Some six years ago in 2010, Mr. Réal Nadeau, then Bloc Québécois Member of Parliament, sought to introduce a motion condemning Islamophobia in response to a petition submitted to the House of Commons .The House which refused to deal with it.
During the first week of October
2016, Mr. Frank Baylis, a Quebec Liberal Member of Parliament sponsored a new
petition initiated by one Samer Majzoub, a resident of Quebec, President of the
Canadian Muslim Forum (CMF).
The petition was opened and
closed for signature on June 8 and October 6, 2016 respectively. It garnered
69,742 signatures 1019 of which were obtained from other countries. The largest
number of petitioners in Canada lived in
Ontario (43573), Quebec (12308), Alberta (7760) and Manitoba (2782).Although
the petition describes the signatories as” citizens and residents” of Canada
but it provides neither a break-down of
the total according to the status of citizens and residents respectively nor a
breakdown of the nature, purpose and duration of the residency .
The concluding sentence of the petition
reads: “We, the undersigned, Citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the
House of Commons to join us in recognizing that extremist individuals do not
represent the religion of Islam, and in condemning all forms of
Islamophobia.”
During the week the petition
closed for signatures, Thomas Mulcair, Leader of the New Democratic Party,
moved a motion in condemning “all forms of Islamophobia”. The motion failed to
secure unanimous support of the House as
a result of some members of the Conservative Party, voting against the
motion. It is not known whether these
members were in fact expressing the wishes of the party or speaking in their
own names.
The following week, on October
13, 2016, the Conservatives were taken to task for blocking the motion in a
local newspaper column written by Amira Elghawaby, the communication director
at the National Council of Canadian Muslims. .
During the night of October 24,
2106, the mosque of the small Muslim community of the City of Sept-Iles, in Quebec
was broken in and vandalised. That same night, the culprit, a 38 year old
French –Canadian man, turned himself in. The police investigation based on the
film of the surveillance camera and their questioning of the offender reached
the preliminary conclusions that the crime was caused by his state of inebriety
and that in all likelihood the offence was not a hate crime.
Mr. Mulcair did not wait for the police
to complete the investigation and announce their conclusions about the facts of
the case. On October 26, 2016 he returned to the House with his motion and
requested that it be put to a vote. The motion reads: “That the House join the
more than 69,472 Canadian supporters of the House of Commons petition e-411 in
condemning all forms of Islamophobia.” It
was. And this time, all the members present, including the members of the Conservative
party voted in favour of it.
This motion was characterised by
Mr. Mulcair as the response of the House of Commons to the events of October 24
and to the increase in the rate of hate crimes committed against Muslims. In
his address to the House, prior to the introduction of the motion, Mr. Mulcair
said: “Mr. Speaker, hate crimes targeting Muslim Canadians have tragically
become more frequent in recent years. Each time we hear of another, it weighs
heavily on our hearts. We know that Canada is fundamentally a country of peace.
We celebrate diversity and differences. This is part of who we are. However, we
must protect these values. The sparks of hatred must be put out. History has
taught us that we cannot stand idly by. We need to fight against hatred
targeting any group of people because of their religion, ethnicity, language,
or sexual orientation. We must actively fight hate perpetrated against the
Muslim community, and denounce, in this House, Islamophobia in all its forms.
On behalf of all New Democrats, I offer my support to the Sept-Isles Muslim
community and remind all Muslim communities across Canada that we are for
them.”
The motion ignores the first
remedy sought by the petitioners who asked “the House of Commons to join [them]
that “extremist individuals do not represent the religion of Islam” .And, irony
of ironies, by so doing Mr. Mulcair
engaged in Islamophobia by implicitly
acknowledging or suggesting that Islamic terrorism exists
, both Mr. Mulcair and the
members of the House lumped together the citizen and resident petitioners into
one large group described as Canadians.
