00:00:00.000And I think we have to be very careful with the influence that these lobby groups, not only in terms of the people they're sending to Ottawa to fill these kind of positions and check these boxes, but also what's going on within these lobby organizations that I think trend towards the extremes, trend toward more hardline positions.
00:00:19.700Yes, you're absolutely right. And very rarely do any of these organizations reach out to people like you and me to say, let's sit down and have a conversation.
00:00:28.960They feel so much more comfortable being cowards and speaking behind our backs.
00:00:33.320But coming back to this whole Islamophobia bogeyman, it's not only the critique, but it's also when certain valid inquiries are termed as Islamophobia.
00:00:43.220You know that the CRA was making some inquiries into Muslim charities because it's their job, not just them.
00:00:49.900They do this for everyone. But immediately they were called Islamophobic.
00:00:54.360And our prime minister picked up on this and, you know, said that this is not something they shouldn't be singled out.
00:01:02.020So we have to understand that we are living in a country which is a democracy and we need to be able to live by the laws that this land.
00:01:10.560In fact, Islam tells us live by the laws of the land in which you are unless it goes against your faith.
00:01:16.420But unfortunately, many Muslims have forgotten all these rules.
00:01:22.560You know, they are following an ideology which is based on a cult.
00:01:27.620They are following an ideology that is a victimhood ideology, which is, you know, extremist.
00:01:33.300And if anyone happens to ask a question, they are immediately are labeled an Islamophobe.
00:01:41.160So this is not going to go well in the long run because, you know, it's not something that Canadians need right now, along with political correctness and the woke culture.
00:01:53.320If you also have, you know, the Islamophobia, both women hanging over people's heads, Canadians by nature are a very peace loving, naive, trusting community.
00:02:03.020They're not going to speak out. And this will then fester.
00:02:05.380Yeah. So one of the questions I had for you, it's based on for both of you or for you, Rahim, actually, based on an observation that Raheel made, which is, you know,
00:02:32.380we need to distinguish between these two things, racism, bigotry and ignorance.
00:02:38.460And that's something that I myself have experienced many times.
00:02:41.460I've had very similar experiences to Raheel, where, you know, someone says something, I think, you know, insensitive.
00:02:49.360And I, you know, you know, upon further interrogation, it just is that they meant their well-meaning.
00:02:56.020It's just that, you know, you know, the reaction, you know, most people would react to that as being racist.
00:03:03.080But actually, if you engage in a dialogue with people, I think most folks are actually just want to be well-informed, I think, you know, and want to learn.
00:03:11.320But why is it that we're hesitant? And by we, I mean, those people who are quick to label people Islamophobic,
00:03:22.260why are they reluctant to criticize what's happening to the Uyghur Muslims in China, what's happening to the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan?
00:03:31.020For example, the Ahmadiyyas are not even considered Muslims by the Pakistani government, if I remember that correctly.
00:03:37.180And the kinds of atrocities that take place committed against Muslims across the world, why is that not a priority to them?
00:03:46.940Why is it that they don't react to that with the same kind of zeal as they do with, you know, everything else?
00:03:55.700Well, I mean, I think the world is messy.
00:03:57.600You know, you have situations where Muslims are oppressors.
00:04:01.900You have situations where Muslims are being oppressed.
00:04:04.300And I think one thing about the buzzword in higher education is intersectionality.
00:04:10.160I think intersectionality, it poses a kind of racial hierarchy.
00:04:15.080It's, you know, if you're white, you're an oppressor.
00:04:17.060If you're not white, you're being oppressed.
00:04:18.440You know, if you're Christian, you're an oppressor.
00:04:20.480If you're a non-Christian, you're being oppressed.
00:04:22.520But the world, you know, is messy and doesn't always conform to those types of binary.
00:04:31.160I mean, you had these, you know, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, I forget the name of the community, but the sort of Christian community in Syria that was, you know, being subject to genocide.
00:04:41.760I mean, I think it's tough to have within this framework of grievance culture a vocabulary for kind of one set of minorities, Chinese people.
00:04:53.060By the way, you know, there's a ton of Sinophobia as well in North America.
00:04:56.840There's been a ton of Sinophobia surrounding, you know, surrounding COVID.
00:05:00.860So it's tough to, you know, have a framework for one set of people who, you know, we view as victims, we view as oppressed, you know, oppressing another set of victims.
00:05:11.360We don't have a vocabulary for that, you know, we don't have an intellectual framework for that.
