Championing Robert Mugabe

In a land of free speech like Canada anyone has the freedom to express their opinion as they will. The amazing thing is that some opinions get air time, print space, and in the process do more harm on occasion to the person expressing an unsavoury opinion than those they criticize. In the instance of the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, who complained to various Human Rights Commissions that published material critical of some Muslims who interpret Islam to suit their singular purposes was tantamount to spreading hatred of Islam, the action redounded to his discredit.

Now, in a truly absurd re-drawing of reality to suit his personal interpretation of events, historical and current, he draws attention to himself once again. And again, the conclusions he draws and the expressions he renders in solidarity with and understanding of one of the world's current brutal dictators tells us more about this man than he might wish us to know. In the process, as the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, insulting the collective intelligence of those whose interests he professes to represent.

If the community of Muslims within Canada haven't already been a trifle embarrassed and put out by Dr. Elmasry's questionable activism, they now have new material to ponder and perhaps come to the realization that they're being poorly represented. In an opinion piece published in the Montreal Gazette, Dr. Elmasry makes common cause with Robert Mugabe, yet another misunderstood, unappreciated defender of his people, his culture, his politics, his prerogatives as an original foe of British imperialism.

Clearly, Dr. Elmasry can relate to that; the Arab populations in the Middle East have long suffered under economic imperialism, and it's all the fault of Great Britain; their own leaders and monarchs and theocracies are not complicit in the signing of agreements with France, Great Britain and the United States for investing in the extraction and refining and distribution of that truly precious resource, fossil fuels. Western arrogance and depredations are responsible for the social and political backwardness of Islamic states.

According to Dr. Elmasry's reading of African history, the British hated Robert Mugabe, and that's why they knighted him, in honour of their ill regard for his intemperance in liberating Rhodesia from Great Britain's grasp. As for Mr. Mugabe's benighted land redistribution, where industrious white farmers and their black farm workers were wrenched off the land so it could be parcelled out to Mugabe supporters, then lie fallow and unproductive, it was justified. African history is not completely out of this man's sphere of knowledge, Egypt being part of Africa.

The West, Dr. Elmasri expounds, has blackened a good man's name, labelling him "a dictator, an arrogant, aging autocrat who has run the economy into the ground, fanned racial hatred and abused his power to suppress political foes, the courts and media, etc. etc." Well, good for him, he got all of that right, although his point is that Mugabe is anything but. Rather, he's a noble spirit, anxious to better the lives of his people, and is, in fact, a victim of cruel Western denigration, completely unwarranted - along with unfair sanctions, responsible for the collapsed economy.

Dr. Elmasry gives the reading public a new perspective on events carefully chronicled otherwise by neutral sources. His commitment to siding with the government of Zimbabwe, and his dismissal of the claims of the Movement for Democratic Change place him at complete odds with close observers of the events in question, including the many victims of the government's vile campaign of coercion, murder, torture, rape, disempowerment and vote-rigging, resulting in the hasty departure of fearful opponents of the regime, flooding into neighbouring countries for refuge.

According to Dr. Elmasry, none of this happened. There was no need for the West to set up insulting poll watchers, and the results of the run-off elections gave clarity and legality to the proceedings, identifying Morgan Tsvangirai for what he truly is, "a stooge of Western powers". That undeniable imparting of the truth of proceedings as they occurred in reality will most surely devastate Mr. Tsvangirai when it is revealed to him; his game will be up.

Zimbabwe, Dr. Elmasry correctly points out, was "once among the most promising economies of Africa. But thanks to Western sanctions the country's economy is in ruins. High inflation, high fuel costs and high unemployment are crippling the economy." True, very true. And Western sanctions accomplished all of this? "Millions of Zimbabweans have fled their country for economic reasons" he goes on, and of course he's right. They're fleeing massive unemployment, the lack of medicines, acute food shortages, a staggeringly impossible inflation rate - and the violent depredations of Robert Mugabe's police and military.

The slave conditions Mr. Elmasry scornfully refers to under its colonialist Rhodesian history is an interesting concept. Europe was developed on the labour of black slavery, as was America. And that too has an interesting antecedent, for it was within the Arab countries that slavery was a traditional condition. It was Arab slavers who aided and abetted the work of white slavers to capture black African villagers so they could be conveyed to North America. Pulverized into insensibility on both fronts.

This story is turning full circle... "Today, as it was years ago under the colonialists, it does not pay to be African, black and poor", claims Mr. Elmasry. As well he might declare that the condition of Arab Muslims in the Middle East - and Africa - is stagnant and stultified by contact with imperialist powers of the West which have compelled the leaders of Muslim countries to tamp down the aspirations of their people, to keep them in a condition of misery and privation. So they may continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

This tantalizingly different view of historical antecedents and current-day politics is so sweetly fabulous one wonders why Mr. Elmasry doesn't take up an alternate position as a humble but highly regarded teller of tales of lost civilizations. We live in a society that celebrates freedom of speech, after all...