Who is Tarek Fatah?
Following about is taken from his blog:
Tarek Fatah is an author and a weekly columnist for the Toronto Sun. He hosts a weekly Sunday afternoon talk show on Toronto’s CFRB NewsTalk 1010. His book “Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State” was runners-up for the prestigious Donner Prize in 2008 while his second book “The Jew is Not My Enemy” won the Helen and Stan Vine Award in 2010. TF-in-KU-1970 Born in Pakistan in 1949, Fatah was a leftist student leader in the turbulent days of the late 1960s and 70s when he was twice imprisoned by successive military dictators. In 1977, he was charged with sedition by yet another military regime and barred from being a journalist in the country. After a ten-year stint in Saudi Arabia as an advertsing executive, Fatah and his family migrated to Canada in 1987 where he has been active in the country’s politics and journalism since his arrival. After 9/11, Fatah founded the Muslim Canadian Congress that has led the fight against Islamism and exposed the designs of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In his own words: “I am an Indian born in Pakistan, a Punjabi born in Islam; an immigrant in Canada with a Muslim consciousness, grounded in a Marxist youth. I am one of Salman Rushdie’s many Midnight’s Children: we were snatched from the cradle of a great civilization and made permanent refugees, sent in search of an oasis that turned out to be a mirage. I am in pain, a living witness to how dreams of hope and enlightenment can be turned into a nightmare of despair and failure. Promises made to the children of my generation that were never meant to be kept. Today, the result is a Muslim society lost in the sands of Sinai with no Moses to lead us out, held hostage by hateful pretenders of piety. Our problems are further compounded by a collective denial of the fact that the pain we suffer is caused mostly by self- inflicted wounds, and is not entirely the result of some Zionist conspiracy hatched with the West. I write as a Muslim whose ancestors were Hindu. My religion, Islam, is rooted in Judaism, while my Punjabi culture is tied to that of the Sikhs. Yet I am told by Islamists that without shedding this multifaceted heritage, if not outrightly rejecting it, I cannot be considered a true Muslim.
Of all the ingredients that make up my complex identity, being Canadian has had the most profound effect on my thinking. It is Canada that propels me to swim upstream to imitate with humility the giants who have ventured into uncharted waters before me. Men like Louis-Joseph Papineau, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, and Norman Bethune; women like Agnes Macphail, Rosemary Brown and Nellie McClung. For it is only here in Canada that I can speak out against the hijacking of my faith and the encroaching spectre of a new Islamofascism.”
Tarek is married to his university sweetheart Nargis Tapal and they have two daughters, Natasha and Nazia Fatah.
