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A commenter on my article over at the American Thinker posted that Mark Steyn had just written about Little Mosque as well. Steyn calls it The Little Mosque that Couldn't.
When I initially sent my article, the editor of American Thinker told me that his online journal had already covered this topic. I told him that mine was different. It wasn't a review of the show, but a description of what the show was doing culturally. To rephrase a running term, it is stealth culture, something that I have been noting for some time now at "Our Changing Landscape", and which I initiated with an article about two or three years ago called "Islam's Missionary Women", about high-ranking Muslim women in the West who are trying to change our society's rules and institutions to accommodate their version of Islam.
So, my observations that Muslims are surreptitiously "changing our landscape" and, as I saw it, our visual landscape, runs back a few years.
Now here is Mark Steyn's mildly hysterical descriptive review of this Little Mosque phenomenon. Just the kind of contribution the American Thinker wasn't interested in, having covered that angle about a year ago.
I call Little Mosque a phenomenon because unlike Steyn, I believe it is a Little Mosque that very much could. A show that is now available in 60 different countries, including France, Switzerland, Israel and Finland. And whose rights Fox Television has recently acquired to air an Americanized version.
As I write in my article, Little Mosque is now basically a franchise; its cast attend Muslim events, get interviewed by major Canadian television and radio channels apart from their patron the CBC, and raise awareness (and funds) for Islamic events. CBC does relentless ads for the show, which is actually tanking (500,000 viewers), but the ads alone give it a kind of brand name even for those who never watch the show. And I doubt the CBC will drop it. It's already in our psyche.
And all Mark Steyn can do is make jokes, along with a few grim, panic-stricken outbursts about real Imams declaring "I come to slaughter all of you." And even here, poor Steyn has to add his little joke, writing: "He meant it, but come on, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter."
Weep with laughter.
Plus, Steyn spends an inordinate amount of time criticizing the CBC, which no amount of complaints will change, so it all becomes an irrelevant exercise.
In any case, leaving aside all the puns and witticism (rather meek, in my opinion), Steyn ends off his string of quips with not a word on: So What?
Even in the first edition of my article, I write that this whole debacle may just be a problem of numbers. Unlike Steyn, I put a historical context to the problem saying that about 100 years ago, the first Muslim immigrants could have never gone this far (and never did), because there were too few of them. Now, instead of assimilating into our culture, Muslims are assimilating us into theirs, because "their large numbers [is] exempting them from assimilating into the dominant society". To reduce or even to eliminate the problem is to...reduce their numbers.
Here is a comment I most recently posted at the American Thinker, which is in line for approval by a moderator:
The only way to rectify this problem is to follow the example of the early immigration patterns (at the time of the Al Rashid mosque.) At that time, the small number of Muslims were forced to assimilate, and couldn't advance their culture and religion on to Canadians.
Now, we have to find ways to reduce at least the immigration numbers. By 2011, the number of Muslims is expected to reach 1.1 million (that of course includes those born here as well as new immigrants.) Our only reasonable recourse at this time is to reduce, if not issue a moratorium, on Muslim immigrants.
That is an important way our cultural symbols and institutions can be salvaged. The more Muslims there are, the less they will assimilate, and the more they will try (successfully) to assimilate us into their way of life.