Safari park that allowed Muslim prayer berated online
• A Quebec safari park that welcomed a Muslim community group Sunday and allowed afternoon prayers to be held on its site has become the target of “racist and hateful” comments after a short video of the gathering was posted online.
In a message posted on its Facebook page, Parc Safari in Hemmingford, Que., denounced the intolerant response and said it was “sorry if freedom of religion had offended some people.”
Park president and owner Jean- Pierre Ranger said Wednesday that the online abuse is coming from a minority of Quebecers who don’t understand what happened at his facility.
“Intolerance is a factor that occurs, but it’s a small percentage,” he said in an interview. “In some way, education will eventually bring the level of understanding a little higher, and there will be less stress in our society.”
The task of inter- cultural education does not usually fall to a zoo, but in Quebec flare- ups of intolerance can occur in unlikely places.
The province’s 2007 de- bate over reasonable accommodation featured outrage over Muslims being served pork- free meals and given prayer space at a maple sugar shack and Hasidic Jews being provided a kosher refrigerator at a pediatric hospital.
On Sunday, the Centre Communautaire Laurentien, part of the Muslim Association of Canada, organized an outing to the Parc Safari to celebrate the end of Ramadan and Canada’s 150th anniversary. The event had initially been scheduled for July 1 but was postponed because of rain.
About 950 people took part, and they were provided a small roped- off section of the park for a picnic. When the time arrived for afternoon prayers, the group used a loudspeaker.
A user going by t he name guindon87 posted a 46- second video to YouTube in which people are seen at a distance gathering for prayer and Arabic words are faintly heard coming over a loudspeaker. The poster, whose YouTube contributions include a video describing Montreal activist Jaggi Singh with a racist slur, wrote that the Hemmingford prayers showed “a serious lack of respect for Quebec and Quebecers.”
The video had attracted 45,000 views Wednesday morning and was picked up by TVA news and other media outlets in the province.
Samer Elniz, manager of the Centre Communautaire Laurentien, said he found the reaction to his group’s visit ” bizarre” and particularly troubling because they were there in part to celebrate Canada.
“Personally, I go into public parks and I see Christians conducting a mass, I see baptisms. That doesn’t bother me, even if I am Muslim,” he said. “I like seeing the diversity, seeing people doing as they wish. There are countries where you don’t have those rights.”
The Parc Safari’s Facebook page continued to draw reaction Wednesday, some applauding its defence of religious freedom while others accused it of being a dupe for a proselytizing religion.
Ranger said people should understand that it was a gathering of families, not a religious event. Even when the brief prayer period was held, most of the Muslim community members were elsewhere in the park, he said.
“We do not invite anybody with a political or religious agenda to the park. We invite parents with children to enjoy a family recreational park based on the presentation of animals from four major continents,” he said. In the past, groups from a variety of religious backgrounds have benefited from the same arrangement, and it never caused a problem.
“I’m very hopeful that this is just an incident that allows people to think and come around to realizing that many are victims of propaganda. Let’s tr y to learn the real facts and be tolerant towards each other, and we’ll walk away from these traumatic years,” Ranger said.
INTOLERANCE IS A FACTOR THAT OCCURS, BUT IT’S A SMALL PERCENTAGE.