Boreal

Little Mosque On The Prairie

The Archdeacon’s Visit

The Unkindness Cut Of All

Call me irresponsible - call me unreliable

Throw in undependable too

Do my foolish alibis bore you

Well I'm not too clever …

Call Me Irresponsible

An old Frank Sinatra tune by

Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen

An associated press story from last week described a treatment for AIDS by President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, an obviously self-thought, part-time practitioner of the medical arts this way:

From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia’s president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eye in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the ribcage of the patient, a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.

Both the real “witch doctor” described in the Associated Press Story and the fictitious witch doctor in Little Mosque on the Prairie – no, not doctor Rayyan, who will ask a man to get naked as part of her physical examination while keeping her chador tightly wrapped around her face and neck, out of modesty – but Fatima Dinssa.

The CBC describes the owner and operator of Fatima's Café as the “no-nonsense (really!!!) Canadian-Muslin from Nigeria”. Both Fatima and the President of Gambia use a green herbal paste to cure their patient of whatever ails them.

The CBC also has something in common with President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia: they are both irresponsible, unreliable and undependable too.

One of the biggest problem in dealing with AIDS in Africa is ignorance about the disease and its treatment. And what does CBC do in The Archdeacon’s Visit but celebrate that ignorance by promoting tribal, nonsense cures for serious ailments, while denigrating modern medicine.

Bin Laden, if he managed to catch this week episode, while busy potting the destruction of the decadent West, would have been pleased. He is a Wahabi Muslim. They reject most innovations occurring after the 3rd century of Islam as being inspired by the devil.

Who would have thought that writers of the Little Mosque harboured such sentiments, and that the CBC would celebrate them on national TV.

The Archdeacon’s Visit continues the Little Mosque tradition of tasteless jokes at the expense of other religions. I would not object to any of these jokes, if the Little Mosque on the Prairie was as tasteless, as uninformed or as ruthless when it comes to jokes about Islamic rituals and beliefs as it is about those of Christianity. It’s the hypocrisy and cowardliness of the CBC that I find so reprehensible.

This week it’s jokes about smells you might find in a Christian church, the Host, the Eucharist and the Anglican church etc. The writers were obviously on a roll here.

The character Yasir Hamoudi, while listening to his wife, a former Christian explain Anglican rituals that are meant to remind Christians about the ultimate sacrifice that Jesus performed on their behalf complains that his seat smells. "Is that why they call it a pew," he asks. A distracted Sarah Hamoudi then proceeds to treat the Host as if it was finger food, which leads to an even more tasteless joke where the character Fatima compares portions of the Eucharist to cannibalism.

The most tasteless and reprehensible joke of them all, however, has to be when the Archdiocese, in the person of the Archdeacon, is compared to a “criminal enterprise” – and a totalitarian criminal enterprise at that. This is the scene where the Archdeacon asks for a cut of the rent the Muslims are paying to use the church as a place of worship. Isn’t that what Allah said that Jews and Christians would do.

9:34 O believers, many of the rabbis and monks devour the property of the people unjustly and bar others from the Path of Allah. Those who hoard gold and silver and do not spend them in Allah’s Path, announce to them a very painful punishment.

For which they will pay dearly.

9:35 On the Day when all that will heated in the Fire of Hell, and their foreheads, sides and backs will be branded with it. This is what you hoarded for yourselves; taste now what you used to hoard.

The greatest disparity in wealth between the haves and the haves not for the followers of any religion has to be Islam.

I know of no other religion where you have billionaire Sheiks and Princes on the Sunni side of the Sunni/Shi’a religious divide, and billionaires among multi-millionaire Ayatollahs, with the majority of the world’s Muslims living at or below the so-called poverty line (a condition more often than not they blame on the West).

This poverty is particularly striking since charity is one of the five pillars of Islam (the other being declaring allegiance to God; daily prayers; month-long fasting; the pilgrimage to Mecca).

Every Muslim is required to give a portion of his yearly income to charitable works. In Shia’s Islam that money is usually given to the Ayatollahs for distribution to the poor. In Iran this has made many Ayatollahs filthy rich. With this wealth they not only maintain private militias, but are also able to control much of the economy by using their wealth and influence to get themselves appointed to head what we in Canada call Crown Corporations. As head of these corporations, which manage large sectors of the Iranian economy (oil and gas being the most obvious), they are able to siphon off even more funds into clerical coffers.

It is disingenuous of the CBC to suggest that Christian churches are into siphoning money from their congregations for their own benefits, as the Ayatollahs are known to do, and to use taxpayer dollars to spread this slander.

The CBC's suggestion that the Anglican Church is less than honest and totalitarian has to be particularly insulting to Protestants, considering that their movement began as a protest against the totalitarian Catholic Church’s questionable fundraising practices such as the sale of indulgences.

Bernard Payeur