Did the Parliamentarians know
anything about the religious and political background, affiliations and
connections of Mr. Majzoub, who initiated the petition and of the CMF? Did they
even bother to ask the security agencies to brief them on these matters lest
they give legitimacy to him and to his organization? It does not appear that
they did.
In their unbridled enthusiasm and
almost indecent haste to pass the motion, the House did not bother to refer the
motion to a committee for further study. Had they done so, the committee might
have sought background information about Mr. Majzoub and the CMF from the
appropriate intelligence agencies and in the process obtain the kind of information
published by the well -known Egyptian journalist and author Saied Shoaaib, a
moderate Muslim who suffered a great deal at the hands of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt.
The committee might also have
invited interested parties to make submissions on the various issues raised by
the wording of the motion including the question as to whether the wording of
the motion, infringes the freedom of speech to the extent of silencing public
comment, debate and fair criticism of the conduct and demands of Muslim
organizations and individuals in Canada and abroad.
Minimally, the motion should have
included the proviso “Nothing in this motion shall be construed to diminish or
infringe upon any fundamental constitutional right protected by the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms.”
As to be expected, the passing of
the motion was greeted most enthusiastically by the CMF. In an article posted
in the website of the organization under the signature of Mr. Majzoub hailed it
under the headline “Canada’s Anti-Islamophobia Motion a Shining Example to
World.”
Although the motion is not
binding on Parliament, according to the CMF, having passed unanimously by the
House of Commons[although the number of members present and voting is not
known], its symbolic value rests on its moral strength conferred by the
unanimity of the vote in the House of Commons.
Symbolic of what and to what end?
On the first part of the question, past platitudes and disingenuous assertions,
the narrative of the petition is silent. On the second question, the narrative
is totally silent. We find a few vague clues in the written and oral statements
of Mr. Majzoub which in turn beg more questions.
In his article, he wrote: “The
next step is for the federal government to set up policies and orientations to
address and deal profoundly at all
levels, social, economic and political, with Islamophobia symptoms that
present themselves strongly in our society” (Italics mine). Mr. Majzoub did not care to disclose what he meant
by the phrase “profoundly at all levels” entails? He spoke obliquely about his objectives in
securing the passage of the motion, during his interview by Hussein Hobollah,
Chief Editor of Sade Al masreq (“Levantine Echos” spelled as Sada-al-Mashrek in
Quebec).The narrative of the interview published in this paper, in part, reads:
“Now that Islamophobia has been condemned, this is not the end but the
beginning, like Mr. Sameer Majzoub puts it. Having launched the petition first,
the interviewee says ‘We need to continue working politically and socially and
with the press.’ They used to doubt the existence of Islamophobia, but now we
do not have to worry about that…In the offing, we need to get policy makers to
do something…especially when it comes
to the Liberals…After condemnation, policies must be made.’ Mr. Majzoub says. ‘All
of us must work hard to maintain our peaceful, social and humanitarian struggle so that condemnation is followed by comprehensive policies.” (Italics mine). Humanitarian
struggle? What exactly is this struggle, for what and with whom? Comprehensive
policies? What kinds of policies and to what end?
If the reader is not
sure what the two men are talking about, surely they knew it but were not
interested in sharing it. On December
29,2010 David Ouellette, a Quebec blogger described this Lebanese
publication as one known, among other things for its Pro-Hezbollah positions,
for its odes to the head of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, for its poems insulting the Quebecois women.
Lest, I commit Islamophobic
offence to Mr. Majzoub, I will refrain from thinking of the old adage” tell me
who you frequent, and I will tell you who you are”.
Based on the strategy
of overseas and domestic Islamist organisations, the foregoing statements of
Mr. Majzoub, provides ample grounds that his organisation will initiate a
number of steps, one at the time, each creating a precedent to justify the next
one until the intended objectives are attained.