00:05:15.780And I think that's why a number of people would rather, you know, turn a blind eye to the weaker situation.
00:05:21.640Because I think one of the truly, I think, regrettable things about this kind of advent of intersectionality and this intellectual movement of intersectionality is it forces people to view a very complicated world through this binary of oppressor versus oppressed, this color-coded binary.
00:05:45.960Yeah, absolutely, that's well said, I mean, a lot of this goes back to this stuff that they teach in schools.
00:05:57.220And so, Raheel, what do you make of that?
00:05:59.700Why are, you know, why do you see this reluctance to call out the atrocities committed against Muslims around the world?
00:06:10.000Because it takes away the attention from them being the victims.
00:06:14.440So this whole drama is about the fact that they want to present, let's say, Muslims in Canada as being victims of racism, bigotry, discrimination, Islamophobia.
00:06:28.020So if they were to talk about another community that is being oppressed, then it takes that attention away from them, you know.
00:06:34.440But this is what is so badly needed is, you know, for us to speak out about the others and see what is happening to them.
00:06:41.780But you never hear of these organizations making statements about what is happening, not only to other Muslims, but minorities in Muslim lands.
00:06:51.220And, you know, some of it is really atrocious stuff.
00:06:54.380So, you know, Raheem is at that wonderful young age where, you know, he can give this intellectual sort of touch to this whole conversation.
00:07:04.240You know, I just look at it very basically as being selfish and being self-centered and pursuing an ideology and an agenda which is entirely focused on this whole idea of getting into where policies are made and to, you know, to influence Canadian policy, to influence Canadian political structure.
00:07:26.240And they're succeeding while it seems that our prime minister and the rest of the leadership is blind to what is happening.
00:07:33.440And it's not as though we haven't said this before, you know, this is not the first time I'm saying it.
00:07:38.340Just, you know, see what is happening around.
00:07:40.600You'll be aware of what is happening and look at the agenda behind it.
00:07:46.800And so, you know, obviously they're not that concerned about what's happening in the rest of the world right now.
00:07:54.460Speaking of agenda, Raheel and Raheem, you know, in Canada, there seems to be a game where every community claims there's a phobia against them.
00:08:02.820So recently, a liberal backbench MP here in Ottawa is making the claim that Canada suffers from Hindu phobia.
00:08:11.020As a Hindu myself, I find this claim rather preposterous.
00:08:14.080And yet it's evidence we're increasingly a society built on grievances and identity politics rather than coming together as Canadians with shared values and shared identity.
00:08:41.420But, you know, when you're bringing in that number each year, it is very difficult to make them feel Canadian, to inculcate them with Canadian political institutions and, you know, Canadian civil discourses.
00:08:54.720So I think you have an increasing number of immigrant communities here in Canada who feel more attached with their diaspora communities back home than they do with Canadian civil society here in Canada.
00:09:07.360And I think a fascinating example of that is Sri Lankan diaspora politics here in Canada.
00:09:15.680So as many of you know, I think Tamils in Canada outnumber Sinhalese in Canada 6 to 1, 7 to 1, you know, by some astronomical margin, a very large margin.
00:09:25.400And you're seeing Tamils, you know, in places like Brampton and the 905, be very strategic in, you know, how they pursue grievance politics.
00:09:34.780Not so much here in Canada, but even in terms of how Canada orients its forward policy towards Sri Lanka.
00:09:43.140You know, do we use the G word to characterize massacres of Tamils during the Civil War?
00:09:52.300You know, you know, do we do we take the Tamil Tigers off of our list of known terror organizations?
00:09:56.780So I think, unfortunately, we have for economic reasons and out of economic necessity, you know, we've decided to take in hundreds of thousands of new Canadians each year, but we don't have the infrastructure on the educational side and on the social side to really make those new Canadians Canadian.
00:10:15.440So I think it's, you know, one, I think, drawback of our set of policy choices and one symptom of that set of policy choices that I think is only going to become more intense in the decades to come.
00:10:30.320Yeah, well, one of the failures of multiculturalism, actually, something I've written about quite a bit.
00:10:38.800I mean, we're Canadians first and everything else after, not the other way around, right?
00:10:43.820And and that's been a failure of multiculturalism.
00:10:48.160Raheel, do you want to jump into this?
00:10:51.660To put it in very simple words, this is happening because we have allowed it to happen.
