What's the Canadian Islamic Congress doing for Halloween?

What's the Canadian Islamic Congress doing for Halloween?

That's not a sentence that I thought I'd ever write, though it does lend itself to a few obvious jokes about what costumes their president for life, Mohamed Elmasry, would choose to wear, and whether they would make him more or less scary than he is when he's being himself.

Elmasry, readers will recall, is famous for two things: appearing on Michael Coren's TV show to declare that all adult Israelis are a legitimate target for terrorist attacks, and for filing a "human rights" complaint (three of them, actually) against Maclean's magazine for publishing a book excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone. Here's an essay I wrote about the great man for the National Post, before he launched his fatwa against Maclean's.

Well, news comes from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs that Zijad Delic, the Canadian Islamic Congress's executive director and Elmasry's right hand man, will be giving a lecture at Foreign Affairs' headquarters in Ottawa. That's right: the Jew-hating, terrorist-condoning Canadian Islamic Congress will be lecturing Canadian diplomats and bureaucrats, on government property and the taxpayers' dime.

I can hardly wait to hear the reviews from Delic's talk. Will he start off with a defence of Saudi-style censorship, as he did in this article? Or will he skip straight to the good stuff, such as the CIC's praise for Iran's Mahmoud Ahamdinejad and his nuclear ambitions? I hope Canada's diplomats are taking notes!

Here's a copy of the memo sent out to all staff at DFAIT headquarters earlier this week.

Administrative Notices

Islamic History Month Canada: Presentation on the Canadian Muslim Community  

From: Stewart Beck, Assistant Deputy Minister, International Business Development, Investment and Innovation (BFM) and DFAIT Visible Minorities Champion and Jim Nickel,Director, Muslim Communities Working Group (FMCG)

To: All Employees at Headquarters
Date: 2008-10-27

Summary: On October 31, 2008, the Muslim Communities Working Group and the Visible Minorities Committee at Foreign Affairs and International Trade will host a presentation on the Canadian Muslim Community in celebration of Islamic History Month Canada in the Cadieux Auditorium from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In celebration of Islamic History Month Canada, the Muslim Communities Working Group (FMCG) and the Visible Minorities Committee at Foreign Affairs and International Trade ( VMC@DFAIT ) are hosting a discussion on "The Canadian Muslim Community: A Comparison of the Situation of Muslims in Canada, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and France" with Imam Dr. Zijad Delic, the Ontario Chair of Islamic History Month Canada. It will be held in the Cadieux Auditorium from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Friday, October 31, 2008 and will also feature a small display on Islamic history in the Skelton Lobby.

Imam Dr. Zijad Delic was born in Bosnia and has studied in Pakistan, the United States and Canada, obtaining his PhD from Simon Fraser University. From 1995 to 2006, Dr. Delic held a range of leadership positions within the BC Muslim Association. For the past six years, he has also worked extensively as a consultant to all three levels of government, as well as to a number of NGOs, and has also served as Executive Director of the Canadian Islamic Congress since 2006.

We'll find out tomorrow who the new foreign minister is. Maybe he can tell us why his department has ended the government's prohibition of meeting with anti-Semitic organizations.

P.S. If any friends at Ft. Pearson can take pictures of the "small display" in the Skelton Lobby, please send them my way. I'm curious if they'll be in keeping with the Canadian Islamic Congress's version of "history" -- namely, that all was fine until the "Zionist Entity" came to wreak violence and pestilence on the world.