Islamophobia Watch

OTTAWA — Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy. Alan Baker said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.

"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," Mr. Baker said in an interview.

Globe and Mail, 8 May 2008

In a recent decision, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (the "Commission") decided not to proceed with complaints filed against Maclean’s magazine related to an article "The future belongs to Islam". The complainants alleged that the content of the magazine and Maclean’s refusal to provide space for a rebuttal violated their human rights.

Denying a service because of human rights grounds such as race or creed can form the basis for a human rights complaint. However, the Ontario Human Rights Code (the "Code") does not give the Commission the jurisdiction to deal with the content of magazine articles through the complaints process.

Nevertheless, the Commission has a broader mandate to promote and advance respect for human rights in Ontario, forward the dignity and worth of every Ontarian and take steps to alleviate tension and conflict in the community, including by speaking out on events that are inconsistent with the spirit of the Code.

While freedom of expression must be recognized as a cornerstone of a functioning democracy, the Commission has serious concerns about the content of a number of articles concerning Muslims that have been published by Maclean's magazine and other media outlets. This type of media coverage has been identified as contributing to Islamophobia and promoting societal intolerance towards Muslim, Arab and South Asian Canadians. The Commission recognizes and understands the serious harm that such writings cause, both to the targeted communities and society as a whole. And, while we all recognize and promote the inherent value of freedom of expression, it should also be possible to challenge any institution that contributes to the dissemination of destructive, xenophobic opinions.

Ontario Human Rights Commission statement, 9 April 2008

"Nothing demonstrates the dangerously misplaced sympathies of Canada's intellectual elite so much as the case of Avi Lewis. A former host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Jewish Lewis is Canada's answer to Keith Olbermann. But what has everyone in Canada talking is not his past career but his new job: Lewis has joined Al-Jazeera, the Middle East broadcaster that serves as a leading purveyor of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

"That the ambitious 40-year-old presenter has departed the state-funded CBC for an international network with exponentially bigger budgets and audiences isn't a huge surprise. But Lewis's career move underscores that the Canadian Left is all too willing to forge an unholy alliance with the official tribune of radical Islam."

Kathy Shaidle at Front Page Magazine, 26 March 2008

Tawfiq Chahboune takes on the self-styled "Muslim refusenik".

Socialist Unity, 10 February 2008

Islamic extremists have no real grievance against the West, former British prime minister Tony Blair says, and Western democracies should stand up and say so.

Mr. Blair said that, faced with terrorism and extremist rage, liberal-minded Westerners sometimes assume that "there's something that we should be doing, or have done, that is causing this." In fact, he told a lunchtime audience in Toronto yesterday, extremism is the result of an internal fight over the future of Islam, not any crime or injustice perpetrated by the West against Muslims. "The truth is that they have no sense of grievance against us," he said.

If democratic countries want to defeat extremism, he said, they have to be ready to say that it is more than the extremists' methods they abhor. "It is the presumed sense of grievance. It is the idea that we are the cause of an injustice."

His comments got a round of applause from a sold-out audience in a downtown ballroom. Tickets to the event, An Afternoon with Tony Blair, co-sponsored by The Globe and Mail, went for $400 each.

Globe and Mail, 18 January 2008

In January this year the small Quebec town of Herouxville hit the headlines when it published a code of conduct for migrants which among other things advised them that it was unacceptable to "kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc."

In the National Post Jonathan Kay defended the citizens of Herouxville against the charge that their bigoted and stereotyped views about migrants (and Muslims in particular) represented an attack on multiculturalism from the right. He claims that such views have been "liberated from the odour of racism" and are now commonplace in what passes for the left:

"... in the culture wars, feminists, gay activists and other progressives are no longer willing to risk their winnings by pledging multicultural solidarity with traditional Muslims, Hasidic Jews and other socially conservative immigrant groups ... muscular monoculturalism is no longer the purview of the right ... it's becoming a mainstream ideology, even a fashionable one, on the left."

