This edition of the Georgia Straight is Number 1,995, which puts us just five shy of our 2,000th edition, and next year, the newspaper turns 40. With the sun and moon about to align in these ways, and considering certain anxieties that plague the world at the moment, I thought it would be useful to recall the historic cause into which this newspaper was born.

On May 12, 1967, the very day that Georgia Straight publisher Dan McLeod moved the newspaper into its first office at 432 Homer Street, he was arrested and jailed on a phony vagrancy charge.

Back then, McLeod was a geeky-looking Vancouver dissident poet, and there wasn't a single printing company anywhere in the Lower Mainland that would do business with him. The newspaper had to be printed in Victoria. After a Vancouver press agreed to be the Georgia Straight's printer, Vancouver's mayor refused to issue McLeod a business licence. McLeod had to go to court to get one.

Then there was a criminal-libel charge, for mocking a judge. Then nine obscenity charges. Then the newspaper was banned from the streets of several Greater Vancouver municipalities. Then there was a charge of inciting to commit an indictable offence. Then another obscenity charge. All within the first two years.

Vancouver Sun columnist Allan Fotheringham wrote: "Someday, some scholar interested in the law and its abuse is going to do a serious study of how the authorities in this town have attempted to intimidate and bust the Straight”¦ Everyone will ask what the rest of us were doing-including the newspapers-while this was going on."

All these years later, the very same question that Fotheringham posed is being raised in a widely distributed plea, recently coauthored by 11 prominent Muslim-Canadian writers and academics. What are the rest of us doing now that extremists in Toronto are vowing to drown the Danish people "in their own blood" because of certain vulgar cartoons that were published in a Danish newspaper? What are the rest of us doing now that there are journalists in Jordan, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere, "rotting in jails, facing charges of apostasy and blasphemy"?

Why no protest?

"A curtain of fear" has descended upon Canada's intellectual class, the declaration asserts. One of the declaration's coauthors, Taj Hashmi, a history professor at Simon Fraser University, tells me it's also partly because multiculturalism has rendered many Canadians incapable of recognizing fascism when it comes in an "ethnic" or "religious" guise. Further, Hashmi said, there is a certain tendency, especially among leftists, to regard radical Islamism as a defensible response to western imperialism.

"Islamism is not the new revolutionary movement against global forces of oppression, as a section of the left in this country erroneously perceives," warns the declaration. Among its other coauthors are such prominent Canadians as Jehad Aliweiwi, former executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation, Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Chronicle, and Munir Pervaiz of the Pakistan-Canadian Writers Forum.

Meanwhile, a dozen more intellectuals and journalists-including former British Columbian Irshad Manji, British novelist Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali of the Netherlands-have just published a similar manifesto. It puts the point this way: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat-Islamism."

Hashmi, the author of several books about Islam and South Asian politics, is a 55-year-old Bangladeshi who was born in Assam and educated in Australia, and he taught in Singapore before emigrating to Canada four years ago. He praises Canada's efforts to integrate people from so many cultural and religious traditions, but he admits to a gnawing fear about the future.

In the tyrannies of the world, Muslims are sinking into despair, Hashmi said. In Canada, young Muslim immigrants could soon end up drowning in a subterranean current of racism, turning to drug abuse, crime, or political extremism as their means of escape. "Multiculturalism is a good thing so long as it doesn't inhibit people from integrating," Hashmi said, adding that Canada's devotion to multiculturalism must be forged in a similarly firm commitment to secularism and free speech.

The rest of us could learn from British Columbia's Iranian immigrants. Roughly 60,000 people have settled in Greater Vancouver after fleeing tyranny of both the secular and the Islamist kind in Iran. Some fled the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and others fled the Shia theocracy that overthrew him in 1979. And while the Straight's anniversaries are coming up, thousands of local Iranians are happily anticipating another alignment of sorts, of the sun and the moon.

The Festival of Norouz is normally held on the vernal equinox, that perfect balance of darkness and light. This year, one local version will take place the day before, on Sunday, March 19. It starts around noon, at the Mickey McDougall Gym at East 23rd Street and St. Andrew's in North Vancouver.

Events are being coordinated by Sherry Shaghaghi, a 40-year-old community activist and the first Iranian-born woman to have contested a federal election-perhaps the ultimate act of "integration". Shaghaghi ran unsuccessfully for the NDP in the last polls, in North Vancouver, and despite the long shot, she said she enjoyed every minute of it.

At this year's Festival of Norouz, there will be Iranian Muslims, Bahais, Christians, and people of no particular religion, and among them will be Iranian Kurds, Baluchis, Afghans, and others. The opening homily will be given by a Zoroastrian. "It's going to be wonderful," Shaghaghi said. There will be door prizes, even. And it's open to the general public.

And this makes the festival Shaghaghi is planning something rather more than a happy example of multiculturalism. It's also a testament to freedom of expression, the cause in which this newspaper was born.

The Chronicles Web log can be found at transmontanus.blogspot.com/.