Carney government replacing Islamophobia and antisemitism envoys with advisory council

2026/02/05 2 Comments

Can’t claim credit but it has been something I have been advocating for some time, as separate envoys tend to accentuate differences:

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government said Wednesday that it is eliminating Canada’s special envoy positions on fighting Islamophobia and antisemitism.The positions, which Carney had pledged to keep when he ran for Liberal leadership, will be replaced by a new advisory council on “Rights, Equality and Inclusion,” Culture and Identity Minister Marc Miller said in a news release.

“The Advisory Council will be comprised of prominent Canadians from academia, experts and community leaders with a mission to foster social cohesion, rally Canadians around shared identity, combat racism and hate in all their forms, and help guide the efforts of the Government of Canada,” Miller said, without immediately announcing its membership.

First reported by the Star, the move comes as the Liberal government had been looking to fill the special envoy position on combating antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance after former representative Deborah Lyons retired in July, several months before her term was set to end.

Speaking to reporters following a Liberal caucus meeting, Miller said the new council will address rising polarization and division coming in part due to the war in Gaza, but will still recognize the “specificities” of Islamophobia and antisemitism.

“I think we have to give the opportunity to people to be upset,” Miller said. “I think the focus here, though, is to make sure that we are focusing on the unity of the country, on the division that we know is there that’s been fuelled by a lot of things, and making sure that we have a group of experts that will focus precisely on trying to bring people together.” …

Source: Carney government replacing Islamophobia and antisemitism envoys with advisory council

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“La communauté musulmane de Québec déplore l’intransigeance du gouvernement”

2026/01/30 Leave a comment

A noter:

“Neuf ans se sont écoulés depuis la tuerie de la grande mosquée de Québec, mais des séquelles se font encore sentir, ravivées par les lois sur la laïcité adoptées par le gouvernement caquiste, qui « encouragent la xénophobie et le racisme », selon les leaders de la communauté musulmane de la capitale.

Le 29 janvier 2017, au moment où Alexandre Bissonnette faisait irruption au milieu de la prière pour ouvrir le feu sur les fidèles, une fillette se tenait entre le tireur et ses victimes. « C’est ma fille. Elle avait huit ans », a raconté mercredi Nizar Ghali, blessé par deux balles à l’abdomen lors de la tragédie.

Le père de famille, ce soir-là, a frôlé la mort sous les yeux de son enfant. Dans les jours qui ont suivi l’attaque, pendant que la ville se recueillait, consternée, et pleurait les six défunts, Nizar Ghali, lui, luttait pour sa vie à l’hôpital, plongé dans le coma.

Aujourd’hui tiré d’affaire — « le corps va bien, l’esprit va quand même assez bien aussi », précisait-il mercredi au Devoir à la veille des commémorations —, il travaille à combattre les « amalgames » qui font le lit, à son avis, du racisme et de la xénophobie.

“Et il en a long à dire sur la vision de la laïcité promue par le gouvernement caquiste. La loi 21 sur l’interdiction des signes religieux et son expansion dans les garderies subventionnées par l’État prévue par le projet de loi 9 passent mal. « Les femmes voilées se sentent lésées par ces lois-là parce qu’elles estiment qu’[elles] sont faites spécifiquement pour elles », explique le docteur diplômé de l’Université Laval. « Pour nous, ça envoie le message que l’État ne veut pas que la femme musulmane prenne de l’expansion dans la société. »

Sa fille, aujourd’hui âgée de 17 ans, a décidé de porter le hidjab. Le père, lui, craint que ce choix ne constitue un obstacle à son épanouissement.