00:10:55.880And multiculturalism being at the top of the list of the problems, you know, this idea that you have to force people to like each other.
00:11:06.580People don't have to like each other as long as they live in respect of each other.
00:11:10.120You know, which brings me back, you know, back to the idea that if somebody holds negative views of another person, it's not a crime.
00:11:17.580You know, we are human beings and we are allowed to have that.
00:11:21.060And having said this, Raheem talked about the immigrant communities and, you know, I'll put it in very grassroots terms that immigrant communities bring with them a lot of excess baggage.
00:11:30.820Some of it, which is very political and they don't know when to drop that.
00:11:34.500So they continue with that while they're here.
00:11:37.380And, you know, Canada has been soft on this.
00:11:40.340They have allowed these international politics to play out on Canadian soil where people feel safe.
00:11:46.040But it's not in the interest of the larger Canadian diaspora.
00:11:50.360It is not in, you know, the idea that some people feel it's a sin to tell their children that they need to be Canadian first and whatever it is next.
00:12:01.000You know, they tend to still live by the laws and the politics of the lands that they've come from.
00:12:07.020And therefore, we see it playing out here and we see it playing out in many different communities.
00:12:13.240So, you know, when the leadership is soft on this, then it just grows and grows until it becomes a problem.
00:12:23.500All of this noise around Islamophobia disguises the fact that violence and hatred are also directed towards some of the founding communities of modern Canada.
00:12:33.020So in 2021, for example, Canada saw, I believe, a 260% increase in hate crimes against Catholics.
00:12:40.080This is according to Statistics Canada.
00:12:42.240And this represented the largest increase in crimes against any religious or ethnic group.
00:12:47.720But hate crimes against Catholics have no consequences.
00:12:51.340They don't even rate a mention by the political class.
00:12:54.620And there's some suggestion that this increase in violence against Catholics may reflect anger against the history of residential schools.
00:13:01.300But this is just hatred, just the same, and isn't being called out by our progressive elites.
00:13:07.120Do you think there's a double standard at work here?
00:13:26.500You know, so this is very, very important.
00:13:31.100And, you know, the fact that Christians or Catholics, the abuses against them or the atrocities against them don't ever get counted is really troubling.
00:13:43.320And then coming back to statistics, when you look at the police statistics, we see that the communities that have faced the largest amount of hate crimes have been the Jewish community, the LGBTQ community, the Black community, and then somewhere along the line, Muslims, like other communities.
00:14:00.780But these reports and this appointment of an Islamophobia czar suggests to the rest of the world that the largest rate of crimes in Canada is against Muslims.
00:14:13.740You know, maybe Muslims walking on the streets are being abused.
00:14:17.940And it gives a very, very different picture.
00:14:20.580So what kind of an image are we presenting to the rest of the world?
00:14:25.160When Canada, to me, is one of the most tolerant countries in the world, it has its share of problems.
00:14:30.760Yes, but which communities don't have a problem?
00:14:36.300Look at the first immigrants that came, the Irish and the Italian.
00:14:39.820If you hear their stories and the amount of discrimination that they faced, but, you know, there was not an appointee to protect them.
00:14:47.360They dealt with it, you know, over a period of time, they dealt with it till they came to a point where they were able to be fully integrated.
00:14:55.260So every community has to go through those steps.
00:14:59.280The Muslim community is relatively new, but they have to learn to reach out to others.
00:15:04.520If they're going to ghettoize themselves, they're never going to be able to be a part of the mainstream.
00:15:09.720So we'll move on to the next question then.
00:15:11.340What is the, to both of you, what is the state of Islamic radicalization in Canada today?
00:16:17.500But Islamists, who are the people who are promoting and presenting this ideology, are absolutely delighted with political correctness, the whole culture, the cancel culture, because it plays right into their hands.
00:16:31.520This is exactly what they were looking for, is to be able to shut people up, to shut free speech, to not have people express their opinions.
00:16:41.040And so, you know, in many subtle ways, it just does exist.
00:16:49.420But I would say that, sorry, I would add to this, that people are much more aware.
00:16:55.340You know, those last 10 years, that awareness that has been created, they are much more aware of it.
00:17:00.360So, I would add, I have a unique perspective on this.
00:17:08.440I, you know, came of age, grew up in the early part of the 2000s.
00:17:12.060I was a teenager of the high school when 9-11 happened.
