The Coloniality of Canadian Islamophobia – and Against Islamophobia | Islamophobia

In the wake of the last death direct attack About Muslims in Canada the third within four years – “anti-Islamophobia” is being used as another tool to strengthen the Islamophobic status quo.

Political leaders have shed tears in the public street of the London-based Afzaal family, which has been cut short while keeping policies that violate Muslims largely out of sight: increased military spending; selling for states that kill Muslim weapons; trying deporting Muslim refugees to the risk of torture; and spending millions of dollars in court to fight compensation for torture survivors of the “War on Terror”.

Politicians across the political spectrum have embraced the use of terrorism to combat the “extreme right” struggle, with even more established legal weapons placed fully against Muslims in the name of protecting Muslims. For example, when the Proud Boys were listed as “terrorist organizations” earlier this year, nine other groups identified by Islamists were also quietly added to the list – the Muslim centralism of the list escalated under the guise of racism.

The criminal prosecution of the London perpetrator as a terrorist does not address the “color line” against terrorism; it masks. Nathaniel Veltman, The man who cut off the Afzaal family in London has been charged with an act of murder that has already been committed, with Muslims pre-criminalizing for acts far removed from death or injury. This has created a situation in which Muslims have been responsible for less than 10% of those killed in public political violence in Canada since 11/11, 98% of all terrorism charges.

If a Muslim Veltman were treated “equally,” he and his family and members of the entire community would be regularly harassed by security agencies at their schools and jobs for denying them security permits for playing paintball while being cared for in their places of worship. , with the goal of catching them while battling mental illness, preventively placed the “peace bond” in stifling conditions without trial, and put up non-flying lists based on coincidence of names and racist stereotypes: dismantling draconian state powers that should not be “equalized”.

In the days following the attack, Canadian media almost constantly interviewed Muslims about their trauma, grief and fear – apparently “humanizing” Muslims without questioning why and how Muslim humanity became something to be proved.

The massacres of previous mosques – Quebec in 2017, Christchurch in 2019 – were barely achieved a few minutes CBC nightly news and marginal mention on the front page of the national Globe and Mail. Now, although the amount of coverage has changed dramatically, the qualitative picture mostly remains the same. Islamophobia is distorted as a problem of “extreme” and “hatred” between people, largely devalued by the devaluation, demonization, and accessibility of Muslim life and separated from everyday state practices.

In fact, some of the same “national security experts” who are responsible for legitimizing the demonizing discourse of “extremist Muslims” are being seen as an authority to fight anti-Muslim extremism.

It was Professor Stephanie Carvin, for example revealed for baking cakes celebrating Muslim drone deaths last year, however, it continues to be mentioned in media analyzes of London’s killings, proving that having your own Islamophobic cake and eating it too is entirely possible.

Even if progressive pundits they have been involved in portraying Islamophobia as an isolated and big-time character: blaming former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, as endemic racism against Muslims in the U.S. has been reduced to anachronism, putting Donald Trump on hold.

It doesn’t matter that Harper’s Conservatives have been out of power for the past six years, but the toxic mill of state-backed Islamophobia has persisted steadily.

Liberals and conservatives have regained counter-terrorism powers, held accountable for the complicity of torture, and Quebec has refused to ban hijabs and other “spectacular religious symbols” from public workers – they have rationalized all necessary measures to eradicate the Muslim represented. threat.

When the Conservatives wrote 2015 Zero Tolerance Barbaric Cultural Practices Act – Labeling and criminalizing Canadian Muslims as “barbarians” – liberals agreed. Now that they are in power name of the law, but not his problematic substance, has changed. In the liberal “anti-racism” approach, some facades of racial injustice are decorated while the building is alive and well.

In the face of Islamophobia, the appeals of superficial gestures have been resilient. Even after the cold-blooded killing of six Muslims in a mosque in Quebec, it took the government four years to celebrate the anniversary, January 29, as the Day of Remembrance and Action against Islamophobia: a small bandage over a wounded man. .

A few days after the London assassinations, former Liberal Justice Minister and recently appointed Special Mandate for Anti-Semitism Irwin Cotler revived an article by the right-wing Toronto Sun that “there is no Islamophobia in Canada” and any animosity against Muslims is the fault of Muslims. The tweet was later deleted as an “accident,” after criticism; but Cotler follows a long-standing pattern of blaming victims of racial violence, specifically Palestinians, for the violence they suffer.

The enduring power of Islamophobia is that there is something for almost everyone, from right to left. As is evident after the London bombing, “anti-Islamophobia” can also be Islamophobia in a different way. The tools of state violence (such as anti-terrorism) are spreading in the name of reducing private violence – cutting off some of the “extreme” branches of systemic racism while feeding its roots.

In the week leading up to the mass murder of Muslims, a massive unmarked grave site 215 native children they found the residence that managed the country’s churches outside one of the old “schools” – more specifically, they are called prison, torture and labor camps. In the following weeks, hundreds more unmarked graves have been found. White supremacism is not an anomaly in Canada, but a genocidal land on which the country is built.

Prime Minister Trudeau may claim that “Islamophobia has no place” in Canada, but the truth is that racism against Muslims has been linked for centuries to violence against indigenous people at the very foundations of the colonial state.

The bulls of the Pope, which allowed the expropriation and slavery of Muslims and Jews on crusades, were the basis for the Doctrine of the Discovery – the Europeans for colonialism in the 15th century. A self-given print of the century that continues to explain Canada’s theft and occupation of Indigenous lands.

The tactics of burning and forcibly rewriting books were exported from the Spanish Inquisition in Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) to the American genocide: the destruction of knowledge systems was linked to the destruction of the peoples who produced them.

While European conquerors subjugated Muslims and Jews as “people of the wrong religion,” indigenous nations were expelled from humanity because they were “people without religion”. This hierarchy of this nature continues in the jurisprudence of Canadian courts – it protects anti-Muslim laws, such as the ban on religious symbols in Quebec, and yet recognizes the right to protection of all religious freedom rights to indigenous sacred sites that suffer corporate denial.

The radical dehumanization of indigenous peoples encouraged the eradication of genocidal violence in the U.S. “Indian Wars,” creating the legal and military precedents that led to the “War on Terror: a mantle to continually crush resistance against indigenous and Muslim domination. colonial states, from Canada to Palestine to Kashmir.

Canada has been defending land and water against indigenous peoples, developed for use against Muslim communities with many powers against mass terrorism surveillance and criminalization since 11/11/11 – following a long tradition of treating those at the end of state terror as “terrorists”. .

The response to the London attacks highlights the falsity and nonsense of attracting this colonial state apparatus as a solution to racism when it is at its source; an apparatus that continues to reproduce the white supremacism at its heart through the violence of condemnation of a van attack or the violence of police and military assassinations, eliminating the complicity of torture and indigenous sovereignty.

For members of the Afzaal family who died in London – Talat, Salman, Madiha and Yumna – we say inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un, we come from God and we will return to God. We want to remind you that if we all come from the same place and all return to the same place, then all systems of racial supremacism can be built and therefore deconstructed: a struggle that continues in their memory.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of Al Jazeera’s editorial.