Islamic contributions to hockey
Islamic contributions to hockey

Growing up partly in Montreal, it was mostly between the French and the English so far as governing, language, culture and everything else.

On the street, the culture clash was often resolved playing hockey, the national sport, and no one did it better than the French.

So it was, on my block, the English-speaking, our team, against them, the French – but now, it appears, I’ve had it all wrong.

A friend from way back tells me that those French were not Catholics, as we thought, nor were they even French. They were Muslim; good, proud, loyal Canadian Muslims.

As proof, he shared the latest from “The Islamic Party of Ontario.” They say – “Islam is the native religion of Canada.”

“Did we know this?”

Well, I sure didn’t. (My book of mostly Jewish Montreal memoirs remembers it entirely different.)

But am always willing to learn. It figures that if they indeed invented Canada, by way of being native, it follows that they invented hockey.

Also, baseball. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the “Palestinian American” from Michigan, is quoted as follows: “Muslims were there (in the United States) from the beginning.”

My friend wants to know if this is true. So I did some research and found that yes, some, a few thousand, were brought over as slaves, in the 1700s. After that, when they were set free, there isn’t much about them; that is, they were here, but they offered no contributions worthy of a single page in the history books.

Besides spectacular mosques, what else did they build? So far as Law, Medicine, Science, Soldiering, Entertainment, the Arts – nothing. Or nothing that I could find. So the fault is surely mine. I am a lazy researcher so I assume that there must be a library of information that I must have missed – but I will keep digging.

There are, after all, miles of data so far as the Hebrew impact on Western Civilization. On Soldiering, for example, 292 Muslims fought in the American Civil War.

Good show.

But from a total population in the US of less than 150,000, some 12,000 Jews fought in the Civil War, according to my research, which further reveals that Lincoln personally handed out the Congressional Medal of Honor to eight Jewish veterans. More – Jews fought honorably in all US wars, and always way above their ratio to the general population. I am sure that the same applies to Muslims.

Only the data on this is slim to blank…or rather, it’s my flaw as a researcher that fails to uncover the full story. I will have to get back on this once I find out more.     

“Okay,” says my friend. “But can we get back to Canada?”

Same story. But Trudeau agrees that Islam is native to Canada – and who am I to disagree with a prime minister?

“You always do,” says my friend.

Well, live and learn, I always say, and once in a while I make it a practice to suspend my natural inclination towards cynicism.

Both of them, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez, belong to a new wave in politics desirous of replacing our longstanding Judeo/Christian values with values more in line with Hamas.
“Was Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard Muslim? Babe Ruth?”

Possibly. We’ll know more when the Islamic Party of Ontario provides more information and after Rashida Tlaib fills us in.

Or maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can grapple with this. After all, a mind like that is already steering the country. Both of them, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez, belong to a new wave in politics desirous of replacing our longstanding Judeo/Christian values with values more in line with Hamas…to the sounds of Progressive hands clapping.  

“Are you aware that the map in Tlaib’s office has ‘Palestine’ replacing Israel? Can you believe this? They claim everything. Everything belongs to them..”

Does seem that way…but I will have to get back on that as well.

Meanwhile, the same day we learned that in an unprecedented frenzy of killing, the Nazis murdered more than 14,000 Jews a day at the Holocaust’s peak, 1942, or 1.5 million in three months, we learned that “Palestinian-American” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib effaced Israel from her map in the Capital. Let the symbolism of that sink in. [From our “Is this the America we want” Dept.]

“Do you believe that ‘Palestine’ is their ancestral land?”

As much as I believe that hockey came from Mecca and Joe DiMaggio was a member of an Islamic tribe.  

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the classic Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” and most recently “News Anchor Sweetheart.” Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com