00:17:15.440And, you know, growing up, when you saw a Muslim on television, you know, was either a terrorist on a show like 24 or a show like Homeland or a taxi driver.
00:17:24.560And I think, you know, now in sort of the 2010s, 2020, I think we have a substantially greater amount of representation of Muslims, you know, in things like sports, in things like popular culture, you know, in the media.
00:17:39.000You know, you have these beautiful Palestinian models, the Hadid sisters, that are all over the place in the United States, you know.
00:17:48.440You know, so you have people presenting, you know, a template of what it's like to be an observant Muslim, but a modern Muslim in the 2020s that, you know, wasn't available.
00:17:59.980That imagery wasn't available in the early part of the century.
00:18:03.180And I think that actually explains a lot of what's going on in Iran right now.
00:18:07.380You know, I think it was always going to be a matter of time, you know, before social media caught up with the regime in Iran.
00:18:14.440It's kind of people through social media, people through Instagram, you know, they're sharing kind of more modern interpretations of Islam that don't jive with the regime's hard line.
00:18:25.580So for me, I can't speak to the big picture of radicalization because I'm sure there are also, you know, digital communities, you know, where these kind of disaffected young men maybe are being radicalized.
00:18:40.340But as, you know, a 30-something Muslim, you know, today I see a much more modern representation of my faith all across popular culture.
00:18:49.680I mean, even a player on the Stanley Cup winning hockey team, you know, last year, Nazem Qadri, is an observant Muslim from Southern Ontario.
00:18:58.760So for me, you know, as a young-ish, still a young-ish Muslim, I see more templates out there for how to be observant, how to be true to my faith, but do so in a modern context.
00:19:15.120And certainly times have changed quite a bit since those days, you know, since 9-11 for sure.
00:19:22.380And there are many such prominent Muslims in popular culture.
00:19:26.980And I think that's also very important when you talk about reform happening within Islam, right?
00:19:32.500That that's sort of an important path towards reform as well.
00:19:40.140Raheel, just one last question to the two of you.
00:19:44.600Raheel, you made a point that one source of, you know, that attracts the ire of your critics is your staunt support for Israel.
00:19:53.740And I kind of, I identify with this because I happen to be a staunt supporter of Israel myself, and I often face flack from the so-called progressives for that reason.
00:20:04.720Is part of the Islamophobia narrative, you know, is there a subtext of anti-Semitism here?
00:20:10.680In other words, is anti-Semitism the ugly underbelly of those who hold forth on Islamophobia?
00:21:15.220So I, as you know, I lived in the United States for a number of years.
00:21:18.980And I think in the United States, there's a much stronger connection between Islam and kind of black nationalism.
00:21:25.860And you look at individuals like Louis Farrakhan.
00:21:28.280You look more recently at kind of what people like Kanye West, you know, have been saying about Jewish people.
00:21:34.000I think, you know, that kind of ugly undercurrent of, you know, kind of these kind of nationalistic kind of staunch, you know, pro-black movements, some of which have gravitated towards Islam.
00:21:47.260You're seeing the anti-Semitism that underpins a lot of this type of political activism come more to the surface.
00:21:56.320And in the United States in particular, you know, you've seen a substantial uptick of sort of black nationalists, either associated with Islam or not, expressing more openly anti-Semitic rhetoric, not just targeting Israel, but targeting Jewish communities within the United States.
00:22:14.620Sort of perpetuating tropes about, you know, Jewish Americans involved in entertainment, you know, Jewish Americans involved in finance.
00:22:23.860Unfortunately, I've seen that type of thing on the rise in recent years.
00:22:28.360Well, anti-Semitism is on the rise globally.
00:22:30.600I mean, you take a person like Ilan Omar, you know, very openly anti-Semitic in a position like hers, prestigious, where she could have built bridges.
00:22:38.440So it's unfortunate that many people who are in leadership positions where they can build bridges, you know, where they can talk about coming together on commonalities, you know, and respecting the differences, but they tend to then perpetuate hate instead.
00:22:55.240And that is not something that I am ever ready for, you know, for me, Canada is not a place where we talk about hate.
00:23:03.860We don't have to like each other, but we definitely need to respect each other and the differences that we have.
00:23:09.500We are definitely not all alike, but, you know, in the work that we do, it's not just about myself.
00:23:15.240It's about supporting others who are persecuted, about others who are oppressed, about others who are facing racism and discrimination.
00:23:24.360And that's a great way to end the show, Raheel.