The sinister political utility of "Islamophobia."

Weekend Special: Navigate your way through the shouting and the spin and you'll soon find yourself facing the mangled core of the Trudeau government's idea of what Canada should become.

Hell of a week. I should start by thanking everyone for their kind wishes and condolences on the passing of my ma. I found it impossible to keep up with all the emails and messages and texts and so on, especially from Real Story subscribers who left comments on last weekend’s post, so I just gave up, overwhelmed. But I noticed you. Thank you.

And because there was no mid-week newsletter, along with this weekend special there’ll be a surprise guest author in a second weekend newsletter tomorrow. No paywall today or tomorrow. But you know you really should:

As I was saying, hell of a week.

The good news is almost every cabinet minister and Member of Parliament showed up to vote in favour of accommodating 10,000 Uyghur Muslim refugees in Canada, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry says we’ve hurt the regime’s feelings. A bonus! I’ll have more backstory about all that in either a column or a newsletter or both. The news is not as uplifting as I would have wanted, I regret to say.

Another big deal this week, and amusingly ironic: Dominic Barton, the notorious errand-runner for the Uyghurs’ persecutors in Beijing - and he earned that reputation before he was appointed ambassador - was questioned in committee in Parliament this week. The Opposition has been holding the Trudeau government’s feet to the fire over its ridiculously expensive relationship with McKinsey and Company, the global consultancy that Barton built into a drug-pushing public relations agency for torture states during his tenure as McKinsey’s big boss.

Is Islamophobia Just Any Old Thing Ottawa Says It Is?

To repeat what I wrote only a couple of weeks ago when I was inquiring into the “systemic Islamophobia” that Prime Minister Justice Trudeau has insinuated is a real thing in the Canada Revenue Agency: The sociopathology of hysterical anti-Muslim bigotry is very real in Canada, it gets people killed, and if you’re that way inclined you’re not welcome here.

Now, to business.

My column in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen this week was about the conniptions over the appointment of the unfortunate social-justice activist Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s first Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia. The hullabaloo is a fascinating teachable-moment sort of thing about a darkness at the heart of this government.

Here’s the gist of my column.

It’s unfair to Elghawaby that she was engulfed in a whirlwind of opprobrium and hurt feelings pretty well from the moment of her appointment. But the whole point of Elghawaby’s job — who she’s supposed to represent, exactly, and what she’s expected to be combating, exactly — has been obscured from the get-go in a shambles of pious boasts, half-truths and cynical disinformation.

This is Amira Elghawaby. It’s not her fault.

There are two important things to know about the spin and smoke and mirrors attending to Elghawaby’s appointment. The first is easy to deal with: This is the way the Liberal government wants it. There’s just no way Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is going to tell the truth about what’s really going on here, not least because of the Liberal Party’s slide in the polls. Abacus Data this week reported “the largest lead we have measured for the Conservatives since the 2015 election.” And the Liberals are roughly tied for third place with the Bloc and the Conservatives in Quebec.

Okay, polls are just snapshots of moments in time, but here’s the more important thing: It’s starting to become just too painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that something darkly dystopian has become of Trudeau’s whole mission in political life, a vision he described quite plainly to the New York Times as he was settling into the Prime Minister’s Office back in 2015. It’s the transformation of Canada into a “post-national state” with “no core identity” and “no mainstream,” as I persist in reminding everyone.

Trudeau took his election mandate as a licence to abandon the customs, conventions, alliances and traditions that made this country everything that it was, for good or ill. The “narrative” he put in play was that this country was a genocidal racist colonial white supremacy settler-state until he came along, and if you opposed his plans to make everything better, well, you know what you are and you should be ashamed of yourself.

It took Xi Jinping’s precipitous imperialist belligerence and his hostage-taking of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resolve of the Biden administration to read Canada the Riot Act in a particularly frightening tone of voice to muck things up. Trudeau has been forced to at least give the appearance of putting the brakes on the big idea of ditching Canada’s Anglo-American economic and foreign-policy model and building Canada’s middle-class prosperity on the whims and favours of the state-capitalist oligarchy in Beijing.