« Ce n’est pas le passé qui nous inquiète, c’est l’avenir, confie Nizar Ghali. Elle arrive à l’âge où tout le monde commence à entrevoir un petit peu son avenir. Il est encore trop tôt pour savoir quel genre de job elle va chercher ou quel domaine d’études elle va poursuivre, mais si elle rencontre des embûches, c’est sûr que ça va être de plus en plus difficile pour elle. Si, au contraire, elle trouve une société qui l’accueille comme elle est, je présume que ça va la soulager après ce qu’elle a vécu. »”…

Source: “La communauté musulmane de Québec déplore l’intransigeance du gouvernement”

“Nine years have passed since the killing of the Great Mosque in Quebec City, but sequelae are still being felt, revived by the laws on secularism adopted by the Caquist government, which “encourage xenophobia and racism,” according to the leaders of the capital’s Muslim community.

On January 29, 2017, when Alexandre Bissonnette broke into the middle of prayer to open fire on the faithful, a girl stood between the shooter and his victims. “She’s my daughter. She was eight years old, “said Nizar Ghali on Wednesday, wounded by two bullets in the abdomen during the tragedy.

The father of the family, that evening, come close to death before the eyes of his child. In the days following the attack, while the city was gathering, dismayed, and mourning the six deceased, Nizar Ghali was fighting for his life in the hospital, immersed in a coma.

Today out of trouble – “the body is fine, the mind is still quite well too,” he said Wednesday at Le Devoir on the eve of the commemorations – he is working to fight the “amalgams” that make the bed, in his opinion, of racism and xenophobia.

“And he has a lot to say about the vision of secularism promoted by the Caquist government. Bill 21 on the prohibition of religious signs and its expansion into state-subsidized daycare centers provided for by Bill 9 is doing badly. “Women with veils feel aged by these laws because they believe that [they] are made specifically for them,” explains the doctor graduated from Université Laval. “For us, it sends the message that the State does not want Muslim women to expand in society. ”

His daughter, now 17 years old, decided to wear the hijab. The father, for his part, fears that this choice will be an obstacle to his development. “It’s not the past that worries us, it’s the future,” says Nizar Ghali. She reaches the age where everyone begins to see a little bit of her future. It is still too early to know what kind of job she will look for or what field of study she will pursue, but if she encounters pitfalls, it is certain that it will be more and more difficult for her. If, on the contrary, she finds a society that welcomes her as she is, I assume that it will relieve her after what she has experienced. “…

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Lederman: The antisemitism you might have missed over the holidays 

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Depressing list:

…There is no question that the war in Gaza has been catastrophic. But Jews around the world deserve to live without discrimination. No other form of racism would be justified in this manner. Nor should it. All Jews are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. Nor are all Israelis. Just like all Americans are not responsible for what Mr. Trump is doing in Venezuela (which the acting Venezuelan president, by the way, said had “Zionist undertones”) – and may be about to do elsewhere.

Back to Winnipeg. Two days after the synagogue incident, a Palestinian-owned restaurant was also hit with hateful vandalism. Its front windows were smashed, and there was a disturbing note: “Leave our country terrorists.” 

I wish I was in Winnipeg right now so I could walk through the front door of the Habibiz Café, order a hummus and shawarma plate and tell its owner, Ali Zeid, how sorry I am that this happened. We Canadians need to have each other’s backs and stand up against hatred of the other. As the world around us darkens, this is one thing we can do together.

Source: The antisemitism you might have missed over the holidays

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Lederman: The ceasefire is holding, but in Israel the fight for sustainable peace isn’t over

2025/12/15 Leave a comment

Good long read:

…Even for a Canadian who couldn’t understand more than the odd Hebrew word, it was electric.When I messaged the woman in Toronto who had let me know about the choir to tell her how profound I found the performance, Bonnie Goldberg shared some notes she wrote after her own experience.

“If the Rana Choir of Muslim, Jewish and Christian women, can find their common voice,” she wrote, “why can’t my former friends who shunned me find their way back to be my friend?”

This shunning in the diaspora has gone from shocking to almost familiar: friendships torn apart, mezuzahs ripped from doorways. For Israel, the shunning is existential, with people around the world using their platforms to question its legitimacy. Does Israel even deserve to exist? 

It was, I have to say, a relief over those 10 days to not be confronted with antisemitism and a prevailing anti-Israel sentiment. There are political arguments and debates here – very heated – but at least you can skip past the should-Israel-even-exist question.

