When he was running as a candidate in the fall 2008 elections, several bloggers commented on the background of Conservative MP Peter Kent, now Minister of State for the Americas. Kent was revealed to be a senior member of the neoconservative outfit Canadian Coalition for Democracies. Wrote Dr. Dawg:
It’s a group that appears to enjoy fomenting anti-Muslim hysteria. The organization even sucked in that indefatigable anti-Muslim campaigner and promoter of campus snitch lines, Daniel Pipes. Pipes was forced to retract comments he made about Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, which had been based upon misinformation received from CCD. (Pipes refers in his screed to Ezra Levant’s further smears of Alghabra, which I dealt with some time ago, and makes additional defamatory remarks that need not concern us here.)
CCD’s legal counsel has been none other than David Harris, whose inflammatory anti-Muslim commentary is notorious in its own right, and who has recently been fussing out loud about “out-of-control immigration.”Harris was in the news last year making some credulous public comments about a hilariously silly “bugged money” story emanating from the US Defence Security Service.
Dr. Dawg’s analysis prompted Buckets at Bouquets of Gray to point out that Kent’s Coalition was one of the supporting organizations in a bid to get Chief Justice Beverley Maclaughlin removed from the committee which gave Henry Morgentaler his Order of Canada - and to ask “whether Peter Kent… had anything to do with this ridiculous charade.”
The Canadian Coalition for Democracies Forum is dominated by the far right, the JDL (the Jewish Defence League) and those that support the demonization of Islam. Having said that, a few good contributors continue to provide moderate and intelligent debate, but I stress - a few.
Unfortunately the forum administration obviously supports those radical elements that make the forum almost worthless.
Recently I joined the forum to basically gauge the feelings of the far-right, learn from those intelligent posters and point out blatant untruths and errors spouted on the forum, particularly about the Islam and the Muslim World. I am a westerner, a former diplomat and a liberal Sunni Muslim since the age of 17. I have chosen to live in Morocco.
What is very interesting and sad is the immediate hostilities put towards me in my entering the forum, with verbal abuse and accussations of sinister plottings.
What I found is that the forum was usurped by those radicals and agenda based groups and for others became a form of theraputic “slander-feast” against Muslims and Islam in general and over time growing more and more hate-filled and factually incorrect. They certainly hated it that someone joined the forum and pointed out all the errors and bigotted crap - even more that it was from a Muslim and since that Muslm was a liberal and western-born they could only defend their hate with personalized attacks.
Eventually, the administration found an excuse to block my postings and interestingly did not announce it to the forum. The Admin accussed me of something and gave me no chance to give the simple explanation and proof of the rediculous “excuse” that the Admin chose because of the block.
At least for the last few weeks the forum is down, I hope for good and perhaps now is the time for CCD itself to rethink its connection with the radical far-right and actually follow its actual mission statement which in itself is commendable.
DHH
Marrakech
DHH,
Thanks for reading and commenting!
While the mission may be commendable, the CCD often seems quite caught up in being anti-Islamic. As the blog post quoted here suggests, Omar Alghabra was subjected to a particularly bizarre attack when the organization falsely attributed to him various “Islamist” statements after he won his nomination.
I appreciate you sharing your experiences in such depth as the purpose of this website is to gather people’s stories and research about religious right organizations in Canada, and you have shared an important perspective.
I was researching this organization myself recently, and was surprised to see the forums had seemingly vanished. If they come back up, I hope to keep an eye on them now and again.