Amira Elghawaby, The Bloc, And The Politics Of Hatred

On The Racism Of Elites

What is the harm in Justin Trudeau appointing an advisor on combatting Islamophobia?

To those about to have a conniption, there is an equivalent for antisemitism – and it’s Irwin Cotler to boot, so not exactly someone you can say is a figurehead appointment – so that argument falls out the window. What actual harm exists from appointing someone to advise on an anti-hatred agenda to see if there are ways to reduce hate against a community in this country who is frighteningly vulnerable to it?

Like, let’s say that we actually park the idea that there is hate against the community – there is, but let’s just accept it’s actually not real. Okay, so, one person takes a government salary that (in this wildly inaccurate hypothetical) doesn’t need to. We have a two trillion dollar economy and a nearly 400 Billion dollar federal budget, this position’s fee is a rounding error of a rounding error, and frankly if you’re looking for government waste, the multiple public servants my father used to work with who played Solitaire all day (literally true) deserve the chop more than this.

So, cost can’t be a complaint, and we know that the National Council of Canadian Muslims have tracked a more than 4x increase in incidents of anti-Muslim hatred from 2013 to 2019 (low base, but still), so there is definitely hate out there. Throw in Quebec City, the 6 year anniversary of which just passed, and the case for it not existing as a clear and present danger is bullshit.

The real reason people are so up in arms about this appointment? It makes white people feel uncomfortable, and that’s all this is about.

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In case you’ve missed why this is a controversy, here’s the very quick rundown.

Quebec has been passing laws targeting more and more people who are not white and French-speaking under the CAQ, from Bill 21 banning all public servants from working while displaying religious symbols – including religious headwear, which makes the bill a de facto ban on those observant followers of Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism from working in the public sector – and their anti-English Bill 96, which tries to limit how much English can be spoken in interactions with the state.

In the defence of their narrow sense of who is and isn’t a real Quebecer, this government has passed two major laws that isolate those they view to be insufficiently Quebecois. As someone who has never lived in Quebec but is the son of two Anglo West Islanders, the CAQ do not consider someone like me, or people like my parents, to be properly Quebecois, nor do they consider a Muslim from parts of formerly French Africa to be so, even if they’ve been in Quebec since their former homeland was still literally part of France.

All of this is fairly inarguably true, because this is how a lot of French Quebec thinks about the rest of the province and the rest of Canada. You can draw a straight line from Parizeau’s “money and the ethnic vote” line after No won in 1995 to this, because to them, Anglos, Jews, and immigrants don’t count. Listen to the rest of the Parizeau speech, and he talks about how Yes got 60% of the French vote, as if that entitled him to victory, and that the No win wasn’t legitimate.

Why does any of this matter? Because Justin Trudeau’s choice for anti-Islamophobia advisor called a racist piece of legislation what it is, and the people who support it racist. “Unfortunately, the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment” is the quote, a statement that is correct – the Bill’s an unconstitutional piece of shit that would have exactly 0.0% chance of holding up if not for the Notwithstanding Clause. What she said, in reference to a poll showing the Bill was broadly popular, was correct. And now she’s had to apologize to try and keep her job, for saying the bloody obvious.

A group of people are responsible for what they do and what they support, and if you vote for a party who promises to pass an Islamophobic piece of legislation and you support the bill, it’s not wrong to make the logical inference. The people of Quebec do not give a shit about the constitutional rights of minorities unless they think those minorities are the right kinds of minorities – which is why Quebec is stridently pro gay marriage, because they think that’s good, and stridently anti-Islam, because they think that’s bad.

The whole fucking point of enshrining minority rights into constitutions is to avoid the rights of the minority from being at the will of the majority. We set up the Charter intentionally so that we couldn’t pick and choose good minorities from bad ones, and yet, here we are, with Quebec picking and choosing which groups get to have rights and which don’t. And someone finally fucking called them on it, and now the pitchforks are out.

Quebec wants to have it both ways – it wants the ability to be xenophobic and nationalist within their own walls, to pick and choose which immigrants it wants and which it doesn’t, and to deny their minority communities rights on any basis they want. They also want the rest of the country to bend over backwards to accommodate the French speaking communities in the 8 provinces without French as an official language. They are hypocrites, plain and simply.

All this is about is Quebec and Quebecers being mad that someone had the balls to call them on their bigotry, so used to the rest of the country biting their tongues. Yes, a large segment of Quebecers – and yes, especially French Quebecers – hold either actively Islamophobic views or do not care enough about their Muslim fellow citizens to want to protect their rights. Does that make them racist? I don’t know and I don’t care, because I don’t really find it any better if you’re unwilling to stand for what’s right because of active racism or just sheer indifference.

What I do know is that this was an Alberta law that deemed all public servants had to be straight, and any gay employee had to be fired, and that law had the same amount of support in Alberta that Bill 21 has in Quebec, Quebecers in general and the Bloc Quebecois in specific would be melting down at the weakness of the Federal Government to stop such vile homophobia. But here, they don’t care.

The reason the Bloc is so fucking offended by Amira Elghawaby is simple – they don’t like that she dares call them, and people like them, out. The difference between homophobes and Islamophobes is that homophobes don’t pretend they’re good people when they do their homophobia. They just call you the slur of the week and move on, they don’t get offended by the idea they’re “homophobic”, because they are, and they don’t get offended. Islamophobic Quebecers think they’re good people, and being called racist or Islamophobic makes them not a good person, so they get offended.

All this is is a group of people being offended that their behaviour has been called out. Bill 21 is a disgrace, a racist piece of shit that is undeserving of this country. If it were targeting any other group, nobody would have ever had the balls to propose it, but because the vast majority of the targets aren’t white, Quebec doesn’t care. That’s racist, and there’s no amount of moralizing and equivalence that changes this fact.

The backlash to all of this is a group of overwhelmingly white people having a meltdown at being called racist for their racism, a fact that the Bloc showed when they said the position should be abolished. They do not view the Muslim community as important or worthy of protection. That’s racist, I’m sorry, it is. I don’t know what you want me to say, it is.

The performance the Bloc has put on this week is worthy of Fox News and the American right, being so offended at the idea their racism is being called out. Save your fucking crocodile tears. You support a racist, targeted, disgusting piece of legislation. This is the consequence of it. Sit down, shut up, and maybe if you’re trying to claim Islamophobia isn’t a problem, don’t toss in that the advisory position shouldn’t exist.