But the Trudeau government is still well on its way to the entrenchment of an endless multiplicity of federally subsidized and easily manipulable racial, religious, ethnic and gender identities in all the places where a nuanced patriotism and a vibrant, immigrant-friendly multiculturalism used to be. The Liberals’ paradoxically illiberal hostility to free speech and their zeal for “discourse” hegemony are central to this mission.

My friend Kaveh Shahrooz, the human rights lawyer and prominent figure in the pro-democracy Iranian diaspora, noticed this astutely a couple of years ago. It was in the way Trudeau responded to terrorist atrocities in France that were ostensibly carried out to avenge the honour of the Prophet Mohammed. Trudeau’s response was “effectively a call for enacting blasphemy laws,” Kaveh wrote.

A defining feature of Trudeau’s “post-national” ambitions is a preoccupation with monitoring, regulating and controlling the way Canadians talk about Islam, about China, about Indigenous people, about race, about gender and about the Trudeau government’s own various “diversity, equity and inclusion” formulae.

Directly related: Just this week, Bill C-11 passed the Senate with amendments, and Senator David Adams Richards, the brilliant and beloved novelist, was on fire about it: “This law will be one of scapegoating all those who do not fit into what our bureaucrats think Canada should be.”

This speech-control project occurs not only at the macro level but at the micro level, right down to the kids around the dinner table. Ordinary Canadians, the poor dears, need Ottawa’s help in recognizing “harmful content online,” says Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, and here’s a new tranche of grants and subsidies from last month to help us get ourselves sorted. It’s called the Digital Citizen Initiative, and it purports to promote “civic, news, and digital media literacy through funding third-party educational activities and programming to help citizens become resilient against disinformation.”

My colleague Jamie Sarkonak has had a look at what this is really all about (it’s about enlisting interventions to assist the government in what Sarkonak calls “regulating misinformation and wrongthink”). One project proposes to identify how “disinformation in complex media messages that are subtly racist and/or incorrect and perpetuate stereotypes and racist attitudes affect Black francophone Edmontonians.” Another looks into “queerphobic cyber-violence.” Another investigates the “alt-right” among Canadians who play video games. Another studies “the fight against misinformation among young people within their family environments.”

It should not be forgotten that Ottawa’s enthusiasm for policing the way Canadians talk about “racism” and ‘diversity” is exactly what allowed a hideously antisemitic personality from the Kremlin’s Radio Sputnik and Tehran’s Press TV to devour hundreds of thousands of federal dollars over several years without let or cease. The Beirut-based Laith Marouf had his money supply shut down last year only after Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriquez and Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen could no longer ignore the public outrage that erupted when this was disclosed: Marouf was being paid to lecture Canadian broadcasters in a project called Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting: Conversation & Convergence.

The mania for rooting out “settler colonialism” has gotten to the point that antisemites can come and go as they please in Ottawa without anyone even noticing, and it’s become official federal policy to lavish funds on the Canadian iteration of the theocratic-fascist Muslim Brotherhood.

These morbid disorders should be expected to arise when you deliberately and officially conflate the interests of ordinary Canadian Muslims with dodgy Islamic Muslim organizations, and when you conflate hysterical anti-Muslim bigotry with principled, liberal opposition to religious extremism and the long reach into Canada from Muslim-majority torture states that persist in trying to push the United Nations to outlaw “Islamophobia.”

Just one thing it means is that anyone who objects to this tawdry state of affairs will be ritually shamed as an Islamophobe. Which is pretty much the utility of convenience in Ottawa’s Islamophobia preoccupations.

About Amira Elghawaby, I’m sure she’s a very pleasant person and I’m reliably advised that on a personal level this is very much the case. So fair play to Elghawaby, but the choice to appoint her as Ottawa’s Islamophobia interlocutor was almost comically perfect as an exercise in pandering to the soft-palmed, radical-chic nomenklatura that makes up the Anglophone wing of Trudeau’s activist base.

