Salam Alsaadi

Palestinian-Syrian writer, residing in Canada, and is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at the University of Toronto.

The intentional car attack that left four Muslim family members dead and one child in hospital in London, Ontario, should not have come as any surprise. Islamophobia in Canada needed no further indications or fatal incidents to be taken seriously. The Québec City mosque massacre in 2017 was supposed to be that incident. Then a 58-year-old mosque caretaker was stabbed to death in Toronto in 2020. And in fact the National Council of Canadian Muslims identified more than 300 incidents of hatred targeting Muslims over the past seven years.

While violence attracts attention and highlights the scale of the problem, Islamophobia is not confined to such acts. It includes non-physical and microscopic aggressions in everyday life. It has become part of the Muslim community’s daily experience in Canada whenever they interact in public spaces — be it public transportation, shopping centres, or even playgrounds. Only by giving this issue the space it deserves in the Canadian media can the size and scope of the problem be realized. Women who wear a headscarf are particularly targeted. Islamophobia, in this case, intersects with misogyny and the perceived vulnerability of women that makes them ‘easy’ and ‘safe’ targets. Once in public spaces, they are taught by their parents to press their backs to the wall, which is one of several ‘techniques’ intended to maintain a resemblance of safety.

Islamophobia, thus, is not about certain isolated, extremist individuals, but extends deeper to those segments of society that maintain orientalist tropes and/or racist views that regard Muslims as uncivilized, irrational, dangerous ‘others.’  The most recent manifestation of that was during the Covid-19 epidemic.  Social media, also some notable media outlets, contributed to an image in which Muslims and mosques appear as super spreaders of the coronavirus — ignorers of physical distancing rules. But this kind of Islamophobia is not new. In the 2015 elections in Canada, debate about the veil became a central issue in the election and helped put Conservatives, who took a hostile stance, into a brief lead. While Zunera Ishaq described her choice to wear a veil in public as a “trivial and minor issue,” millions of Canadians, who represented more than thirty percent of voters in that election, disagreed, pushing the issue of Muslim women clothing from the private sphere to the public — transforming it into an issue that requires state intervention and policing.

Whenever such attacks against Muslims occur, attention often goes to the perpetrator as an individual while other factors related to societal views of Muslims, ideology, and history of racism in the country get little attention (when they are not totally ignored). Not all hate crimes are treated equal. Deadly attacks by Islamists have been linked to specific ideologies and certain extremist organizations. Hate crimes against Muslims in Canada, which have increased dramatically in recent years, deserve to be taken more seriously. They should also be considered in the context of flourishing of far-right organizations and the dark history of racism and oppression in this country.

For the most part of Canada’s history, the state contributed in the construction of widespread racist societal views against indigenous peoples, non-whites, French-speaking Canadians, and Jews as inferior populations, if not threats to the identity of the state. The Ku Klux Klan, the infamous white supremacist organization, established headquarters in Toronto in 1925. It managed to mobilize thousands of people across several cities in Ontario in which they held meeting and big rallies. These cities included London, where the latest despicable attack happened. This popularity was accompanied by the violent targeting of people of colour, Jews, French-speaking Canadians, and Canadians of Asian origin. The attacks included lynching and killing of Black people as well as an explosion at a Roman Catholic church in Barrie. The goal, as it was in the US following the liberation of Black people, was to maintain the dominance of one race over another and to ensure that all non-white peoples remain inferior in the social hierarchy.

As Canada embraced multiculturalism, minority groups came to be seen as particularly threatening and calls for their return, to their original countries, became central to the KKK’s rhetoric. Today, such white supremacist groups did not disappear — they moved online. They take advantage of social media to spread hateful extremist discourse and they organize in a decentralized, transnational form. This explains the rise in hate crimes and Islamophobia not only in Canada but in Western countries at large.

The London hate crime and before that, the uncovering of a mass grave at a residential school for 215 Indigenous children, shed light on the need to deal critically with Canada’s history and its present. Henna platform has been emphasizing this since launch a few weeks ago. The Canadian state’s narrative ranges from ignoring its colonial past and the essential role that racism has played, to underestimating both colonialism and racism, instead dealing with the country’s history in a descriptive, simplified, and uncritical manner. The media is not doing enough in this regard. It engages in the automatic circulation of a romantic image, constructed by the state. Immigrants are subject to a special indoctrination of Canadian history. They have to memorize a simplified, one-dimensional, conservative, and highly idealized version of Canada’s history offered in a guidebook to the newcomers. Such efforts by the state seem to succeed in shaping the narrative that immigrant communities tell about their new country in which they engage in a voluntary promotion of Canada as inherently good. This hides their agency and the complexity with which they have to grapple while living in Canada and working for a better further.

One can thus sympathize with today’s demands for the Canadian government to take tougher actions to tackle Islamophobia. Such demands are rooted in both the current horrifying tragedy in London but also in uncritically embracing the official narrative about this country.

Islamophobia is not an isolated sudden incident. It is an extension of a long history of ethnic and racial domination over various segments of the Canadian population. It is essential to reread that history and to rethink the problem of Islamophobia in order to discover intersections with other oppressed communities and within a broader structure of racism and domination.