With UM Financial in receivership, Islamists' efforts to build an alternative banking system insulated from the rest of the sector appears to have foundered on old fashioned financial mismanagement. Tarek Fatah reports that hundreds and potentially thousands of homeowners may be seriously out of luck:

UM Financial is in receivership, but that does not mean the end of Sharia banking in Canada. Far from it. There is just too much money to be made at the expense of a vulnerable and naive community for mainstream banks to not pay attention to their Muslim executives who are promoting this business. There are dozens of Western banks that have partnered with Arab Banks in this profitable ventrure where the depositor gets no interest on his or her deposits, yet pays 50 points above the market interest rate on their mortgage, as a supposed act of piety to please Allah, but in fact ends up enriching the banks.

It would seem that sharia finance is in trouble for precisely the same reasons cited by both economists and Occupy Wall Street protesters pointing at the failures of the conventional financial sector: greed and incompetence.

Note to the Toronto-area police. When a religious fanatic threatens one of Canada's foremost Muslim advocates of secularism and moderation, Tarek Fatah, do your job. Press charges.

On second thought, when a religious fanatic threatens anyone, press charges.

Best wishes on a speedy recovery, Tarek.

The Propagandist's own contributing writer Lauryn Oates will be joining Tarek Fatah, Aruna Papp, Morton Weinfeld, Alia Hogben and others October 1-2 in Calgary for the The Marsha Hanen Symposium on Ethical Leadership and Gender Equality, organized by by the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. The symposium's topic is Gender, Culture and Religion: Tackling Some Difficult Questions. From the Foundation's website:

The Sheldon Chumir Foundation is concerned with how we organize ourselves so as to live ethically well together – peacefully, with dignity for all and in mutual respect. Equality issues are central to our mandate. This Symposium will provide an opportunity for thoughtful engagement with one set of equality issues – those presented by the tension between gender equality and Canada’s cultural and religious diversity.

Registration details here. Read more

The month of fasting has now begun, but it seems not even one month of the more ordinary kind has gone by since that September morning nine years ago without the eruption of some uproar that forces Muslims to the middle of it and obliges everyone else to issue opinions on the subject.

Now and again, a sensible voice enters the fray. It's quite often the voice of Christopher Hitchens. This month's rumpus is about plans to build a mosque in the vicinity of 9-11's epicentre in Manhattan, and again, what Hitchens has to say today may as well serve as the last word on the subject. He's had it up to the teeth with the "cheap appeals to parochialism, victimology and unreason" that have characterized this latest rumpus. Me too.

I do admire the case against the proposed Cordoba mosque that Tarek Fatah and Raheel Raza argue here, especially if this is true: "It's a repugnant thought that $100 million would be brought into the United States rather than be directed at dying and needy Muslims in Darfur or Pakistan." But this is completely off-key: "If this mosque does get built, it will forever be a lightning rod for those who have little room for Muslims or Islam in the U.S." If that turns out to be true, so what? Let it be a lightning rod for bigots like that. May lightning strike them all dead.

I also highly recommend this thoughtful assessment by my friend Jonathon Narvey, right here at Propagandist Magazine, but I will take exception to this: "There is no monument to Stalin and the Gulag Archipelago in Washington, D.C." Apples and oranges. A mosque in a 9-11 commemorative exercise cannot be equated with a hypothetical tribute to Red Fascism in the capitol of Americaland.

Anyway, I was particularly encouraged by Hitchens' line of argument because if there is one thing I can't abide it's the mewling self-pity that tends to emanate from so many American cakeholes whenever the matter of 9-11 comes up. If it isn't a self-righteous and jingoistic assertion of entitlement to some kind of unique victimhood, then there's its counterpoint, in the form of the blubbering and accomodationist cowardice that almost always animates appeals against "Islamophobia."

