Canadian Muslims still have reason to be anxious

Faith’s followers are demonized and stereotyped by politicians and the general public — and terrorized by radicals

  June 4 2010 

 A young Port Moody Muslim is travelling to Europe for the first time and is worried about being racially profiled.

Raised in the relative tolerance of Metro Vancouver, Shaheed Devji has won a European Union-Canada Young Journalist Award that has him flying alone to Belgium, where Muslims are sometimes treated suspiciously in airports and elsewhere.

Devji, a B.C. Institute of Technology broadcast student and SFU soccer play-by-play announcer, wondered if he was just being “paranoid” about whether his laptop was going to be searched.

Unfortunately, he has a right to be anxious.

Racial profiling may be just one of the problems Devji experiences away from Metro Vancouver, which has roughly 70,000 Muslims. Some Muslims in Europe, and especially in the U.S., are being subjected to shocking discrimination, harassment and violence.

In a world on heightened “terrorism alert,” you don’t have to agree with everything to do with Islam — followed by more than one billion diverse people around the planet — to be appalled at the way Muslims are often demonized and stereotyped.

The most recent North American hate speech came last week when well-known Texas talk show host Michael Berry (who has been a fill-in for Fox TV’s nationally syndicated Bill O’Reilly) encouraged his audience to blow up a proposed mosque in New York City.

When one caller supported a new mosque for New York City, Berry responded: “No, you can’t. No, you can’t. And I’ll tell you this — if you do build a mosque, I hope somebody blows it up … I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up, and I mean that.”

This kind of vicious talk, linking all Muslims to bloody terrorism, is almost common on broadcast networks in the U.S., where Muslims make up one per cent of the population.

In the month of May alone, U.S. Muslims were subjected to numerous verbal and physical attacks.

One of the top leaders of the pro-Republican Tea Party movement, talk-show host Mark Williams, last month labelled Islam a “monkey religion.”

As well in May, a pipe bomb exploded in a Florida mosque containing 60 people. It started a fire.

Muslim men were also brutally beaten in both New York and Oregon in suspected hate crimes. And federal authorities last month stepped up their investigation into why a Muslim imam in Detroit was shot 21 times by police — when he was wearing handcuffs.

Although these kinds of shocking incidents don’t occur with the same regularity in Canada, where Muslims make up two per cent of the national population (three per cent in Metro Vancouver), Muslims, unfortunately, have reason to not feel entirely comfortable here.

When I wrote about these U.S. attacks on Muslims on my blog this week, epithets and untruths came flooding in about how Muslims “deserved” such treatment, about how Muslims are “all the same” and about how “Islam is a totalitarian religion” bent on “promoting violence.”

Even though many people wrote to my blog that Muslims have no right to fret about being criticized in Canada — with numerous readers alleging that Christians are more vilified than Muslims in this country — the figures don’t back up the claim.

A recent Angus Reid poll showed only 28 per cent of Canadians “approve of” Islam. In contrast, the poll suggested 72 per cent of Canadians approve of Christianity, while 57 per cent support Buddhism and 53 per cent feel positive about Judaism.

In a world where attacks on Muslims in the West continue to be treated by many as just business as usual, it’s hard for many of us to really appreciate the anxiety that Canadian Muslims, including a young journalist travelling in Europe, still experience on a daily basis.