ISLAMOPHOBIA (whatever that term means) HAS NOW GIVEN WAY TO ISLAMOPHOBIA-PHOBIA AND SO-CALLED ‘waves of xenophobia.’ Is Canada going a little crazy?
Last week, a sloppily written but otherwise harmless motion that didn’t even go to a vote in the House of Commons had us all being harangued about a foreign plot to impose Islamic blasphemy laws on an unsuspecting Parliament. This week, we are expected to believe that a similarly anodyne motion that was voted down in the House on Tuesday is already causing “waves of xenophobia” to sweep across the country.
Believe what you like, but it would be difficult to dissuade a reasonable person from concluding at this juncture that at the pointy ends of these debates, uproars and arguments, just about everyone is overdosing on crazy pills.
It is only a little more than three weeks since six innocent Canadians were murdered while at prayer at a mosque in the Quebec City suburb of Sainte-Foy, we should remember. And yet Islamophobia, whatever that term might mean, has given way to what you could call Islamophobia-phobia, and the state of play now is best cap- tured by the gonzo maxim: when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
To recap, last week the rookie Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, backed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, ignored entreaties from Conservative MPs who had not entirely taken leave of their senses to clarify her motion asking the House to condemn “Islamophobia” and to oblige a standing committee to inquire into the ways and means by which the federal government might address itself to questions of systemic racism and religious discrimination. A vote on Motion 103 is scheduled for April.
Rebuffed, the Conservatives then put forward their own resolution this week, which was pretty well identical to Khalid’s except with the contested term “Islamophobia” excised. On Tuesday, the House defeated the motion in a 165-126 vote that pitted the Liberal bench against the Conservatives, the New Democrats, the Bloc Québécois and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.
These fascinating procedural intrigues were playing out against the backdrop of a Conservative party leadership race in which several of the contestants disgraced themselves l ast week by pandering to the crowd at a fringe jamboree of yobs in Toronto organized by a certain pseudo- journalism outfit that relies on a business model involving the traffic in conspiracy theories and alt- right political incorrectness.
But fringes have their own fringes, and by l ast Friday more than a dozen people carrying “Ban Islam” placards and signs emblazoned with similar stupidities showed up at the Masjid Toronto on Dundas Street in what Toronto police described as an incident that bordered on a hate crime. The mosque was then the object of an immediate outpouring of good- hearted Torontonian solidarity and empathy from all quarters.
Awkwardly, around the same time, it came to light that imams at Masjid Toronto have been given to preaching about “the filth of the Jews” and summoning Allah to “kill them, one by one.” Similarly blood- curdling supplications have been offered up at the Andalous Islamic Center in Montreal. Officials at Masjid Toronto offered an unconvincing apology on Monday. The Andalous mosque has disingenuously appealed to “context.”
If you don’t ordinarily pay attention to these competing iterations of squalor, or if you just prefer to have your “narrative” about these sorts of things kept tidy and neat, you will not notice that in the real world, Muslim Canadians and the rest of us are not at one another’s throats at all. Not even close. It would help a great deal if even the most well-meaning MPs ratcheted back the rhetoric.
Last week in the House of Commons, for instance, Iqra Khalid made several impassioned entreaties to her fellow MPs, invoking the spectre of “more than one million Canadians who suffer because of Islamophobia, who are victimized on a daily basis.”
But this isn’t quite the horrible state of affairs described by Muslim Canadians when someone actually bothers to ask them.
Last April, a CBC- Environics poll revealed that Muslims in Canada are annoyed less by discrimination in this country than by all the damn snow. About a third of the Muslim respondents said the really lousy thing a bout Canada was t he weather. Only nine per cent said it was discrimination. One of five respondents said they couldn’t identify anything about Canada they didn’t like. Eight in ten said Muslims are treated better in Canada than any other Western country.
Still, 30 per cent of Muslim respondents said that in the preceding five years they had experienced discrimination that was based on their religion, ethnicity or culture. This is not something Canadians can be proud of, and it would be well worth the time of Khalid’s proposed standing committee study to look into this closely. But it’s well shy of a million Muslim Canadians being victimized by “Islamophobia” on a daily basis.
As for the persistent conspiratorial insinuation that Muslims are devoted to some shadowy allegiance that supersedes their devotion to Canadian values, a 2015 Environics survey found that 83 per cent of Muslim Canadians declared they were “very proud” to be Canadian, compared to only 73 per cent of the rest of us. Freedom and democracy turned up as the main reason why Muslims are proud to be Canadian, followed closely by multiculturalism and diversity.
Last October, the CBC and the Angus Reid Institute had us furrowing our brows at poll results showing 68 per cent of Canadians said minorities should be doing more to “fit in” to Canadian society. As harsh as such views can be made to appear, for good or ill they quite closely reflect the views of Muslim Canadians as well. A CBCEnvironics poll released last April found that 57 per cent of Muslim respondents said that immigrants of all kinds, of every ethnicity and cultural background, should try harder to fit into Canadian culture.
Whatever you think about the Conservatives’ aversion to the term “Islamophobia,” it would be reckless not to take a pretty huge grain of salt with the Muslim Forum of Canada’s warnings this week that the Conservatives’ stubbornness will result in Canadians drowning in “waves of xenophobia.”
More likely, Muslim Canadians and the rest of us will continue to go about our lives, getting to know one another better when the opportunity presents itself, consoling one another in our grief, sharing the occasional joke, and rolling our eyes at the outbursts and depraved supplications of our politicians, our intemperate imams, and the lunatic fringes on all sides, equally.
REALLY LOUSY THING ABOUT CANADA WAS THE WEATHER.