Persistent dismissal of Muslims about Islamophobia
Last week — the same week that marked the one-year anniversary of the Quebec mosque massacre, the most fatal act of ideology-inspired violence in Canada since 1989 — the Parliamentary Heritage Committee released the fruits of its months-long study on Islamophobia and systemic racism.
The shooting rampage in the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec, which killed six men and injured 19 others, emblematized the deadly power of Islamophobia in Canada. And the Heritage Committee’s report, which largely ignores Islamophobia’s deep and pervasive Canadian roots, epitomizes the gross inadequacy of the government’s response.
One year after Azzedine Soufiane, Abdelkrim Hassane, Mohamedou Tanou Barry, Ibrahima Barry, Aboubaker Thabti and Khaled Belkacemi were gunned down after evening prayers, the reality is that the myths that fuel anti-Muslim hatred remain as prevalent as ever.
Surveys conducted since the shooting have found that 46 per cent of Canadians have negative views of Islam, 44 per cent of Ontarians think police are justified in racially profiling Muslims, fewer than half of Canadians would find it acceptable for one of their children to marry a Muslim and 51 per cent support government surveillance of mosques.
Mainstream media outlets and state counterterrorism publications continue to propagate the misperception that Muslims are the primary source of terror in Canada, rather than some of the primary victims — even though white supremacist and right-wing extremists have murdered and maimed several times more people in Canada than Muslim extremists ever have.
The Quebec mosque shooting received four times less coverage in major Canadian media than the Boston Marathon bombing, although the assault on the mosque was more fatal and happened in Canada. CBC’s flagship news program The National spent five minutes of airtime on the mosque shooting the night it occurred — a stark contrast to the many hours of live reporting and commentary devoted to the London Bridge attack (in which three British Muslim men killed eight people) five months later.
CSIS has produced two reports on terrorism in Canada since Jan. 29, 2017; neither mentions the Quebec mosque shooting at all, or the metastasizing menace of right-wing extremists and white supremacists.
Public Safety Canada’s “2017 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada,” published 11 months after the mosque shooting, includes only two paragraphs on rightwing and white-supremacist violence.
It insists that Muslims constitute “the principal terrorist threat to Canada,” while claiming the activities of the extreme right are merely “sporadic” and “predominantly (conducted) online” — even as groups such as PEGIDA, the III% and Soldiers of Odin brazenly commit regular real-world acts of aggression, such as border patrols, mosque stakeouts, paramilitary training exercises and rallies against immigration and Islam.
Young Muslims who play paintball are treated as security threats — while Alexandre Bissonnette, who’s charged in the Quebec shooting case, was able to practice at a gun range without attracting suspicion. State security agents hound Muslims at their schools and places of work — while not a single Canadian politician bothered to visit shooting survivor Aymen Derbali, who was permanently paralyzed while trying to shield others from bullets.
For the last decade-and-a-half, Muslim communities have endured a steady stream of hostility and harassment, from intrusive surveillance in our most intimate spaces to violent assaults in public places. And yet, widespread denialism about Islamophobia persists, including in the Heritage Committee study purporting to investigate Islamophobia in Canada.
The committee’s report says nothing about security agencies’ repeated abuses of Muslims’ basic rights: not a word about the Muslim men tortured with Canadian complicity, or about the Muslim kids barred from travelling because of Canada’s no-fly list. And it says little about the continuing Islamophobic stereotypes that rationalize these abuses: government and media representations of Muslims as “terrorist” threats.
In fact, the committee’s study on Islamophobia says remarkably little about Islamophobia at all. Instead of analyzing the forms of systemic discrimination that Muslims experience, it fixates on semantic debates about the appropriateness of the term “Islamophobia.” (As Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn observed, “If we demand precision, what of anti-Semitism, a word that has been accepted for centuries to describe 2,000 years of persecution against Jews?” — even though not all Jewish people are Semitic, and not all Semites are Jewish.)
Only one of the Heritage Committee’s 30 recommendations deals specifically with Islamophobia: the call to recognize Jan. 29 as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia.
But one day of remembrance cannot begin to counter 364 days of anti-Muslim racism — particularly when the reality of Islamophobia in Canada continues to be denied, even after the cold-blooded killing of six Muslims in a mosque.