MONTREAL—By appointing Amira Elghawaby as his lead representative on the Islamophobia file, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has thrown the equivalent of a political grenade into his Quebec trenches.
The damage to his party and to the cause she is tasked with advancing could be consequential.
Here is an early assessment.
At week’s end, Elghawaby’s appointment had been disavowed by most of the leading figures of Quebec’s political class.
The noxious effects of identity politics have been on full display in Canada since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Jan. 26 nomination of Amira Elghawaby as his government’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia.
In Quebec, the reaction to Ms. Elghawaby’s appointment has gone far beyond the boilerplate outrage that usually awaits external critics of the province’s efforts to preserve its language, identity and values. This time, the indignation is real and proportional to the offence Mr. Trudeau committed in promoting someone who has perpetuated stereotypes about Quebeckers as hostile toward “others.”
Canada’s new anti-Islamophobia representative apologizes for comments about Quebecers
OTTAWA – Canada’s new special representative on combating Islamophobia says she is sorry that her words have hurt Quebecers.
Amira Elghawaby apologized in English before a meeting today with Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet.
She’s a liar and she ain’t “Canada’s” anything. Just a cheap bit of vote whoring by Trudeau.
A decade of Stephen Harper as Prime Minister was more “perhaps more hurtful” than 9/11, a federal inclusion advisor suggested in a 2015 newspaper column. Amira Elghawaby, in other commentaries, complained middle-class Canadians never experienced inequity and advocated for Muslim prayer in public schools since “parents of these children pay taxes.”
The Quebec government is calling on the federal government to withdraw its support of Amira Elghawaby, the new representative to combat Islamophobia, only four days after she was first appointed.
This comes a day after her attendance at the sixth commemoration of the deadly mosque attack in Quebec City, honouring the six men who were killed in 2017 when a gunman opened fire just before 8 p.m. in the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Sainte-Foy neighbourhood.
Since her appointment on Thursday, the journalist and human rights activist has been pressured to clarify her position on Quebec’s secularism law.
More… Trudeau Appoints Leftist ‘Anti-Hate‘ Group Founder To Fight ‘Islamophobia‘
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has appointed a former member of an Antifa-aligned group who claimed Quebecers had “anti-Muslim sentiment” to a government position to fight Islamophobia.
The Canadian Prime Minister announced the appointment of activist Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s first-ever special representative of the government for the fight against Islamophobia on Thursday.
In 2018, Jasmin Zine, a sociology and Muslim studies professor at Wilfrid Laurier University was awarded a federal grant of $24,900 for a research project resulting in a report titled “The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North.” Its driving theme is the need to expose a matrix of people and groups who “demonize and marginalize Islam and Muslims in Canada.” Zine rightly identifies certain white-supremacy groups that have been called out for their racism many times. But Zine’s principal “watch list” targets individuals (including me) and organizations with views regarding radical Islam and Israel that Zine personally disagrees with.
Five episodes of South Park have been banned from HBO Max for depicting Islamic prophet Muhammad, reminding fans that virtually every other religion is considered fair game for making fun of — except for Islam.
South Park, which started in 1997, has five episodes that depict Muhammad: “Super Best Friends,” “Cartoon Wars Part I & II,” “200,” and “201,” all of which are missing from the HBO Max lineup, notes Screen Rant.
David Hofstedter: Antisemitic rot, on university campuses and in society, is worse than we thought
Recent examples of antisemitism in North America have exposed a horrifying and deep-seated prejudice that is far more dangerous (if that’s possible) than we already knew. You might think that post-secondary students and faculty members would be among the more enlightened people in the world when it comes to social and political issues. Think again. Neo-Nazism is on the rise on university campuses, including the University of Toronto.
… This level of antisemitism has been building up for years, manifesting itself in beatings and the desecration of synagogues. All of this is in the face of an increased effort to combat racism. Remember that the Nazi German culture was revered prior to the Second World War, despite the philosophy of white supremacy and hatred toward Jews and other minorities.
This is an an astounding piece of willful blindness and or outright deceit. In fact it seems born of ideologically driven extremism.