It was also a relief to meet with so many Israelis who are fighting for justice for Palestinians, while also acknowledging the trauma of Oct. 7.

It was never lost on me – visiting art museums, strolling on the beach that I had more rights as a visitor than many of the people who live here, Palestinians, have under Israeli control. I was not able to visit Gaza, obviously. Nor was I able to get to the West Bank. But I didn’t need to go there to know, with certainly, that in those places, there is a lot less of that thing I had been searching for.

Source: The ceasefire is holding, but in Israel the fight for sustainable peace isn’t over

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Levitt: At a time of widespread antisemitism, thoughtful conversations are vital

2025/12/05 Leave a comment

More such conversations needed.

…Recently, I had the pleasure, along with 1,600 people, of listening to two leading commentators share their insight on current issues. NYU’s Scott Galloway and CNN’s Van Jones were the keynote speakers at an event in Toronto hosted by Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, the human rights organization I head. At a time of widespread antisemitism, high-profile pundits — non-Jewish and Jewish, like these respected American observers — addressing this scourge is more vital than ever.

In this limited space, it’s hard to do full justice to the hour-long discussion, moderated by Canadian journalist Steve Paikin, but the following two excerpts give a sense of the thought-provoking conversation.

Responding to Paikin’s question about whether the U.S. is facing the prospect of a civil war, Jones, a prominent Black political analyst, gave a sobering perspective.

“We are being torn apart by a couple of different factors,” he said. “The most important one is that social media companies have decided to make a bunch of money off of dividing people and now they’re waging a shadow war, a grey war, against the West, primarily on TikTok, and they’ve come up with a novel strategy, never before heard of, called ‘Blame the Jews.’

“This is brand new,” he added caustically, “and unfortunately people are stupid enough to fall for it. I keep telling people that blaming the Jews isn’t the oldest trick in the book, blaming the Jews is literally older than books … Whenever they attack Jews, it’s never about the Jews. It’s always some other thing going on. Why are they picking on the Jews? It’s always because it’s another agenda. And so there’s this very nefarious agenda to divide the West, to divide us, to have us turn on each other rather than turn to each other and one of the ramifications of that is this uncivil war in our country.”

For his part, Galloway, a bestselling Jewish author, professor and entrepreneur, was equally astute. Asked why so many U.S. universities had become cauldrons of hate, targeting especially Jewish students, he didn’t mince words.

“A lot of the fault lies with campus leadership,” he said. “In trying to come to grips with American history, unfortunately, we’ve created the very reductive construct of the oppressed and the oppressor. Figure out who you are based on your identity and that categorizes you as the oppressor or the oppressed. What we’ve done is we’ve basically trained a generation [to think] that you’re one or the other. The most reductive or lazy way of thinking for identifying an oppressor, which we’ve taught kids on campus, is that your level of oppression is directly correlated to how rich and white you are. And unfortunately, Jews have been conflated with the richest, whitest people in the world.”

Referring to the anti-Israel encampments on campus, which often openly and enthusiastically embraced antisemitism, he added:

“If I went down to the square at NYU and I said, ‘Burn the gays!” or ‘Lynch the Blacks!’ my academic career would be over by the close of business that day. There would be no need for [discussing] ‘context.’ We wouldn’t be talking about the First Amendment. My career would be over. It became clear to me that on campuses through a series of well-intentioned teachings that went too far, it ended up where free speech never became freer as long as it was hate speech against Jews.”

Long may the insightful voices of Jones and Galloway resonate far and wide. We need more like them speaking out candidly and people giving them the attention they deserve.

Source: At a time of widespread antisemitism, thoughtful conversations are vital

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Anti-Palestinian racism report calls for Canada to recognize May 15 as Nakba Day

2025/08/09 Leave a comment

Well, this will provoke some interesting discussions within the government.