These ostensibly opposing lines of incoherence are actually not at opposite ideological poles at all. They are forms of hectoring that share a nasty sort of prejudice, the kind that equates "Muslims" with jihadist crackpots and elides the necessary distinctions between Islamism and Islam, between Salafist belligerence and the simple faith of perfectly decent people, and between the clerical-fascist savagery of Talibanism and the harmless devotions of ordinary, intelligent and innocent mosque-goers.

Count the number of dead Muslims among the Taliban's victims and you will find they outnumber Al-Qaida's American victims in Manhattan on that horrible September day by an order of magnitude. And yes, it is actually proper in this particular case to ignore the distinctions between Al Qaida and the Taliban. Don't even start.

Set aside for a moment the thousands of Muslims murdered by Islamist lunatics in Pakistan and elsewhere in recent months. Let's just look at Afghanistan for a moment, and just the first six months of this year. UN human rights workers recorded 1,271 civilians deaths and 1,997 injuries over that period. That's 3,268 casualties. Of that number, 386 are attributable to the almost-always inadvertent harm caused by NATO and Afghan forces. The rest - 2,477 casualties - are directly attributable to the same sorts of Islamist madmen as those who turned Lower Manhattan into a smoking charnel house that day.

Remember these things the next time you find yourself confronted by some doofus who wants you to join him in instructing Barack Obama or Stephen Harper to "stop the war." Notice that the doofus will profess to be left wing, but when he's talking about Muslims he can't help but resort to the terms "they" and "them," and he will look you straight in the eye when he's saying "we" and "us." All I can think to do when I'm stuck in such awkward situations is to ask: What the hell do you mean, "we"?

From such geezers of the "right-wing" sort, I can't count the number of times I have heard this plaintive question: Why don't "they" do something about all these jihadists? Why don't "they" speak up? It's everything I can do to keep my temper and simply point out that in the company I happen to keep, among those I would consider to be the bravest anti-Islamists and the most fervent partisans of democracy, toleration, secularism and freedom, the overwhelming majority happen to be Muslims.

It might also be useful to remember all those Muslims who would be the first to defend democracy and freedom, but they can't, because they are dead. For a bracing illustration, do read my friend Lauryn Oates' Hazaras in Afghanistan: A Quiet Genocide.

But this is Ramadan, and it's not supposed to be an unhappy time of year. It's supposed to be a time of reflection, humility, and retreat from the hurly-burly of the world.

I don't see the point in it, quite frankly, because I was raised Irish Catholic, and we were always fasting and giving things up and going without meat and abstaining from this and from that and blaming ourselves and going without things right through bloody Lent if you don't mind. And then we'd get trundled off to mass every Sunday morning to be instructed by some thick Kerryman that the true, threefold nature of God consisted of an old man in the clouds with a long white beard, a handsome young Jew who was nailed to a tree in Palestine 2000 years ago, and a little white bird that has fire coming out of the top of its head.

But to those fasting through the daylight hours these days, especially to my own beloved Muslim friends, a warm Ramadan Mubarek to you, and Ramadan Kareem. We could all do with a bit of humility and careful reflection, after all. And a good laugh, besides:

Terry Glavin is a Propagandist Magazine contributing writer. His blog can be found here.

In Why Ground Zero Still Matters to America, The Propagandist recently took a controversial stand against building the proposed mega-mosque in the vicinity of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Prominent moderate Muslims like Muslim Canadian Congress board member Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah are now publicly opposing the Cordoba House project, laying into religious extremists and their politically-correct supporters.

"As a Muslim, I'm not buying that at all. How does building a mosque in the very place where Muslims murdered so many Americans create any kind of respect?" Raza says in a interview on The O'Reilly Factor.

"We don't show our caring for them by being intolerant. Building a mosque or a place of worship in the particular place across the street from Ground Zero is a slap in the face of all Americans," she adds. "Bloomberg and other bleeding-heart white liberals like him don't understand the battle that we moderate Muslims are faced with in terms of confronting radical Islam and Islamization and political Islam in North America, which has only grown since 9/11 because of political correctness."