- Islamophobia had ‘a long time to germinate within society’ and paved the way for violence and discrimination to be perpetrated and justified, says Zine, a professor at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University
HAMILTON, Canada
Islamophobia in Canada has reached an unprecedented point, surpassing even the surge of anti-Muslim sentiment after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, an expert on Muslim studies has warned.
“Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism have escalated dramatically since Oct. 7, 2023 and the Gaza genocide, with levels that were actually higher than after 9/11,” Jasmin Zine, a professor at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, told Anadolu ahead of the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, marked globally on March 15.
The growing hostility towards Muslims is not just confined to Canada, she added, and represents a deeply concerning global phenomenon, with manifestations across various regions, including China, Myanmar, India, Kashmir, and Gaza.
“The impact of Islamophobia on Canadian Muslims is compounded by both global geopolitics as well as the local context and reality,” said Zine.
She pointed to several hate-motivated incidents in Canada as evidence of the disturbing trend, including worshippers in Toronto being assaulted with rocks and bike chains, and a mosque in Ottawa being vandalized and defaced with feces.
According to a 2023 report by the country’s Senate Committee on Human Rights, Canada leads G7 countries “in terms of targeted killings of Muslims motivated by Islamophobia.”
Zine sees this grim situation as symptomatic of a “homegrown” culture of anti-Muslim sentiment within Canadian society, perpetuated by societal and structural biases, such as Quebec’s Bill 21, which prohibits the wearing of religious symbols in public sectors, or racial profiling at borders, and increased surveillance of Muslim groups and charities.
“Islamophobia has done its job over the past 20 years … Islamophobia has had a long time to germinate within society and that’s made it a lot easier for these kinds of acts of violence to be perpetrated, but also to be legitimated and justified,” she said.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric and propaganda is “now very normalized within people’s minds,” she said, referring to a 2022 poll where more than two in five respondents – 43% – viewed Islam as “a harmful presence” in Canada.
Even as far back as 2012, there was a survey that found that “52% of Canadians distrusted Muslims, and 42% believe that the discrimination that Muslims faced was basically their own fault,” she added.
Politics and media: Justifying discrimination
Zine particularly criticized how political and media discourses in Canada have fanned Islamophobia, saying: “I think it’s not just downplayed. It’s also actually being exacerbated by … xenophobic policies and practices.”
She referred explicitly now-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assertions about being a Zionist: “Narratives like that are promoting Zionism at a time where we’re seeing a genocide … That is really problematic.
“That kind of political rhetoric is very much then authorizing those kinds of violent (anti-Muslim) actions to continue. It’s not condemning them; it’s actually contributing to legitimating those kinds of actions.”
Zine also expressed concern about the deeply ingrained perception of Muslims as dangerous or threatening within many Western societies, including Canada. She argued that this perception has historical roots, drawing parallels with the aftermath of the US-led war on terror.
“The global war on terror was the precursor, and that was also underpinned by racist ideologies that cast 2 billion people around the world as violent fanatical terrorists who were threatening democracy, threatening the stability of white nations and Western civilization as a whole,” she said.
These narratives persist today, she said, continuing to fuel the dehumanization of Muslims, especially Palestinians, and laying the groundwork for violence and discrimination.
“We heard references to Palestinians as ‘human animals,’ as ‘barbaric,’ as ‘monsters.’ That reproduced the idioms of colonial racism that were used to authorize and justify colonial violence,” she said.
“There’s a historical continuity there, and that dehumanization of Palestinians has been the precursor, as we’ve seen, to this wholesale genocide,” she added, referring to Israel’s devastating assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed or wounded more than 150,000 Palestinians and left the besieged enclave in ruins.
Despite this grim analysis, Zine identified a source of optimism in grassroots movements, particularly among young people and students advocating for Palestinian rights.
The pro-Palestine protests seen at universities around the world “give me hope for that generation moving forward and becoming leaders in other spheres of life where they’re desperately needed, because we have a crisis of leadership around these issues,” she said.