Islamophobic letter sparks mother’s worry
The letter felt threatening.
It was dropped off in Dana’s mailbox last week in the dead of night. Its author didn’t sign the note.
It reads: “How dare you allow your daughters to wear a veil. Shame on you, you are in Quebec. Shame on your men imams. No future for them. Stop affronting us. We don’t want Islamic hijabs. Down with brain washing. Understood?”
Dana lives in Laval, she was born in Egypt but — after spending most of life in this country — considers herself Canadian. For at least one of her neighbours, however, the fact the Dana and her two teenage daughters wear a headscarf is a sign that they don’t belong here.
“When I first saw the letter I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Is this for real?’” said Dana, who did not want her real name published for fear of reprisals. “I was angry, I was offended and then I was just sad. … My daughters don’t know about the letter and I don’t want them to.
“Now every time they leave the house, I watch to make sure no one is confronting them or approaching them. I don’t want them to feel hated. I don’t want to have to explain hate to my kids. It’s not the Canada I was raised in.”
Dana brought her case to the Laval police, who filed a report and said that — while they consider the letter a “hate incident” — it contains no specific threat against Dana or her family. The fact that the letter is unsigned means investigators won’t be able to trace its origin.
“If the threat can be traced to someone, that’s one thing, but when it’s anonymous, the best we can do is write a report and file it in case anything similar ever surfaces,” said Evelyne Boudreau, a spokeswoman for the Laval police. “We do file it, we collate it, the key words are entered into a database and when we search something similar in the future, it’s in our files.”
INCIDENTS ON THE RISE
At least one advocate says hateful attacks on Muslim women have been on the rise since the Quebec government passed its religious symbols ban last spring.
Hanadi Saad runs a volunteer organization that tracks incidents against Muslims. She says she’s been getting two or three reports of attacks each week since May.
“Last week, a woman in her 20s was shoved to the ground in the métro,” said Saad, who runs Justice Femmes. “She sat there as people watched and her attacker told her to take off her hijab. That’s what it’s come to.
“It used to be up and down, we would get a complaint every few weeks, but it’s escalating. And women are bearing the brunt of these incidents. People are being yelled at in public, they’re being physically assaulted, and they won’t go to the police because they don’t think they’ll be taken seriously.”
In other words, Saad says, police statistics on hate incidents — which are hard to come by — may not be reliable, given that so few of the women she encounters actually file an official complaint.
Saad says she sees a correlation between the rise in hateful attacks and the emergence of the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s religious symbols ban.
Bill 21 was passed last spring in order to secure the religious neutrality of the state. Under the law, public school teachers, police officers and other authority figures are not allowed to wear religious symbols on the job.
But a series of legal challenges to the law claim the bill seems laser-focused on Muslim women. Since the bill became law, Muslim women have been refused employment in public schools for wearing their headscarf , some have had parents refuse to allow their children in their classrooms and others have chosen to remove the religious garb in order to keep their job.
For Dana, last week’s letter was the first time she encountered hate while living in Quebec. And while it may not be the last, she insists she won’t be intimidated by anonymous letter writers.
“Nobody gets to tell us we’re less Canadian than anyone else,” said Dana. “Nobody gets to tell me what my kids can wear and how they can choose to practise their faith. I don’t believe we should judge women for wearing hijabs, just as I don’t believe we should judge women for wearing short skirts.
“We are productive members of society and I’m raising my daughters to be productive members of society. I’ve been to school here, I work here, I have Muslim friends and secular friends and our life is here among our fellow Canadians. We’re not going anywhere.”