According to the author Anti-Semitism on college campuses is the fault of Neo-Nazis. Muslims & Islam aren’t mentioned at all. Nor is the Israeli-Islam conflict.
Neo-Nazis are the Big Man on Campus when it comes to anti-Semitism. Who knew?
Bernie Farber, well known Nazi Hunter in his own mind, lends his support. Why anyone would seek out Bernie’s thoughts are a mystery given his credibility is at virtual zero due to his association with the Antifa supporting far-left extremist group CAHN. But they don’t mention CAHN for some reason only Bernie’s previous role as head of the defunct CJC.
Documentary maker Meg Smaker hopes that British film audiences will help her where those in the US could not. Her film The UnRedacted, about ex-Guantanamo Bay inmates undergoing “rehab” in Saudi Arabia, screens this week at an indie cinema in north London, its first British outing since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Given the film’s many rave reviews, a seven-day run at the ArtHouse Crouch End may seem a somewhat low-key release. A clue as to why lies in one of the reviews quotes on the film’s poster. It hails it as a “masterpiece”, but adds: “Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel about it until you see it yourself.”
Comedian Bill Maher knocked liberals for refusing to criticize radical Islam while attacking anyone who dares call out its dangerous precepts.
Maher issued his critique during an episode of his Club Random podcast on Monday as he interviewed famed atheist Richard Dawkins. The conversation first centered on the Sundance Film Festival pulling the documentary Jihad Rehab in response to a mob of leftists that claimed it pushed Islamaphobia.
“We’ve come to this place where you can’t even go near a topic, certain topics, without the mob coming after you,” Dawkins said.
A US paper of record’s podcast on the Trojan Horse affair is activism disguised as journalism
Anybody who has read The New York Times (NYT) recently knows the American newspaper of record has it in for Britain. Its correspondents describe us “cavorting in swamps” and surviving on a diet of “porridge and boiled mutton”. It reports that Brexit has ruined Easters and Christmases past and caused shortages of “candy”. Even the death of Queen Elizabeth prompted columns condemning the “repugnant royal demand for deference”.
How an identity-politics-obsessed mob destroyed a young filmmaker’s documentary
At the beginning of director Meg Smaker’s documentary Jihad Rehab, we hear a former Guantanamo detainee saying, “Meg, can I tell you something?” Sure, a woman’s voice says. “In every story there is good and bad,” the man goes on in a gentle Saudi accent. “But . . . it’s a thin line. The American government did bad, bad, bad things against us. But at least I am honest with what I did.”
The film festival gave Meg Smaker’s “Jihad Rehab” a coveted spot in its 2022 lineup, but apologized after an outcry over her race and her approach.
Meg Smaker felt exhilarated last November. After 16 months filming inside a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused terrorists, she learned that her documentary “Jihad Rehab” was invited to the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious showcases in the world.
Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival’s screening were strong.
“The absence of absolutes is what’s most enriching,” The Guardian stated, adding, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” Variety wrote:
The film “feels like a miracle and an interrogative act of defiance.”
But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.
Link fixed.
And misled Christians in the process.
In the late 1930s Catholic historian Hillaire Belloc wrote:
It [Islam] is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…
It seemed an unlikely prediction. At the time, the Islamic world was practically moribund. A comeback did not seem to be in the cards. Yet, Belloc was proved right. Within four decades, Islam was once again a power to be reckoned with.
In the West alternative models of civilization are competing for the upper hand and the healthy one is losing.
In an age like ours, so talkative and so free, it is always a bit surprising to see a certain moderation, to put it mildly, about events such as the stabbing of the novelist Salman Rushdie, threatened since 1989 for his ” irreverence towards Islam ”, or the beheading of a professor in front of a French school. The point is that in the West alternative models of civilization are competing for the upper hand and the healthy one is losing.
There is, of course, our heritage, built on Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. The legacy of Europe, the legacy of the West. But two strong rivals have emerged from this legacy.
One of these is imported: Islam, which is not just a metaphysical faith, but an alternative civilization to ours and which wants to replace it.