Reading through the report, there appears little recognition that some of the actions, symbols and language in various pro-Palestinian protests have contributed to the rise in anti-Palestinian incidents. The description of the Hamas attack of October 7 is antiseptic and is silent on the rapes and other atrocities, also suggesting an element of denial at play “Hamas launched an attack on Israel on this date, actions which included taking 250 people hostage, some of whom remain in captivity in July 2025:”

There also appears little recognition that public and private bodies can make decisions based on public activity and statements, if these create controversy and impact communities. After all, “actions have consequences.”

Perhaps my experience in government where the line between being publicly silent despite any misgivings informs this view (post-government, of course, many public servants share their personal views fairly widely with considerable diversity of opinions.)

The existing definitions of ethnicity (Arab) and religion (Muslim and Christian) are the preferred way to assess discrimination and hate crimes against Palestinians as they bring the issues into the broader context that affect all groups. In other words, focus more on the universal rather than a plethora of individual definitions based upon individual groups (e.g. anti-Tibet, anti-Khalistan, anti-Tamil etc).

Hate crimes against Muslims increased by 8.5 percent compared to last year, against West Asian/Arab by 18.3 percent, higher than most other groups:

A new report from the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University calls on governments across Canada to increase oversight on how universities, schools, police forces and Parliament deal with the recent spike in instances of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.

The report also calls on all levels of government in Canada to officially recognize May 15 as Nakba Day. Palestinians mark the day after Israel declared independence in 1948 as the beginning of the destruction of their homeland.

“Provincial governments should develop curriculum, train staff and educate students on Palestinian culture, identity and history, including the history of the Nakba,” the report published Wednesday said.

It also wants all levels of government to “recognize and adopt” a definition of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) “as a distinct and detrimental form of racism that operates at multiple levels of state and society.”

The director of the research hub, Nadia Hasan, an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, said recognizing both Nakba Day and an official definition for APR would set Canada apart from other countries.

“These are important things for Canada to take very seriously,” Hasan said. “I think it would be a first and an important step for Canada to lead on.”

The report examines the increase in Islamophobic verbal and physical attacks directed at Arab and Palestinian Canadians since the beginning of the conflict between Hamas and Israel.

The war was triggered when Hamas-led militants attacked Israeli communities and military bases near Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, including more than 700 civilians, and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s military response has devastated the tiny, crowded enclave, killing more than 61,000 people — mostly civilians — according to Palestinian health authorities.

The report says its findings are based on interviews conducted virtually with 16 Canadian community-based organizations that focus on addressing Islamophobia, APR and anti-Arab racism. Media reports were also used. The report does not include any first-hand accounts from victims or injured parties.

Recommendations and calling out the CBC

The report calls for greater oversight of post-secondary institutions by striking “advisory tables” made up of students and faculty to develop strategies for colleges and universities to use in combatting discrimination on campus.

The authors of the report also call for those institutions to undergo third-party reviews of how they responded to incidents of Islamophobia and campus protests against the war in Gaza.

They say school boards across Canada should also face province-wide reviews to determine how schools have dealt with incidents of anti-Palestinian racism and examine “cases that were insufficiently or never investigated.”

Aside from the increased scrutiny on universities, colleges and school boards across the county, the report wants to establish provincial and territorial “hate crime accountability units.”

The units would allow people alleging they have been the victims of discrimination to “report directly about law enforcement agencies’ mishandling of hate-motivated crime cases.”

The report also calls for Canada’s public broadcaster to be “reviewed to ensure fair and balanced coverage of Palestinian perspectives.”

This external review, the report says, should probe the possibility that CBC is disproportionately “rejecting Palestinian guest commentators” leading to biased media coverage.

The report provides two reasons for its focus on CBC.

The first is a report by a former employee who alleged she faced backlash for pitching “stories that would bring a balanced perspective” to the war in Gaza.

The second reason is a letter sent to CBC signed by more than 500 members of the Racial Equity Media Collective asking the public broadcaster to “address an apparent pattern of anti-Palestinian bias, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism within the corporation’s news and documentary culture.”

