A leading Canadian intelligence expert warned that political correctness may be stopping people from denouncing the misogyny of various Islamic groups in Canada and many parts of Europe and Great Britain.
Thomas Quiggin, who is regarded as one of Canada’s foremost experts on counterterrorism, security and intelligence, spoke to some 475 people at Chabad Flamingo in Thornhill, Ont., on Feb. 29. He discussed the attacks on women in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve, the misogynistic philosophy of Islam and the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada.
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Quiggin was introduced by Judy Feld Carr, the Canadian who spearheaded the clandestine rescue of some 3,000 Syrian Jews from the oppressive regime of Syria under the Assad family from 1972 to 2001. British-Canadian columnist, author and television talk show host Michael Coren moderated the Q-&-A session that followed the main presentation.
Quiggin expressed concern that Syrian refugees settling in Canada may not have been properly screened because there is a lack of personnel on the ground with sufficient security expertise.
He said some Muslim organizations helping to integrate the new arrivals are promoting sharia law and other Islam ideology that discourages Muslims from assimilating into Canadian society.
Such organizations may only represent a small fraction of the Muslim community, but he said there’s a tendency for the media and government to defer to Islamic leaders who are more visibly Muslim, and they therefore have disproportionate influence as spokespeople for their communities.
The focus of much of Quiggin’s presentation, however, was the institutional misogyny of Islam. He said the attacks by Muslim asylum-seekers on women in Cologne on New year’s Eve was a watershed event, because the media exposure set these attacks apart from similar violent episodes against women in other parts of Europe that had previously been ignored.
In Cologne, 1,075 criminal complaints were launched against 73 individual suspects, many of whom did not have proper identity papers, he said, noting that initially, the government and the media were reluctant to report the story.
He cited political correctness as the reason for the disparity between the women’s complaints and initial media versions that obscured the Islamic identity of the perpetrators.
The Huffington Post and Human Rights Watch both reported that only only three of the attackers were refugees, and the rest were German. Quiggin said, however, that those three men were recent refugees but the others had also been Islamic asylum-seekers.
Quiggin pointed out that similar violent attacks against women by Muslim asylum seekers had occurred in Vienna, Stockholm and Helsinki. Even though the Finnish police had prepared for the most recent attack on New Year’s, it was the “greatest amount of sexual violence they had seen at one time.”
He also spoke about a prostitution ring in Rotherham, England, which had operated from 1997 to 2010. Some 1,400 vulnerable children and adolescents between the ages of 11 and 14 had been sexually exploited by people who were predominantly of Pakistani heritage, according to the government report Quiggin cited.
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He said the authorities had downplayed the severity of the sexual abuse in Rotherham, because they were sensitive to these men’s ethnicity. “Political silence was maintained because of political correctness.”
He said it is also common for older Islamic men to be married girls as young as nine or 10, and when these people resettle in European countries they want those unions to be recognized even if they are considered illegal by the host countries.
In fact, Quiggin said, an imam in Denmark said any attempt by the government to break up such unions is an attack on the family life of Muslims.
“In radical Islam, women have no legal status or rights,” Quiggin said.