Elghawaby’s impossible task
I’m in perfect agreement with Quebec’s political establishment that Amira Elghawaby is the wrong choice for Canada’s first special representative on combating Islamophobia.
However, unlike federal Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, I don’t believe the former journalist is the wrong person for the job because she dared to criticize Quebec’s racist secularism law. Nor do I think she is the wrong person for the job because she once reportedly wrote a crass tweet at the expense of Quebecers.
Rather, she is the wrong person for the job because the right person does not exist.
Who, after all, would the likes of Blanchet find palatable in such a role? It’s impossible to “combat Islamophobia” in Canada without at the same time combating a law that is explicitly Islamophobic, as it prohibits hijab-wearing women — not to mention Jewish men in kippot and Sikh men in turbans — from working in the public service.
Elghawaby would be justified if her only goal in her new role was to help strike the secularism law from the books forever. Instead, thanks to a politically unprepared prime minister, she’s doing damage control.
Elghawaby recently apologized for wholly reasonable remarks she made in a 2019 Ottawa Citizen column co-authored with prominent Jewish activist Bernie Farber. Elghawaby and Farber suggested that, in reference to Bill 21, “the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment.” The authors noted that in a Léger Marketing poll, among respondents who harboured negative feelings about Islam, 88 per cent also supported a ban on religious symbols for public school teachers.
As reported in the Montreal Gazette, the poll also found that “63 per cent of Quebecers supported a ban on religious symbols for judges, police officers and prison guards, and 59 per cent were in favour of a similar ban for teachers.”
In 2019, while defending the controversial law, Quebec Premier François Legault told reporters: “The majority was asking for secularism and they were ignored. Now they feel listened to.”
Tell me again where Elghawaby got it wrong?
Since this controversy emerged, it’s become clear that many of the pundits and leaders who commend the letter of the secularism law can’t grasp its insidious spirit because their loved ones don’t include people of faith who wear religious headgear on a daily basis.
For those of us who do belong to minority faiths, the issue is starkly uncomplicated. This is a law that dehumanizes our friends and family by reducing them to the cloth on their heads. This is a law that assumes they are incapable of functioning within a secular society (for the record, my family doctor growing up, a kippah-wearing Jew, did not cite the Talmud when teenage patients asked him for birth control).
“She does not know our history,” Blanchet told reporters recently about Elghawaby. “And I will be pleased as a citizen, as a party leader, and as an anthropologist to discuss Quebec history with her.”
But no piece of Quebec history can render moral the removal of a teacher from a school classroom for wearing a hijab. And no explanation of the law can render that outcome free of racism.
It takes a wilfully warped sense of morality to champion a racist law and then balk at the mildest suggestion that you might be just a little bit racist yourself.
At least proponents of discriminatory policies in the United States are concise. They don’t offer transgender youth an academic seminar after they ban them from the school lavatory. They just ban them.
Quebec leaders who are proud of Bill 21 and outraged at Elghawaby want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to uphold a bigoted law and avoid being described, accurately, as bigots. They want us to believe that “secularism” gives them a pass. It doesn’t.