A quick review of the postures Elghawaby has adopted: Removing the Queen as Canada’s head of state: check. Sneers at Canada Day as a festival of Judeo-Christian storytelling: check. Has attended WE Charity functions and squealed approvingly about both Justin Trudeau and Trudeau’s mum: check. Big supporter of the Liberals’ proposed online harms legislation: check.

Founding member of the board of the antifa-friendly, increasingly loopy Canadian Anti-Hate Network: check. Used to work for the CBC, now appears routinely in the opinion pages of the Toronto Star: check. Thinks former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper was actually worse for the image of Canadian Muslims than Al Qaida’s 9-11 atrocities: check.

Unfortunately for her, Elghawaby’ s commentaries on Quebec’s secularist laicité obsessions (“the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment”) immediately ran up against Team Trudeau’s need to pander to voters in Quebec. So she was made to apologize for what was probably the most reasonable and least intemperate of her various avant-garde standpoints.

And then Trudeau attempted to reconfigure Elghawaby’s contentious interpretation of a Leger Marketing poll of Quebeckers as her innocent misunderstanding of the roots of Quebeckers’ aversion to public displays of religiosity. “It comes from a genuine and very real place,” Trudeau said on Wednesday, namely Quebeckers’ historical resentment of the repressive tendencies of the Catholic Church.

This was a really weird thing to say, because the Leger poll in question found that while only 28 percent of respondents had a positive view of Islam, 60 per cent expressed positive views of Catholicism. “The historic baggage of Catholicism and its negative role in Quebec isn’t part of the identity of a lot of Quebecers despite what we hear from a lot of thought leaders”, said Jack Jedwab of the Association for Canadian Studies, which commissioned the poll.

All this would be amusing except that for the backstory here. Endorsed by Trudeau and championed by Elghawaby’s former employer, the National Council of Canadian Muslims, it’s a full-on, out in the open propaganda and lobbying campaign. The objective is to put a foot down on the alarm among liberal Muslims and national-security agencies arising from the presence of reactionary, grossly antisemitic and foreign-influenced Islamist elements within Canada’s Muslim leadership.

Real Story subscribers will be familiar with the subject, which I laid out in detail in a newsletter last month. The specific point of that project is to restrain the Research and Analysis Division of the Canada Revenue Agency’s Charities Directorate in its collaborations with Canada’s intelligence agencies, the RCMP, border-security officials and Department of Finance investigators.

The purpose of the collaboration is to shut down money-laundering and terrorist-financing operations that exploit Canada’s Muslims by using Muslim-centred charities as a cover to skirt Canada’s sanctions laws and jump national-security guardrails.

A deliberately opaque definition of the term “Islamophobia” is critical to disrupting the work of the CRA on this front, precisely because it has allowed the CRA’s work to be criticized on the grounds that it is evidence of “systemic” Islamophobia. Hence the demand from the NCCM and the Muslim Association of Canada that the CRA’s audits should be called off entirely.

There’s a 235-page handbook setting out how to make this sort of public-policy mischief. It’s been endorsed by no less a personality than Amira Elghawaby. It’s called The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North.

Too bad, really. Authored by Jasmine Zine of Wilfrid Laurier University, the project might have been a worthwhile, but it tips its hand right off the top in its acknowledgements page. The book began in partnership with Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative on Islamophobia, which is generously funded by Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

There’s an entire chapter on Native Informants: Muslim Dissidents and Ex-Muslims. So Muslim dissenters are the bad guys in this, along with the unambiguously bigoted and hysterically anti-Muslim Blood and Honour, Combat 18 and Soldiers of Odin. Got it.