CBC’s head of public affairs, Chuck Thompson, said an external review is not necessary because CBC is already accountable to the independent CBC Ombudsman, Maxime Bertrand, who regularly reviews complaints about the corporation’s journalism.

“CBC News has amplified countless Palestinian voices in our ongoing coverage of the conflict in Gaza,” he said. “There are now thousands of stories we’ve published and broadcast about Israel and Gaza since 2023, all archived here … we think the work speaks for itself.”

The York University report references CBC News journalism covering dozens of instances of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.

A policy for MPs

The report is also calling on Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein, who administers the Conflict of Interest Act and the code of conduct for MPs, to be given increased responsibilities.

The commissioner, the report says, “should develop a clear and enforceable policy on how parliamentarians are to be held accountable when they disseminate disinformation, especially … when such acts target marginalized communities.”

It provides only one example of an MP allegedly spreading disinformation, a post on X by Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman.

The post includes the line: “Stickers with ❤️s glorifying terror on campus popped up today at UBC.”

The report notes the stickers were falsely associated with the UBC Social Justice Centre.

CBC News has reached out to the Official Opposition for reaction to the allegation but has yet to receive a response.

The 15 recommendations contained in the report also call on the federal government to address issues with the temporary resident visa program for refugees fleeing Gaza and probe alleged Israeli foreign interference in Canada.

A Senate report released November 2023 found Islamophobia remains a persistent problem in Canada and concrete action is required to reverse the growing tide of hate across the country.

The report, the first of its kind in Canada, took a year and involved 21 public meetings and 138 witnesses. It said incidents of Islamophobia are a daily reality for many Muslims and that one in four Canadians do not trust Muslims.

Police and advocacy organizations have also reported increases in antisemitic incidents. In the spring, B’nai Brith Canada reported that in 2024 the total number of reported cases of acts of hatred targeting Jews had reached a record high of 6,219 incidents.

Source: Anti-Palestinian racism report calls for Canada to recognize May 15 as Nakba Day

Report link: Documenting the ‘Palestine Exception’: An Overview of Trends in Islamophobia, Anti-Palestinian, and Anti-Arab Racism in Canada in the Aftermath of October 7, 2023

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Khan: We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to assaults on Muslim women 

2025/08/07 Leave a comment

Agree:

…The scourge of hate is corrosive. It cannot be effectively addressed in a siloed fashion, where each affected group stands alone. Here’s an idea: next time when there’s a hateful incident against one group, let’s have a few representatives of all affected groups stand together to condemn the hate. There are fundamental disagreements between affected groups, but all agree that no member of our Canadian family should be subject to intimidation, threats or violence.

Source: We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to assaults on Muslim women

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Lederman: There is an abundance of shame – and rightly so – over the calamity in Gaza

2025/08/02 Leave a comment

Indeed:

…As more than 170 former Canadian diplomats, including former ambassador to Israel Jon Allen, wrote in an open letter this week: “If Israel continues on this path, it will lose its standing with the world community, placing the security and the future of the Israeli people in jeopardy.”

This isn’t the most important reason to speak out about the suffering of so many people, of course. That would be the killings, the starvation, the inhumanity.

“Food and health are basic rights,” Dorit Nitzan, director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told Haaretz. “When we turned them into a bargaining chip, we harmed ourselves, not just our values and morals.” 

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has issued an “emergency call” for “massive nonviolent civil disobedience” to bring a total shutdown of Israel until there is a change in government. “The Israel of the Declaration of Independence and the Zionist vision is collapsing,” he wrote.

The Union for Reform Judaism also issued a statement this week: “Blocking food, water, medicine, and power—especially for children – is indefensible. Let us not allow our grief to harden into indifference, nor our love for Israel to blind us to the cries of the vulnerable. Let us rise to the moral challenge of this moment.”

Yes. Let us. The moral tragedy of this moment is abundantly clear. 

