Category Archives: Canada

Canadian PM accused of double standards over Omar Khadr

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Omar KhadrThe leader of one of Canada’s largest Islamic groups accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday of being indifferent to Omar Khadr’s plight because he’s “brown-skinned” and a Muslim.

In an opinion piece released to the media, Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, wrote that Harper is “callously” unconcerned about the 21-year-old Khadr, who faces trial before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in October.

“In this case, Mr. Harper is playing politics because of the backdrop of Islamophobia in this country,” Elmasry said. “This is where a leader comes in, to say this is really wrong and I have to correct that wrong by bringing this person [back to Canada] even if I lose some political points with Islamophobes.”

Khadr’s lawyers and others want Ottawa to repatriate Khadr – who was 15 in 2002 when he was accused of killing a U.S. army medic in Afghanistan – from the U.S. detention centre.

The prime minister repeated his vow to leave the case in U.S. hands following the release of a videotape showing a Canadian official interrogating a crying and despondent Khadr at Guantanamo Bay in 2004. The official was told the U.S. military had deprived the then 17-year-old of sleep for weeks to make him “more amenable and willing to talk,” according to a recently released internal report from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Elmasry contrasted Khadr’s case with that of dual Canadian-British citizen William Sampson, who was freed from a death sentence in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Prior to his release, Ottawa had said it had made pleas on Sampson’s behalf to the highest levels of the Saudi government.

“Why is Stephen Harper so callously indifferent to Omar Khadr’s case?” Elmasry wrote. “It’s painfully obvious: William Sampson is a white westerner while his fellow Canadian citizen, Omar Khadr, is brown-skinned and a Muslim.”

CBC News, 21 July 2008

Canadian mosque targeted with hate messages

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Moncton mosqueCodiac RCMP are attempting to link a series of spray-painted messages, including swastikas and racist declarations, at five different Moncton locations during the last 48 hours.

Two large swastikas and racist messages were spray-painted on the side of Moncton’s two-year-old mosque on High Street. One swastika was painted in black, while the other and the message were painted in red.

“Why?” asked worshipper Abdullah Delancey as he attempted to scrub the thick paint off the vinyl siding during yesterday afternoon’s heat wave. “It scares our kids. In fact, it scares a lot of our members. That’s probably why I am the only one here working on this. Some of our members are afraid to come back.”

Other offensive messages were found during the last two days at the Tiferes Israel Synagogue on Steadman Street, the Mapleton Road Shell station and Beaverbrook School and St. Hubert restaurant, both on Mountain Road.

At the mosque, Delancey, who also serves as a volunteer chaplain at The Moncton Hospital and is the father of seven and nine-year-old children, was confused by the hate crimes. “It’s sad because people come here to pray and it is a place of peace,” the 38-year-old Monctonian said. “In the past, we’ve had people throw rocks through the front window and now we have this.”

Times & Transcript, 10 July 2008

Study suggests ‘turban effect’ as a source of Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim-style turban is perceived as a threat, according to a new study, even by people who don’t realize they hold the prejudice, dubbed “the turban effect” by researchers. Research volunteers played a computer game that showed apartment balconies on which different figures appeared, some wearing Muslim-style turbans or hijabs and others bare-headed. They were told to shoot at the targets carrying guns and spare those who were unarmed, with points awarded accordingly.

People were much more likely to shoot Muslim-looking characters – men or women – even if they were carrying an innocent item instead of a weapon, the researchers found. “Whether they’re holding a steel coffee mug or a gun, people are just more likely to shoot at someone who is wearing a turban,” says author Christian Unkelbach, a visiting scholar at Australia’s University of New South Wales. “Just putting on this piece of clothing changes people’s behaviour.”

Unkelbach largely blames one-sided media portrayals for the bias.

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Quebec’s culture clash

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Is it likely that Hérouxville, set in Quebec’s overwhelmingly white and francophone heartland, will ever witness the stoning of a Muslim woman? Not really, mused Gérard Bouchard, the co-chair of a provincial commission looking into the reasonable accommodation of minorities at an October 2007 public hearing in Trois-Rivières, 30 minutes from the town. “We’re pretty far from stoning here,” he said.

Bouchard was speaking to Andre Drouin, a member of the Hérouxville town council which, in January 2007, created a national firestorm by adopting a code of conduct that banned the stoning of women and covering of faces, among other practices. Yet Drouin held his ground in the face of Bouchard’s skepticism. “Stoning takes place, and some of those people will want to come here. It’s important to be preventive.”

Exchanges like these have consumed the province since Premier Jean Charest formed the Bouchard-Taylor commission in February 2007, largely in response to the public firestorm over the Hérouxville news.

CBC News, 21 May 2008

Quebec report upholds right to wear hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim hijab. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s no real threat to Quebec values. And most women here wear it by choice, not because of coercion. That’s what the Bouchard-Taylor commission has concluded after a year of study costing $5 million.

In the final draft of their report – which was submitted to the provincial government yesterday and is to be made public at a press conference Thursday – scholars Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor say Quebec society will have a lot to lose if it restricts the wearing of the Muslim head scarf strictly to the home and outdoors.

Devout Muslim women suffer intimidation and discrimination in the Quebec job market for wearing the hijab the commissioners say, recounting testimony from several Muslims in public hearings last fall. For example: A young hijab-wearing woman studying to be a pharmacist “saw her job applications rejected by 50 pharmacies before she was finally able to land a job with an Arab pharmacist.”

Bouchard and Taylor talk of some Quebecers’ “often irrational” opposition to the hijab. They quote from a brief submitted to them in November by a woman in Longueuil, when their 17-city tour of the province swung through town: “In 2007, in Quebec, when a Muslim women wears the veil, I tremble,” the woman wrote.

It’s wrong to think that all veiled Muslim women are somehow under a man’s thumb, the commissioners also say. “There’s a strong feminist current among Muslim women. It follows an original path and is a model that differs from Quebec feminism. It goes along with the wearing of the head scarf.”

Montreal Gazette, 20 May 2008

Israeli ambassador warns of Muslim threat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

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

Ontario Human Rights Commission slams Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

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

Al-Jazeera’s newest (Jewish) star

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“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

In defence of Herouxville

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Herouxville (1)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