Category Archives: Canada

Islamophobia has surged in Quebec since Charter proposed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim Council of Montreal press conference

Islamophobia has surged in Quebec since the introduction of the proposed Charter of Quebec Values, the Muslim Council of Montreal warned Tuesday, with an alarming rise in attacks, specifically against Muslim women.

Muslims made 117 complaints of verbal or physical abuse to a local anti-Islamophobia group between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, compared to a total of 25 complaints (or 3.5 complaints per month on average) in the nine-month period of January to September 2013.

This spike coincides with the kick-off of the debate on the Parti Québécois government’s proposed charter of values, which proposes to prevent public servants from wearing “ostentatious” religious symbols, including the hijab and niqab.

“Premier Marois’s introduction of the charter of values has unleashed an alarming number of xenophobic and Islamaphobic attacks,” the council’s president, Salam Elmenyawi, told a press conference.

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Canadian city pulls Geller ads

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Edmonton bus with Geller ad

EDMONTON — The city will re-examine the way controversial Edmonton Transit ads are approved after pulling anti-Muslim bus placards offering to help Muslim girls threatened with honour killing.

“The minute I found out about these ads, I called over to Charlie Stolte, our general manager of Edmonton Transit Service, and showed my displeasure,” Coun. Amarjeet Sohi said Tuesday. “They target one group, and in my mind they were very discriminatory and racist, and there’s no place for that kind of bigotry on city property.”

The posters on the back of five buses were taken down Tuesday, eight days after they went up.

They show a photo of young women above the caption “Muslim girls honor killed by their families. Is your family threatening you? Is there a fatwa on your head? We can help.” There’s a link to FightforFreedom.us, which warns about the “encroachment of Islam on western civilization.”

The site is operated by SIOA (Stop Islamization of America), which put up the same material in Tampa, Fla. It has also run ads on buses in New York, San Francisco and Miami aimed at people facing family threats who wanted to leave Islam, and fought plans to build a mosque near New York’s destroyed World Trade Center site.

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Muslims real target of charter, law prof. says

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MONTREAL — Muslims are the real target of the proposed charter of Quebec values, while kippot and turbans are “collateral damage” in the provincial government’s plan to eliminate religious symbols from the public service, a McGill University law professor says.

Speaking Oct. 20 at a panel discussion on the issue at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, Daniel Weinstock said Islamophobia is “the elephant in the room” in the push to secularize Quebec.

“We are not at the centre [of this debate], but as Jews, according to our ethical tradition, we have to stand up resolutely for our Muslim brothers and sisters,” Weinstock said, receiving widespread applause.

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Calgary’s first Muslim mayor cruises to re-election

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nenshi reacts after he was elected Calgary mayor for a second term in CalgaryCalgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who three years ago became the first Muslim elected to the office in a major North American city, easily won re-election on Monday after a first term dominated by a stellar performance during devastating floods.

Nenshi, 41-year-old Harvard graduate and former McKinsey & Co consultant, won a national profile for his response to the floods that swamped large parts of the city of 1.1 million in Canada’s costliest natural disaster.

He won 74 percent of the vote against eight opponents, including a former provincial cabinet minister, a marijuana advocate and an anti-abortion activist.

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Diverse group protests against PQ’s values charter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Montreal anti-Charter protestSeveral hundred protesters took to Montreal streets again Sunday to express their opposition to the PQ’s proposed Charter of Quebec Values, legislation that would ban provincial workers from wearing certain symbols of religious adherence at work.

The march was organized by a group that called itself “Together against the Xenophobic Charter” and attracted demonstrators from a wide swathe of the political and demographic spectrum, including anarchists, devout Muslims, Jews and people of many other stripes.

“I’m here against the charter because it’s depriving people of their right to human expression,” said demonstrator Norman Simon. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an anarchist, a separatist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Canadian, a Communist, I don’t care. But what I do care about is deprivation of rights. There’s the right to choose in this world and the Marois government isn’t honouring that, so we have to insist on co-existence,” said Simon.

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Canadian actor apologises for derogatory comments about Muslim women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Quebec veteran actress and film personality Denise Filiatrault apologized Thursday night on Facebook and Twitter for derogatory comments she made about Muslim women who wear hijabs in an interview Tuesday on radio station 98.5 with Paul Arcand.

“Some of the words I used to describe veiled women … were clearly inappropriate and went beyond my thinking,” wrote Filiatrault, 82. “I apologize to anyone who was offended. I’ve always been very colourful in my way of expressing myself but I admit that this debate requires a more measured choice of words.”

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Québec inclusif replies to Janette Bertrand

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Quebec writer and feminist Janette Bertrand has published (in four different newspapers) an open letter “To the women of Quebec”, co-signed by 19 other women (“the Janettes” as they have become known), which bizarrely claims that the proposed law banning the hijab is equivalent to the law granting women the right to vote. The letter reads:

All my life I have fought for equality between men and women and I have always thought that if we want to keep this equality we have to be vigilant. At this point the principle of gender equality seems to me to have been compromised in the name of freedom of religion. I would like to remind you that men always and still today use religion in order to dominate women, to put them in their place, that is to say below them.

Faced with the prospect of a step backwards I feel the need to speak out. So I agree that there should be a charter of Quebec values ​​– often rightly called the charter of secularism – and that the government should legislate. In this regard, we would never have had the right to vote, we would still be under the domination of men and the clergy, if the government of the time had not legislated. At that time, I recall, many men and women did not want this law, yet without the right to vote, where would we be today?

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Ontario: Muslim students subject to hate crime

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Six Queen’s students are the victims of a hate crime that took place on Sunday, according to Kingston police.

The male students, who self-identify as Muslim, were walking home from Empire Theatres near Division St. and Highway 401 at approximately 1:30 a.m. when they were assaulted by four Caucasian males. The assault itself happened closer to the downtown core, at Fraser and Patrick Streets.

Approximated to be between 18-25 years old, the group approached the students on bicycles, yelling hate-based profanities and racial slurs while wielding a baseball bat.

One of the victims of the attack said they were approached by the males, who were drunk and offering to sell them drugs. “As they turned onto Fraser St. these four guys started chasing [us] who are all Muslim and they started screaming out … foul languages and racial hate speeches,” the student said, adding they originally thought the attackers wielded a machete.

“We were terrified because we thought it was really a machete and the guy was going to literally slit open and kill everyone,” he said. “They caught one guy and they hit him on the biceps and the thigh area, but it turned out to be a baseball bat, not a machete.”

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Calgary mayoral candidate blasts rival’s Muslim faith

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Larry HeatherCalgarians will be tempting God’s wrath if they re-elect Naheed Nenshi to the mayor’s chair in the coming election, a mayoral candidates forum heard on Monday.

The comments were made by mayoral candidate Larry Heather, who describes himself as the Christian option on the ballot.

According to the Calgary Sun, Heather told the forum, with eight candidates present, how wrong it was for Calgarians to elect someone who took the oath of office on the Qur’an rather than the Bible, as Nenshi did in 2010.

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