Outrage over Omar Khadr defies reason: Kanji
Islamophobia
arises from a wilful refusal to recognize that Muslims deserve the same
protections from being tortured, banned, and killed as other human
beings.
How
could so many Canadians protest the government’s apology and
compensation to Omar Khadr, when the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled
that Canada violated some of his most fundamental rights?
The Supreme Court unanimously stated in 2008
that “by making the product of its [post-torture] interviews of Mr.
Khadr available to U.S. authorities, Canada participated in a process
that was contrary to Canada’s international human rights obligations.”
In 2010 it wrote
that “the interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel,
to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that
the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing the
fruits of the interrogations would be shared with prosecutors, offends
the most basic Canadian standards.”
These rulings make monetary damages almost inevitable.
Canada’s
complicity in the torture and unjust military trial of Khadr was
indisputably and seriously illegal; Canadian courts only apply the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms to state actions outside the country if
they “violate Canada’s binding obligations under international law.”
Consider that 74 per cent
of Canadians acknowledge Khadr was a child soldier and should have been
treated as one — yet a majority would still have denied him redress for
the abuses he experienced.
According to a poll by Angus Reid,
91 per cent of Conservatives, 61 per cent of Liberals, and 64 per cent
of NDP voters are against the settlement; 43 per cent of Canadians
wouldn’t even have apologized for Canada’s participation in his ordeal.
When it comes to Muslims branded as “terrorists,” the facts and the rule of law don’t seem to matter.
The
outraged reaction to Canada’s settlement agreement with Omar Khadr
demonstrates, once again, that the demonization of Muslims is impervious
to reason and reality.
How could a
significant percentage of Canadians support Trump-like “Muslim bans” in
the name of combating “terrorism,” when no one in Canada has ever been
killed or seriously injured in an act of “terror” by a Muslim immigrant?
According to recent surveys, almost one-third of Canadians approve of Donald Trump’s prohibition on travellers from several Muslim-majority countries, more than half appreciate his approach to national security, and one-quarter think Syrian refugees should be forbidden from entering Canada.
Never mind that Muslims have been responsible for only two out of the 487 “terrorism”-related deaths in Canada recorded in the Canadian Incident Database
since 1960; that both of these casualties from “Muslim terrorism” were
caused by white men born in Canada (Martin Couture-Rouleau and Michael
Zehaf-Bibeau); that extreme right-wing and white supremacist groups have murdered and assaulted several times more people than “Muslim terrorists” have; and that in the U.S., too, there have been no deadly
“terror” attacks by immigrants from any of the countries targeted by
Trump’s ban, while the radical right wing has been responsible for 73
per cent of fatal extremist incidents since 9-11 (as documented in a report released this April by the U.S. Government Accountability Office).
When
it comes to Muslims, neither data nor logic nor our self-proclaimed
“Canadian values” — pluralism, equality, humanitarianism — seem to
matter.
How could so many Canadians oppose
M103, a parliamentary motion to study and condemn Islamophobia, even
after six Muslims were gunned down in an attack on a Quebec mosque?
Alexandre
Bissonnette’s rampage at the Centre Culturel Islamique in Ste-Foy in
January, which alone killed three times more people than “Muslim
terrorism” ever has in Canada, occurred against a backdrop of
steadily-rising animus: police-reported hate crimes against Muslims
tripled between 2012 and 2015, according to Statistics Canada. And yet, 55 per cent of Canadians surveyed by Angus Reid
in March claimed the problem of anti-Muslim discrimination has been
“overblown,” and only 29 per cent said they would have voted for M103.
Following the killing of two soldiers in 2014 by Muslim extremists, in contrast, almost two-thirds
of Canadians felt that “homegrown terrorism” poses a “serious threat,”
and more than half endorsed the expansion of national security powers
with the Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act.
The
introduction of increasingly repressive laws to counter statistically
minuscule violence by Muslims is considered reasonable; a non-binding
motion to counter more-fatal violence against Muslims is criticized as
an overreaction.
When it comes to Muslims, their deaths don’t seem to matter.
Islamophobia
— the unfounded fear, hatred, and dehumanization of Muslims — is often
represented as the product of ignorance. But Islamophobia is more
pernicious and resistant to correction than a mere absence of knowledge;
it arises from a wilful refusal to recognize that Muslims deserve the
same protections from being tortured, banned, and killed as other human
beings.
Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst based in Toronto. She writes in the Star every other Thursday.
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