Update:  See also Yusuf Smith's comments at Indigo Jo Blogs

OTTAWA – A pervasive bias exists in the way Islam is studied in the West, says a prominent Muslim thinker, who is calling for sweeping changes to the way Islamic studies are taught in universities.

Tariq Ramadan, a visiting professor at Oxford University and one of Europe's leading intellectuals on Islam, argues that despite a growing interest in the field, the scholarly pursuit of Islam is driven not by an interest in theology, but by fear and an obsession with the struggle against terrorism.

In the latest issue of the Canadian journal Academic Matters, Ramadan chastises universities for their "carefully orchestrated infatuation" with Islamic studies. He says the current academic focus on terrorism reduces the richness of Islamic theology into political ideology.

"The study of religious thought proper (of the theology, of its premises, its internal complexities and its development) has been relegated to a subsidiary position," he writes. "Universities in the West must seek the kind of knowledge of other civilizations and cultures – particularly that of Islam – that is driven neither by ideological agendas nor collective fears." What's "cruelly lacking," Ramadan argues, is an objective study of Islamic law, legal scholars and philosophers as well as a "historical and critical approach to Islamic history and thought."

He goes on to criticize western scholars for ignoring the body of "fresh, compelling, audacious critical thought" emerging from contemporary Muslim societies, which are often eclipsed by controversies surrounding sharia law or the role of women. "There is a deep-down, deliberate process of evolution under way in every Islamic society in the world," writes Ramadan. "Far from rushing to conclusions, far from populist, ideological speech, the academic world must take this process seriously, study it, and present its outlines and implications."

Ottawa Citizen, 22 December 2007

"Here's what we know of Aqsa Parvez' death: Aqsa Parvez had problems at home stemming from intergenerational and, probably to some degree, cross-cultural conflicts, which made her distinct from other Canadian kids in exactly zero ways. She was killed in her home, something so mind-shatteringly evil there is nothing normal at all about it. Analyzing it as if it falls into some pattern or other is fruitless. Scrambling over Aqsa Parvez' prone dead body, wrenching off this bit or that, to position it so that its ultimate sacrifice is a sacrifice for our just cause, the obliteration of the hijab or the destruction of the myth of traditional multiculturalism or the age-old war against tradition, is disgusting."

Abdiel Abd Al Hayy takes on Irshad Manji et al.

Abdiel, 18 December 2007

Two members of the so-called Muslim Canadian Congress add their voices to the anti-Muslim campaign provoked by the tragic death of Aqsa Parvez.

National Post, 12 December 2007

For a response, see muslimmatters.org

MONTREAL — No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec's two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants' union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission Monday.

"We think that teachers shouldn't wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not," said Rene Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour. "The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service ... in order to ensure the secular character of the state," said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Quebec union of public employees.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new "charter of secularism" that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau, president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions. Such a charter is needed "to avoid anarchy," Carbonneau said Monday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation's 300,000 members at the commission's hearing on the integration of immigrants in Montreal. That's the same point of view as the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Quebec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

The unions' anti-religious attitude – especially the idea to ban hijabs on teachers – got a cold reception from groups as disparate as a Muslim women's aid organization and the nationalist St.-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montreal. "What that would do is close the door to Muslim women who want to teach," said Samaa Elibyari, a Montreal community radio host who spoke for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. "It goes against religious freedoms that are guaranteed in the (Quebec) Charter of Rights."

Elibyari said Muslim women routinely face discrimination in the workplace. They don't need unions on their back, too, she said. "When a young teacher calls a school to see if she can do an internship, and is asked on the phone straight out: 'Do you wear the veil?'; when a cashier at a supermarket is fired and her boss tells her 'The customers don't want to see that,' referring to the veil; when a secretary gets passed over for promotion even if she succeeds in all her French exams, and is told 'take off that tablecloth' – is that not discrimination?" Elibyari asked.

Canada.com, 10 December 2007