There’s Big Money in Fighting Racism & Curbing Free Speech
Egyptian-born, hijab wearing Amira Elghawaby is Canada’s newly minted Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. The job comes with a $6.5-million budget — no word on how much the highly critical Elghawaby will pocket. She’s no friend of free speech. She’s been a board member of the anti-free speech Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) — that’s Bernie Farber and Richard Warman, both decades-long advocates of state censorship of speech. She currently works for the Muslim Association of Canada and the National Council of Canadian Muslims. She worked in communications with the taxpayer-funded Canadian Race Relations Foundation. She’s a shrill critic of this country. Terry Glavin in the National Post (February 1, 2023) reports: “As an activist and frequent opinion-pages contributor, Elghawaby has adopted all the respectable standpoints with just the right degree of transgressive élan, rarely too strident or too squishy. She called for removing the Queen as Canada’s head of state and dismissed Canada Day as a festival of ‘Judeo-Christian storytelling.’ She’s been gushing in her praise for Trudeau and backs the Trudeau government’s extremely contentious moves to regulate commentary on the Internet. She’s argued in favour of Muslim prayer rooms in schools [of course, Christian prayers are banned in most public schools], and once blasted the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper as having done more harm to the image of Canadian Muslims than al-Qaida’s atrocities in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.” As she doesn’t like the Queen and believes Canada Day was concocted by Jews and Christians, one wonders why she doesn’t return to Egypt. She quickly ran into a firestorm of protest from across the political spectrum in Quebec for remarks suggesting that Quebec nationalists are Islamophobes. Interestingly, her appointment was endorsed by the loudly anti-free speech Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
The appointment is a shameless attempt for curry favour with the Moslem vote. What is Islamophobia? Literally, it is a fear of Moslems or the Islamic religion. Many people may have good reason to fear radical Islam or the religion itself which has often been a religion of conquest. Does the government have any role in telling people what to think or feel? Certainly not in a country that values freedom. Islamophobia like “anti-Semitism” — yes we have a Special Representative (the well-connected Irwin Cotler) to combat that too –is a vague term and all too often means any criticism of Moslems or Islam.
If any group needs a special representative, it is Christians. Not only is there barely disguised disdain and hostility from many Canadian governments to Christianity, but 2021 saw a cross-Canada terrorist campaign of arson and vandalism of Christian churches. Writing for True North (August 21, 2021) Cosmin Dzsurdza reported: “Sixty-eight Christian churches in Canada have been vandalized, burned down or desecrated since the announcement last month of the apparent discovery of graves found near a residential school in Kamloops, BC. Since then, three other first nations have announced similar findings of burial sites located near former residential schools. In response to these announcements, far-left radicals have used this opportunity as an excuse to terrorize Catholic and other Christian communities by targeting churches. Twenty-five churches across the country have been lit on fire in the past two months, many of them have been completely destroyed.” Far from appointing a special representative to combat Christophobia, Trudeau said that, while he didn’t support arson and vandalism, he could understand it.
There she is, second from the left, beside the monumentally incompetent fellow Moslem Ahmed Hussen, ex-immigration minister who presided over the Roxham Road invasion, and now is Minister of Housing, Inclusion & Diversity; beside him iis Omar Alghabra, the Saudi Moslem and witless
Transportation Minister who blamed Canadian travellers last summer for airport delays, saying
had forgotten how to unpack their laptops for screening.
