Chris Selley: Putting activists on the federal government payroll won’t fix intolerance

Tend to agree. More virtue signalling to individual communities rather than fostering integration and reducing intolerance:

…All of this is pretty much beside the point, however, as far as Housefather’s new position is concerned. You can’t fight antisemitism in Canada without engaging the most passionate Palestinian supporters, a good few of whom clearly do mean “Jew” when they say “Zionist,” at least to my and many other Canadians’ eyes and ears. If Palestinian supporters can’t stand the sight of Housefather, surely he’s just wasting his time, preaching to a choir that’s already perfectly cognizant of the problem.

It’s precisely the situation that Amira Elghawaby has faced since her appointment in 2022 as our first “special representative on combatting Islamophobia.”

You can’t fight Islamophobia in Canada without engaging Quebec nationalists, many of whom make no bones about being fearful of Islam and what pious Muslims might do to Quebec society. You can’t fight Islamophobia without talking to the only province that bans teachers and Crown attorneys and police officers from wearing a hijab.

But Elghawaby can’t talk to Quebec, and never will be able to talk to Quebec, because in the past she had disrespected Quebec’s all-consuming victimhood complex. “I want to puke,” she wrote on Twitter in response to a historian’s proposition that French Canadians were “the largest group of people in this country … victimized by British colonialism.”…

Source: Chris Selley: Putting activists on the federal government payroll won’t fix intolerance