Juno News - May 12, 2026


The activist networks influencing anti-Islamophobia equity training for educators

Mentioned
Maria Malma Stengard Combating Islamophobia Amira El-Gawabi Nayala Muhammad Faisal Kutty Al-Gawabi Problem
Gad Saad joins to discuss why Canada remains entrenched in woke ideology Is Canada DOOMED？ Professor Gad Saad explains why Canada can’t shake the woke fad

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

143.49

Word count

421

Sentence count

22

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Amira El-Ghawabi, Canada's former Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia, delivered a keynote presentation titled Unlearning Islamophobia at Harmony Movement s Educator Anti-Racism Conference on April 29th.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Amira El-Ghawabi, Canada's former Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia,
00:00:04.620 delivered a keynote presentation titled Unlearning Islamophobia at Harmony Movement's
00:00:09.000 Educator Anti-Racism Conference on April 29th. The presentation draws heavily from two primary
00:00:14.940 sources, El-Ghawabi's own Federal Guide to Understanding and Combating Islamophobia,
00:00:20.100 and the York University Islamophobia Research Hub's 2025 report on the Palestine exception.
00:00:26.600 Now, in December, Blacklock's reporter revealed that Al-Gawabi's office authorized an $80,000 payment to the hub,
00:00:33.440 effectively covertly commissioning the research.
00:00:35.580 The guide links Islamophobia with intersectional racial discrimination of those who follow Islam
00:00:41.340 or have perceived Muslimness based on attire, names, appearances, etc.
00:00:47.040 Even non-Muslims can be subject to Islamophobia, according to them, regardless of ethnicity.
00:00:51.380 and ultimately this racialized protection of religion can turn criticism of Islam as a set
00:00:56.500 of ideas into racial prejudice against a racialized group. And this approach is being rejected
00:01:01.740 internationally. In April, Sweden dropped the term Islamophobia from official policy. Foreign
00:01:07.540 Minister Maria Malmer Steingard called the concept problematic and announced that Sweden would
00:01:13.020 instead use the term anti-Muslim racism or anti-Muslim hatred. The government is also urging 0.98
00:01:18.960 the EU and UN to follow suit. And the United Kingdom did just that. It replaced the racialized
00:01:26.480 Islamophobia with a narrow definition of anti-Muslim hostility and included stronger free
00:01:32.260 speech protections. Al-Ghawabi's keynote also relies on research from the Hub previously mentioned.
00:01:38.340 One of the Hub's steering committee members is Faisal Kuti, co-founder of CareCan, now the National
00:01:43.400 Council of Canadian Muslims. And in 1999, an article he penned called No Democracy Without
00:01:49.300 Risks, Kuti argued for including so-called moderate Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in
00:01:55.140 democratic processes to prevent radicalization. He wrote, quote, democracy cannot be suspended
00:02:01.360 every time there's a chance Islamists might be coming to power. Kuti has been criticized by
00:02:06.480 counter-Islamism researchers, and in 2015, Senate testimony for associations they describe as
00:02:13.220 aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked advocacy ecosystems and for his history in
00:02:18.060 defending Islamic organizations facing national security scrutiny. The keynote cites data from
00:02:23.960 the Center of Studies of Organized Hate, which is a U.S. activist group. Their program lead for
00:02:30.540 Islamophobia in North America is Nayala Muhammad, previously served as Director of Policy and
00:02:34.940 strategy at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an organization that has repeatedly opposed
00:02:39.560 designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, and has defended care against
00:02:44.900 similar scrutiny. Problem is, once you look behind the hood, you can see how research featured in
00:02:50.180 al-Ghawabi's keynotes to educators connects activist narratives that many countries are
00:02:55.080 increasingly rejecting