Islamic association advocates for additional education

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This article was published 24/10/2017 (2962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Anti-Muslim incidents are on the rise in Manitoba, according to a provincial group that has asked Parliament to boost educational initiatives and workplace accommodations to curb discrimination.

“We are experiencing a palpable increase in incidents that raise serious concerns,” Idris Elbakri, past-president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, told the Commons heritage committee Monday.

He said graffiti and vandalism targeting Muslims, Jews and other minorities used to appear every few years in Winnipeg — not months — and bacon is being mailed to mosques and strung on windshields. (The consumption of pork is prohibited in Islam.)

Muslims are worried that “fringe racists, who mostly spread their message online or spray graffiti under the cover of night” will successfully “claim public space and normalize their message as part of our nation’s discourse,” Elbakri testified at hearings on Islamophobia.

Elbakri said he only has anecdotal evidence, but is “confident in saying that we have seen a spike over the past couple of years” in the province. That correlates to a national trend of reported hate crimes more than doubling between 2012 and 2015, according to Statistics Canada data.

He recalled a torrent of disparaging online comments when the Canadian Museum for Human Rights featured a Manitoba Muslim family in a promotional campaign.

He said Muslims are similarly jolted by incidents, such as when a family came home New Year’s Eve to see a gift box on their Wolseley neighbourhood porch containing a rock painted with a swastika and the words “Die Jew.”

But MIA president Osaed Khan said Muslims were moved by an “outpouring of love and support” in Winnipeg after a gunman slaughtered six at a mosque near Quebec City in January and more recently when counter-protesters drowned out a rally by the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam.

St. Boniface-area MP Dan Vandal, who sits on the committee, said he was troubled by the story of bacon appearing on someone’s window.

“That’s really disturbing, because it means that person was followed and targeted. That’s the sort of thing that we just need to quell across the country, but (it’s) especially disturbing when it comes from the community you’ve grown up in,” Vandal said.

The ongoing hearings stemmed from anti-Islamophobia motion M-103, which caused heated demonstrations across Canada by a mix of white-nationalist groups and free-speech advocates. The former claimed the motion was a backdoor effort to implement Sharia law (despite motions lacking any enforcement in Parliament), while free-speech advocates charge the term “Islamophobia” was ill-defined.

Vandal says his office got “a noticeable number” of concerned calls, which he blamed on “misinformation” from The Rebel — a fringe, but influential, online media outlet that has slid from supporting the oilsands in 2015 to posting an anti-Semitic video this past summer.

“It’s the old, extreme right-wing preying on people’s fears,” he said. “I think that’s a significant part of what we need to combat with this discussion.”

The Manitoba Islamic Association joined other groups in suggesting Ottawa implement an anti-discrimination strategy encompassing educational initiatives and workplace accommodations for things such as religious dress and holidays.

Vandal says that could look like public-educational campaigns by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, or changes to the employment code that only governs federal public servants. The vast majority of Canadian workers fall under provincial labour codes and Ottawa has virtually no say in provinces’ school curricula.

Elbakri said roughly 20,000 Muslims live in Manitoba — 1.5 per cent of the population — with most living in Winnipeg but also in Brandon, Thompson, Winkler and Altona. He and Khan travelled to Ottawa to testify Oct. 4, but unexpected House votes caused MPs to cut the meeting short. They testified through a videoconferencing link.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca