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I slept Friday with the dreamy prospect of spending the next day relaxing with my kids at this park or that. I awoke instead to a phone call from my office telling me that Margaret Wente had written a nasty j'accuse against us in The Globe and Mail's Focus section.

Ms. Wente's piece centred on a complaint the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) had sent several months ago to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce about offensive remarks in one of their financial reports. The bank granted our request to send the report's author, Jeffrey Rubin, chief economist for the World Markets division of the CIBC, for sensitivity training; Ms. Wente took the same course and also wrote about her experience.

There it was: Two pages of text with what must be my most unflattering picture. Even my two-year-old nephew was put off. But I won't hold the picture against Ms. Wente, as she made space in her Focus article to call me "articulate" and "charming."

"It's tongue-and-cheek," my wife says, her eyes rolling.

"Not so," I say. "The adjectives don't have the quotation marks denoting sarcasm."

In her hurry to pen her story, Ms. Wente omitted more than merely quotation marks. Her edits should have been preceded by a fact-check. Today's publication numbers won't match Saturday's but here's a selection.

We at CAIR-CAN are "scaremongering" when we allege that the RCMP and CSIS use bully tactics. But these organizations do use such tactics. Listen to Maher Arar and others. In fact, The Globe just did a Saturday exclusive with Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian tortured abroad, which raises these and more chilling concerns.

Ms. Wente says that CAIR-CAN and other groups like us are stifling speech through libel chill. Are we? Not really. We're suing a former CSIS agent, and also neo-conservative ideologue David Frum, both of whom called us "extremists" - any level-headed Canadian would respond in the same way.

She says that we are accusing McGill University of discrimination. You bet we are. McGill recently revoked a prayer room for its Muslim students on the basis that the university is a secular institution - even as its faculty of law makes explicit allowances for cancelling or rescheduling lectures that fall on Jewish holidays.

Ms. Wente writes that our asking that Jeff Rubin, CIBC economist, get sensitivity training "is a cautionary tale" with "unpleasant lessons for all of us." I pray for the day when the greatest cautionary tale facing us is getting a sensitization-training workshop. Making mistakes is part of the process of personal refinement; Mr. Rubin has added to, and not diminished, his value as a CIBC employee.

Ms. Wente says that CAIR-CAN uses "aggressive tactics." Sensitization training can't possibly be that onerous!

She asserts that we have "ready access to government officials." Well, if Ms. Wente insists (I'm beaming). Not bad for a five-year-old advocacy organization with a staff of four-and-a-half servicing all of Canada, eh?

Ms. Wente was particularly outraged by the fact that we asked that the CIBC's Mr. Rubin undergo sensitivity training for comments he made about "mullahs" and "sheiks" controlling oil taps in the Middle East. Many Muslims felt the comments were inappropriate. Dialogue between CAIR-CAN and CIBC resulted in a solution that satisfied all parties.

But not Ms. Wente, who savaged our involvement and satirized the very idea of sensitization training.

The premise of sensitization training is to expose the participant to a broader range of culture than their experience might have afforded them. The principle is a simple and rather luminous one: See the world through another's eyes. It's the closest thing to Atticus Finch's inestimable advice to his daughter, "Walk a mile in someone else's shoes."

Without interacting with others, and left to ourselves, we tend to argue through self-centered anecdote. Unfortunately, this is the rule, not the exception. Our cultural milieu tends to be static and staid. Birds of a feather flock together.

We've offered a number of workshops to the private and public sector. It's an important part of our work in breaking down stereotypes. In a July report, the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the more people know about Islam, the more favourable opinion they have of both Islam and Muslims.

The format for our workshop is a brief intro - say, 15 minutes - and then an interactive free-for-all for as long a time permits. No question is taboo. Everything is fair game. From theme to theme, we agree, or agree to disagree. Perhaps some participants retain their cynicism after the experience, but many have remarked that the experience was transformative in one way or another.

The essence of the encounter is not to impose a list of do-not-do's. Rather, it is to open the heart to common humanity and unique difference. What's so bad about that? Am I the only one here who'd love to spend an afternoon listening to someone discuss their Jewish, Sikh, Baha'i or Mormon faith?

Let's spread the love around. I'll offer The Globe and Mail a discounted rate (a bit disingenuous since we don't charge anything for our sensitivity training anyway) to give Ms. Wente a 101 course in Islam and Muslims. Amnesty International, which she once called "Sham-nesty International," is free to co-present the course. She'll get free Turkish-style coffee and I'll grade her easy - but only if she takes good notes.

Riad Saloojee is executive director of CAIR-CAN.