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Taliban stooge * **Comments Twitter LinkedIn Digg Buzz Email * *National Post* · Muslim Turkey doesn't allow it. Neither does Muslim Jordan. Nor Muslim Iran. Veils in the voting booth, that is. Moreover, no Muslim organization in Canada is asking for faceless voting, and some are downright opposed to it. There seems to be only one Muslim in Canada at the moment making an issue out of it. Visiting globetrotter Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who catapulted to celebrity after 11 days of captivity by the Taliban in 2001 turned her into an Islamist apologist, and who later converted to Islam, has accused Canadian politicians of Islamophobia, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of racism for voicing opposition to face-concealed voting. At a fundraising dinner for the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) in Montreal I attended last Friday, keynote speaker Ridley challenged the women in the audience to "put on a niqab" (i.e., face veil) on voting day -- an exhortation that drew a round of applause. Ridley's agenda in stirring up grievance around such a trifle is doubtless what has become her stock in trade: Nurturing Muslim revanchism and fomenting tension between Muslims and their fellow citizens. Take a closer look at the woman the CIC saw fit to honour: Like many other adult converts, Ridley went from Islamic zero to zealotry after she became a Muslim in 2003. She adopted colourful Middle Eastern garb and the hijab, issued savage denunciations of the United States, Israel and Tony Blair, and became a strident apologist for the worst of the worst of Islamist terrorists. Apart from the Islamist fringe and the far left, Ridley has lost whatever personal and professional credibility she once enjoyed. She was even fired by al-Jazeera after a brief stint for her "overly-vocal and argumentative style." She joined disgraced MP George Galloway's pro-Islamist RESPECT party in Britain, and subsequently lost three elections in a row with ever-diminishing support (6.4% in the 2005 general election). She is now reduced to shilling for Iran's oppressive regime on PRESS TV, a 24-hour news channel, and peddling endless reprisals of her Taliban adventure to the curious and uncritical. Controversy dogs her. In 2006 she outlined her viewpoint in a debate at Imperial College London as "pretty much in line with Hamas." She defended the utility of British Muslims watching videos of Iraqi insurgents beheading hostages as a necessary counterpoint to Western media propaganda. When Chechen terrorist leader Shamil Basayev, the mastermind of both the Moscow theatre hostage crisis and Beslan school massacre, was killed, Ridley opined that he had become a shaheed (i.e., martyr) whose place in paradise was now assured. Most problematic for Canadians, who appreciate that our security depends on Muslim co-operation in identifying jihadist elements amongst them, Ridley is on record counselling British Muslims "to boycott the police and refuse to co-operate with them in any way, shape or form." For this pernicious advice alone, the CIC must realize that her views are more than incompatible with Canadian values: They run dangerously counter to Canadians' national security. In addition to her obsessive Islamocentrism, Ridley's Friday night speech revealed a narcissism that has her bizarrely detached from objective reality. Particularly surreal was the sitcom-storyboard pitch of her Afghanistan adventure: Set in rubble-strewn Kabul instead of verdant Sherwood Forest, nevertheless the nostalgically backlit narrative of her sojourn with the Taliban evoked a latter day Maid Marian kidnapped by a turbaned version of Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. In Ridley's weirdly jolly, revisionist account, the Taliban come off as roguish and unsophisticated, but well-meaning idealists who accepted her rudeness, cursing and spitting with bemused tolerance: "The harder I pushed them, the nicer they were to me!" (By the Prophet's beard, what zany prank will this English spitfire Ridley think of next?!). Not a word about the Taliban's notoriously ruthless oppression of Afghans, especially women. On the contrary. "Thank God," Ridley twinkled mockingly, "I was captured by the (air quotes) 'most evil regime in the world' and not by the Americans." She spoke more respectfully of her Taliban warders than of the "happy clappy" Evangelical Christian prisoners with whom she was briefly incarcerated, whose daily prayer sessions "tortured me." Ridley closed her remarks with a wistful recollection of a previous fundraiser where she had raised thousands of pounds by waving a Hezbollah flag: "I wish I had that flag tonight." Hezbollah is a terrorist organization and officially recognized as such in Canada. And whether one approves or not, Canada is at war against the Taliban. Ridley's laundering of the latter and support for the former are, or should be, offensive to all Canadians. The CIC erred in lending its name to the odious views of this Islamist dupe. I hope its leadership will not compound the mistake by reflexively adopting the Ridley strategy of labelling legitimate opinion as Islamophobia. From now on Yvonne Ridley should be persona non grata amongst all Canadian Muslims. 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