Is this the way Trudeau’s new Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia sees things? Well:

Kaveh Shahrooz کاوه شهروز @kshahrooz

.@HonAhmedHussen: in 2021, I told the CBC that we need to distinguish between anti-Muslim hatred [obviously bad] and opposition to Islam as an ideology [which is everyone's right]. This was Ms. @AmiraElghawaby's reply. Will she make that distinction in her new role?

Ahmed Hussen @HonAhmedHussen

An important day today for Canada. I am pleased to announce the appointment of the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby. https://t.co/hUO2xPI7Sw https://t.co/aMb2cc1rN8

I suppose you could say the question was answered there, but you never know. Elghawaby has a habit of saying something morally unobjectionable while slipping in something else entirely.

Here’s a piece Elghawaby wrote for the Toronto Star, ostensibly about the “painful and heartbreaking crash of Flight 752 - irresponsibly even if unintentionally shot down by an Iranian missile.” That’s an odd way to describe it. “Irresponsible even if unintentional” is the Khomeinist regime’s position. “Deliberate” is the view of the courts. The federal inquiry into the matter concluded that the Iranian regime acted with “recklessness, incompetence, and wanton disregard for human life” in the matter. But never mind.

Elghawaby takes the opportunity of that opinion piece to call on Canada to hold the United States at fault for taking out the terrorist warlord Qassem Soleimani. She equates the “Islamophobia” endured by Muslims in the United States with the predicament of Muslims in China and India. And she paints a rosy picture of the lives led by Iranians under the yoke of the Khomeinists:

“They are young, old, middle-aged, intelligent, hopeful human beings. Some choose to pursue opportunities beyond their borders and like other immigrants, they often contribute immensely to their adopted homelands, their children growing up as integrated citizens, eager to benefit society.” That’s not quite how the millions of Iranians who have lately risen up against Khomeinist tyranny are likely to describe their captivity. To escape the Khomeinist police state is merely to “choose to pursue opportunities beyond their borders”?

In light of the “crash” of Flight 752, what did Elghawaby say Canada should do, exactly? It’s this: Restore diplomatic relations with Iran, which were suspended by the former Conservative government in 2012.

So what is Islamophobia, exactly?

The Liberals’ anti-racism strategy says Islamophobia: “Includes racism, stereotypes, prejudice, fear or acts of hostility directed towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general. In addition to individual acts of intolerance and racial profiling, Islamophobia can lead to viewing and treating Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level.”

It includes bad things and can lead to things that sure sound bad “on an institutional, systemic and societal level.” But what the hell is it? Does it include “defamation” of Islam?

Didn’t we get this sorted out in the shouting and vote-splitting around Iqra Khalid’s Motion M103 back in 2017, where all of this began? No, we didn’t, because the Liberals deliberately saw to it that we wouldn’t, as I pointed out in the National Post back then. Quite a few leading Conservatives were similarly worse than useless. The party had reached a point of no return back then, leaving no options in dealing with its crank fringe apart from these: Isolate, quarantine, amputate or purge.

But while everyone was howling at each other in the House of Commons at the time, Canada’s Muslims were going about their business like the rest of us. Their main complaint about Canada was all the damn snow. It wasn’t all roses and unicorns for them, not by a long shot, but what they told pollsters wholly contradicted Khalid’s claims about “more than one million Canadians who suffer because of Islamophobia, who are victimized on a daily basis.”

Muslims were generally more patriotic than the rest of us, the poll showed. A majority of Muslims were also of the view - shocks and horrors - that immigrants should try a bit harder to fit into Canadian society. Exactly six years ago to the day, Macleans published an inquiry I was assigned to write about all this, and about the implications of leaving “Islamophobia” such a deliberately slippery concept.

Long story short, this was my takeaway: Getting “Islamophobia” wrong will only entrench everyone in the preposterously deadlocked and polarized place that tends to leave Canadians largely incapable of having a respectful, “non-partisan” and productive conversation about a range of vexing difficulties. The problem is with the word itself.

I hate to say I told you so, but what the hell: I told you so, and you can read it all here.