Source: There is an abundance of shame – and rightly so – over the calamity in Gaza

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia Tagged with , ,

Islamophobia envoy says Mideast war is bringing back anti-Muslim tropes from 9/11

2025/08/01 Leave a comment

Hard not to disagree but she is silent on whether the nature of some of the demonstrations, their locations and the carrying Hamas related symbols likely also has played a role in reinforcing anti-Muslim tropes:

…Elghawaby spoke to The Canadian Press after the sudden retirement this month of Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism.

Lyons left her post early, saying she felt “despair” over of a growing gulf in Canadian society related to violence in the Middle East, and the failure of many Canadians to find common ground against hate.

Elghawaby said that she and Lyons worked to reinforce “the soul of Canada — a Canada where all of us, with all of our diversities, can belong and fulfil our fullest potential and feel safe to do so.”

Elghawaby said she shares Lyons’s fear that Canadians have “a sense of concern about appearing to be, for example, favouring one community over another.”

She said fighting hate means advancing the shared principle that everyone in Canada should feel safe to express their faith or political views without retribution.

“We do have rules and policies, and we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and we have human-rights codes that should help be our North Star on how we navigate a time of deep social challenge, when it comes to the rise of hate toward any community,” she said.

But Elghawaby pushed back on Lyons’s claim that some Muslims have been uneasy with seeing her work to combat anti-Jewish hate.

Lyons told the Canadian Jewish News that she and Elghawaby tried to work together to counter hate, and had plans to visit provincial education ministers together.

“Neither my community, nor her community, were happy all the time to see us in pictures together,” Lyons said of Elghawaby.

Elghawaby said she’s not aware of Muslims opposing any of her work against anti-Jewish hate.

“I have had no pushback on condemning antisemitism. I have had very good conversations with members of Canadian Jewish communities,” she said.

Elghawaby said many Canadians’ discomfort with confronting the reality on the ground in Gaza is making it impossible to engage in “good faith” dialogue about a path forward.

“Many Canadians of all backgrounds do believe that there is terrible oppression happening in Palestine, that there’s an occupation,” she said. “It’s been described by human rights organizations as apartheid. Genocide scholars, and organizations have called what’s happening now a genocide.

“If we are to have true dialogue, not being able to actually name the situation as it’s being described … by human-rights organizations and experts, it means that it’s a discussion that can’t be had in in fully good faith, because of the effort to almost make invisible or erase what various Canadians are seeing or describing for themselves.”

While Elghawaby said she has no plans to quit before her term ends in February 2027, she acknowledged it’s been “very, very sad and difficult” to see the rise in hate….

Source: Islamophobia envoy says Mideast war is bringing back anti-Muslim tropes from 9/11

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Casey Babb: Canada doesn’t need an antisemitism or Islamophobia czar

2025/07/31 Leave a comment

Very one sided but one does have to ask whether these special rapporteurs are effective in improving cross community relations or not or just assuaging and reflecting the concerns of their particular groups.

Former antisemitism envoy Lyons and current islamophobia envoy Elghawaby apparently did try some joint events and initiatives but Lyons, in any case, was frustrated that neither group wished to listen to the concerns of the other.

No easy way to have such dialogues but clearly, current approach not effective:

All told, this disconnect between the positions of Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism and its special representative on combating Islamophobia has rendered them not just futile, but problematic. Never in our nation’s history have we so desperately needed moral fortitude, truth tellers and courageous religious and community leaders to come together and face hard truths in unison. Yet for the last two years, this need has been met not just with inefficiencies and obstacles, but what feels like deliberate attempts to undermine relations not just between Jews and Muslims, but between Jews and everyone else.

Canada is at an inflection point — socially, culturally, politically and economically. Major issues could improve in these spheres — or gradually worsen over time as they have been now for many years. It is therefore imperative that every dollar and initiative be spent and developed with prosperity and unity in mind — not the indulgence of endless grievances, the infantilization of entire peoples and the notion that our country can only be unburdened of our sins by relentlessly confirming our guilt.

Step 1 in achieving these things: get rid of useless and divisive positions.

Source: Casey Babb: Canada doesn’t need an antisemitism or Islamophobia czar

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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