Justin Trudeau said yesterday that Prime Minister Harper's insistence that niqabs - female face coverings - should not be allowed in courts and citizenship ceremonies demonstrates an insensitivity to minority rights. I would say that Mr. Trudeau's continuing failure to comprehend that cultural particularities should never be raised to secular right is an overt threat to the health of a liberal pluralistic democracy and is cause for concern in someone who seeks to become the head of government.

This is not the first time that Mr. Trudeau has voiced illiberal and - dare I say - anti-feminist views. When then Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney released Canada's new citizenship guide, it included a description of practices that Canadians find "barbaric." The practices described as barbaric included honor killings of girls and female genital mutilation. Mr. Trudeau denounced the use of the word barbaric as "insensitive." Insensitive to what?

By any objective standard setting girls on fire and mutilating genitalia are barbaric practices. If Mr. Trudeau seeks another adjective it is only for political expediency and an innate attitude of that moral relativism that is rotting the will of democratic nations. Mr. Trudeau just doesn't get it.

In December of 2012 he chose to speak at a conference in Toronto entitled Reviving the Islamic Spirit. That Conference's main sponsor was IRFAN, an organization that had lost it's charitable status in Canada because of ties to Hamas. Soon after I condemned Mr. Trudeau's decision in an op-ed, IRFAN coincidently withdrew as a sponsor. But what was perhaps more troubling was that the other featured speakers were Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder, and an Imam who held the position of Chair of the European Commission on the Fatwa. Mr. Trudeau defended his position to participate on the grounds that in the face of extremism it was important to deliver a message of inclusion and Canadian values. It was pointed out to him that few would be listening and that his very prescence would be exploited as validation of the Conference. In façt that is what happend as Mr. Trudeau's picture was plastered on the Conference website. The picture showed a grinning Trudeau with his arm outstretched as if he was a solicitous headwaiter.

In another opinion expressed by him after the Boston terrorist bombings, Trudeau said that we must condemn such acts but we must also search for the "root causes." A man who wants to lead a western nation still doesn't understand that Jihadist terror has no root causes other than bloodlust and a desire to subjugate free people to sharia law. That Trudeau can demonstrate the mentality of an appeaser is frightening indeed.

In a free society people do not cover their faces. In a free society, women are not to be treated as second class citizens. We must deal with each other with open minds, open hearts and open faces. And not just for the sake of security. It is for the sake of equality and mutual respect. Nothing in the Koran demands face coverings for women. This practice is a vestige of medieval customs used to subjugate women. It has no place in the public square of a free nation. And it is about time that Mr. Trudeau understood that. These are dangerous times. We have seen it here at home . In the past ten days over sixty people in Libya have been beheaded or burned alive by ISIS. Their crime? They were Christians. Mr. Trudeau should realize the job he seeks leaves no time for dress rehearsals.



