Canada: In Arabic, ‘multiculturalism’…

…means ‘kill everyone not like us’.

[A] Calgary conference has invited Bilal Philips as the top speaker; Philips has repeatedly said homosexuals should be executed. Get the name of the conference – The Power of Unity: Islam in a MultiCultural Canada. Some unity!

And there’s a slew of other craps, too.

Munir El-Kassem, a dentist from London, Ont., wrote a column back in 2001 that condemned the West as hypocritical and defended the Taliban regime for destroying the sixth-century Buddha statues in Bamiyan…

Shaykh Hatem Alhaj recently lost his job at the Mayo Clinic because he wrote papers in support of female circumcision. He later tried to clarify his position by saying he only supports nicking the clitoris, not cutting it right off.

Butterflies and Wheels.

US: Buddhist cult expels member — to die in the desert

The rescuers had rappelled from a helicopter, swaying in the brisk April winds as they bore down on a cave 7,000 feet up in a rugged desert mountain on the edge of this rural hamlet. There had been a call for help. Inside, they found a jug with about an inch of water, browned by floating leaves and twigs. They found a woman, Christie McNally, thirsty and delirious. And they found her husband, Ian Thorson, dead.

The puzzle only deepened when the authorities realized that the couple had been expelled from a nearby Buddhist retreat in which dozens of adherents, living in rustic conditions, had pledged to meditate silently for three years, three months and three days. Their spiritual leader was a charismatic Princeton-educated monk whom some have accused of running the retreat as a cult.

NYTimes.com

“Don’t get us wrong — we’re just as loony as the other major religions.” a spokesperson for Buddhism said. “But we don’t get the chance to show it so often.”

Australia: Salvation Army for hire

…four hours of my time! Now where’s my sixty bucks?

…No job too small. Astroturfing a speciality.

 Last Tuesday, the Minchinbury arm of the Salvation Army’s Joblink service put out an unusual call: ”Hi Everyone, I have a request from someone who is willing to pay $15 per hour for people to hand-write letters in support of the Coxs Road [landowners] Master Plan at Ryde….”

Attached to the email dispatched to clients of the recruitment agency was a stack of template letters, all addressed to the council’s general manager, John Neish. For $15 an hour, writers could take up numerous guises, many professing their bona fides as concerned local residents with openings such as ”Dear John, as the mother of schoolchildren living in the Ryde neighbourhood”, ”Dear John, as an elderly and long-term resident who lives near Coxs Road” and ”Dear John, I walk on Coxs Road every day”.

SMH