Ottawa’s special representative on combating Islamophobia says she’s alarmed by a recent revival of decades-old tropes about Muslims supporting terrorist violence.
She said she’s seen “extremely troubling” instances of people being maligned for peacefully expressing support for Palestinians and urging that Israel be held accountable for its restrictions on aid in Gaza and the high civilian death toll in the enclave.
“The same types of narratives that we had seen and we talked about post-9/11 have been resurfacing over the past two years”, she said.
“We’re constantly being viewed as engaging in, for example, what some politicians and columnists and media folks will call ‘hate marches’ when involved in any type of protests for Gaza”.
She said that kind of commentary is a grim echo of widespread claims in 2001 that “Muslims are quintessential violent radicals, that they must be surveilled and disciplined by the state”.
Elghawaby said police forces tell her that most of the protests on the war in Gaza take place without hate speech or calls for violence.
“There is consensus across the board that hate speech targeting any community — whether it’s Muslims, whether it’s Jewish people, whether it’s Indigenous, any community at all — has to be taken fully seriously, with consequences meted out”, she said.
“Many Canadians of all backgrounds do believe that there is terrible oppression happening in Palestine, that there’s an occupation”, she said. It’s been described by human rights organizations as apartheid. Genocide scholars, and organizations have called what’s happening now a genocide.
