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Tarek Fatah

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Tarek Fatah

Tarek Fatah (Punjabi: طارق فتح; [t̪aɾɪk fətah] / [fəteh] 20 November 1949 – 24 April 2023) was a Pakistani-Canadian journalist and author. He was a Punjabi born into Islam and was a vocal critic of the Pakistani religious and political establishment, and the partition of India.

Fatah was born on 20 November 1949 in Karachi, Pakistan into a Punjabi family which had migrated from Bombay to Karachi following the Partition of India in 1947. Fatah graduated with a degree in biochemistry from the University of Karachi but entered into journalism as a reporter for the Karachi Sun in 1970, before becoming an investigative journalist for Pakistan Television. He was a leftist student leader in the 1960s and 1970s and was imprisoned twice by military regimes. In 1977, he was charged with sedition and barred from journalism by the Zia-ul Haq regime.

Fatah left Pakistan and settled in Saudi Arabia, before emigrating to Canada in 1987. He stated that he eventually renounced his Pakistani citizenship due in part to the government's discrimination against Ahmadiyya.

Of himself, Fatah asserted:

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.

Fatah was a long-time member of the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) and ran unsuccessfully in the 1995 provincial elections as the party's candidate in Scarborough North. He subsequently worked for Ontario NDP leader, Howard Hampton.

In July 2006, he left the NDP to support Bob Rae's candidacy for the Liberal Party of Canada's leadership. Rae, a former Ontario NDP leader and Premier of Ontario, had himself left the NDP several years earlier. In an opinion piece published in Toronto's Now Magazine, Fatah wrote that he decided to leave the NDP because of the establishment of a faith caucus which he believed would open the way for religious fundamentalists to enter the party. However, after Rae's defeat by Stéphane Dion, Fatah condemned similar racial and religious organization activity in the Liberal Party, arguing in a Globe and Mail editorial that Tamil, Sikh, Kurdish and Islamist Muslim leaders had engaged in "blatant efforts to wield political muscle," "bargaining the price of their cadre of delegates" and creating a "political process that feeds on racial and religious exploitation." "I respect the diversity of Canada," he wrote, "but I want to celebrate what unites us, not what divides us into tiny tribes that can be manipulated by leaders who sell us to the highest bidder."

At a press conference on 2 October 2008, Fatah sharply criticized the federal New Democratic Party (NDP). He stated that he was a lifetime social democrat who had supported the NDP for 17 years but that he could no longer be affiliated with that party. He claimed that the NDP began opening its doors to Islamists under Alexa McDonough and that, under Jack Layton, he had seen them flood into the party. Fatah said that Islamists in the NDP have pursued a campaign to instill a sense of victimhood among Muslim youth.

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