Rob. Bredin Working with, teaching, and coaching Muslims in the Greater Toronto Area for the past couple of years now, I have come to discern a type.

Lining up to deliver the ball, at a form of pitching, in a Toronto park the other day, the group of 12-yearolds I help coach were chatting amicably with one another, and cheerfully waiting their turns, when an intense Muslim male adult stepped aggressively in and said, “No talking!” This particular sport I’ve been around for almost four decades and chatting, cheery, harmless, excited talk has never not been part of it. Sometimes, the chatter has been better than the game itself, which can be prone to tedium, even though a canny, sociable Scot like Sir John A. Macdonald, himself, named it Canada’s national game — but that was then. Now this Muslim fellow was not having it. “Don’t talk”, he ordered the boys again. Then, it was necessary for them to submit themselves. To myself, I thought you might as well instruct them not breathe while you’re at it, chief, particular on a fine evening, in summer-time, and with school out. This command of “Don’t talk” seemed to go against the very essence of play.

Several Toronto (and national) newspapers have begun to report on the full Friday mosque-observances (usually 1-1:45 p.m.) in a few Toronto elementary or middle schools. This is extraordinary, astonishing, exasperating even, especially considering the painstaking care that has been taken over the years, especially through the courts since 1988, to ban Christianity, all its symbols, all of its uplifting message, all its powerful images, and any vestiges of prayer (specifically the Lord’s Prayer) from Ontario’s public school system. And our public schools, as well as being “peanut-free,” have become essentially belief-free zones, unless the ‘belief’ happens to be the trendy faddism like the new ‘trinity’ of reducing-recycling-and re-something elsing, the ‘gospel’ of Al Gore & co., or non-competitive, harmfree, inane, cooperative activities like inter-school plastic cup stacking contests, where no one is quite sure what exactly the point was, or that anyone won.

I spent six months inside a mosque/school in 2010 which I would liken now to the fine American memoir, Two Years Before the Mast (1840), by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. “Before”, in the case of his literary masterpiece about life at sea, denoted an inferior, or more common, standing within ship’s company, or an inferior rank and status.

I had no status whatsoever amongst the Muslims, most keenly among the men. Dana became a leading American advocate in the fight for the liberty of fugitive slaves in Boston, in the supposed land of “Liberty.” What I saw inside the mosque/school was girls, young women, and women being denigrated, and rather crushed at every turn – not as slaves, but in a kind of servitude nevertheless. None was the equal of a male, no matter how young he was: at best the females were second-class citizens, sitting modestly behind the males, and almost entirely covered from head-to-toe, presumably to not inflame male desires or attract wandering eyes. Some were third-class citizens, sitting out prayers/mosque attendance (generally in a room where I did my marking) if they were menstruating; and, even fourth-class citizens, if female staff members who did not have a male in their circle protecting them, or if they were divorced. They were sexually harassed by intense men, supposed colleagues, who wore the traditional garb of the desert, in winter, in Ontario. All this was endured by the females, if alone, stoically, silently, without really being able to complain, and without talking.

“Timid” Tim Hudak’s response to the ‘discovery’ of public school mosque-activity is entirely lacking, totally inadequate for someone seeking to become premier of Ontario, which position has direct responsibility and oversight for the totality of Ontario’s publicly funded education system. He has, effectively, stated that this “is a local school board issue.” This response is a cop-out. Obviously, politically, Mr. Hudak is mindful of “Gentleman” John Tory’s electoral chances (and silver opportunity) crashing and burning in 2007, in large part over the issue of school choice. But, this Islamification of the conventional school day is entirely different and most certainly not merely a local school board issue. It is the thickening edge of a wedge. Only Ms. Horwath, of the provincial NDP, has come out openly against school hour, in-school and in-cafeteria Islamic prayer hours in our shared public schools, ground-zero of neutral Canadian citizenship.

There are now over 50 private — or “independent” — Muslim schools operating across the GTA. I have entertained leading figures in the development of these schools — some of them have to be given with inverted commas as ‘schools’ — and as they relax, these men allow that there is a self-ghettoizing spirit abroad in many of them, and a creed that can be found of — in these men’s words — “of hate thy neighbour.” Odd that, really, considering the ridiculous levels of poverty that many of these people have sought refuge from to come here, to generally prosperous, caring and sharing Ontario.

The old Orton, union schoolhouse has been my family’s ‘cottage’ since 1977, and is, in the classic Ontarian-style, graced with dual front entranceways, one for girls, one for boys, that the cloakrooms could be chaste and modest places during their era of use. Our public schools are now, in the main, chock-a-block with immodestly dressed and comported youth; however, as a constant in Ontario, girls have always been respected as the equals, and even the better, of boys, in intellectual and other scholastic pursuits.

Long has been the haul for girls and women society-wide to attain equality here; but, they have done so effectively, in quiet triumph, and justly. All this progress, however, is increasingly jettisoned in the name of “political correctness” and “tolerance” — which are actually fear and cowardice, masqueradingly, deceivingly, bullyingly, dressed as a ‘virtues’ — that newcomers and their “customs” may not take offence, may not seek legal redress which is the sort of thing that makes modern educators cower. Mainstream and principled opposition is essentially told, “Don’t Talk.” And, even submit.

It may take Ms. Horwath, to stand up for Ontarians now and to say, “Enough is enough”, and that all the slights and put-downs toward females, and the wrongs done them taken together, cannot make even one right.