European countries have had a variety of ethnic, if not racial, groups living in them for centuries.

So when liberals and others start blabbering about “rethinking multiculturalism,” what they’re really doing is betraying their discomfort with the teeming masses saying, “Yes I am!” and with the minorities challenging the way things have always been done, the way history’s always been told, and the way the rest of the world is and has been explained to Joe and Jane America.