A little over one
month after the Islamophobia motion passed that Ms. Iqra Khalid, Member of
Parliament for Mississauga-Erin Mills,
in response to the motion, introduced her Motion M-103 which calls upon
the House to “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism
and religious discrimination” and
requests “that the standing Committee on Canadian Heritage undertake a study on how the government could develop a
whole- of – government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and
religious discrimination including Islamophobia, in Canada.”
The fact that Ms. Khalid
represents Mississauga-Erin Mills is not mere coincidence. It so happens that
the schools in the City of Mississauga are governed by the Peel District
School Board which is being pressured by three Muslim organizations led by
the Muslim Students Association (MSA) based on the campuses of the University
of Toronto, not to change the existing policy which permits students to give
sermons during Muslim religious services held on Fridays afternoons in school
premises and during school hours without outside interference.
It also happens that
MSA is an organization founded for university students by members of the Muslim
Brotherhood ( 1963), an extremist religious and political organisation based in
the Middle-East, with branches in Canada, United States and Europe among
others.
The lack of
definition in the motion is rather bizarre for the Parliament of a country
whose government , not long ago was the first country to sign the “Ottawa Protocol on Combating
Antisemitism of 2010”, established by the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism ( ICCA), which
adopted a detailed working definition of antisemitism.
And it is highly
improbable that all the members of Parliament who voted for the motion
including Mr. Mulcair, Mr. Majzoub and the people who signed the petition had
in mind the same definition.
Surely given the
large number of definitions of the term, that are readily available in
dictionaries and elsewhere, it would not have taken much effort for Mr. Mulcair
to locate one satisfactory to all the parties in the House and insert it in the
motion. Better still, he could have requested Mr. Mazjoub to provide the
definitions both of the term and the phrase.
Had Mr. Majzoub
inserted his definitions in the petition
it is impossible to tell how many persons would still have signed the petition; whether Mr. Mulcair would have introduced a motion which adopted
these definitions or whether the House would have even considered the motion, let alone vote for or against it.
Clearly, in passing the motion,
Parliament threw caution to the wind. It did so, by failing to take the
reasonable precaution of defining the term and the phrase “all forms of
Islamophobia” before voting on the motion to avoid confusion and misunderstandings
in the future. As it stands, nobody knows what to make of them. Clearly, our
parliamentarians have been had.
One person in Canada who readily
shares his definition of “Islamophobia” is Mr. Thomas Woodley, President of
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME). He defines
Islamophobia as “dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force.”(Italics mine). Decidedly, a sweeping
definition with a very low level of tolerance
of people who dislike, as most Canadians do, Muslims who
are members or supporters of radical Islamic organizations which champion and engage in terrorism or harass
and silence those who do not share their Islamic political ideology.
If Mr. Majzoub happens to share this definition,
a substantially similar one or a more sweeping one, it is understandable why he
withheld his definition from public and parliamentary scrutiny.
The fact of the matter is that neither
my family nor I or the immigrants from four corners of the world including
moderate Muslims who managed to leave or flee their native land in order to
avoid getting caught in religious violence or religiously inspired oppressive political
ideology which guides political regimes or movements, did not immigrate to
Canada only to have to contend with such organisations, persons and ideologies.
Last but not least, I did not
find about the passage of the motion and the facts surrounding the event until
November 10, 2016 when I read an article bearing the same date published in an
American international electronic publication under the heading “Canada:
Parliament Condemns Free Speech” that severely criticised the way the motion
was framed and passed, some of which criticism I have adopted here. Strangely enough,
most of my supplementary reading on the subject originated from Quebec, a small
Lebanese newspaper in Montreal, the English edition of a Turkish daily
published in Istanbul and in two of the blogs in Huff posts “Canada Politics”.
In all of this, where was the
English Canadian print media and why did it fail to report the story? And what
about CBC, CTV national and regional news? Nothing. Zip. Is it self-censorship;
fear of being accused of Islamophobia, or worse, fear of getting into serious
trouble? At all events, I suspect that their secret common motto must be “Not
all the news that is fit to print or broadcast”.
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