“Islamophobia”

Media reports and videos on social media, immediately after the October 7, 2023 attack and to this day, document a significant segment of Canada’s Muslim community’s targeting, bullying, and trying to intimidate the Jewish community in the country, with disturbing protests often thousands strong. As one recent X post stated, “it’s open season on Jews in Canada.”

While the U.S. has had its share of extremist pro-Palestinian supporters, marching with signs, flags, and banners of Hamas, Hizbullah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other terror groups, and targeting of the U.S. Jewish community, the size and scope of this phenomenon in Canada is even more pervasive and severe – and at times terrifying.

Islamism — defined most benignly as “the belief that Islam should influence political systems”— is, according to Joe Adam George, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s National Security Analyst, the “biggest existential threat to Canada within its borders.” Yet, in the English-language leaders’ election debate, when Bloc Québécois leader François Blanchet dangled the word “Islamism” for discussion, nobody took the bait.

Writing on the subject in these pages last year, George observed that, unlike China and Russia, “what makes Islamists such a formidable force to reckon with is their ability to weaponize Islam to silence, punish and deter” their critics. One Islamist group, the politically influential National Council of Canadian Muslims ( NCCM ), is particularly active on this front.