A new report released on August 6 warned of an alarming surge in hate incidents across Canada since the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian hate crimes spiking by as much as 1,800% in some regions.

The report, titled “Documenting the ‘Palestine Exception’” and authored by Nadia Hasan of York University’s Islamophobia Research Hub, outlines what it calls a “sharp and dangerous” rise in Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism (APR) and anti-Arab racism (AAR) over the past 21 months.

“In the aftermath of Oct. 2023, Canada saw a rise in anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism that affects many areas of life and work for Canadians,” Hasan said during a news conference in Ottawa.

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 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.”

Nadia Hasan 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.”

Based on consultations with 16 Canadian organizations, public data and media reports, the report revealed that Toronto Police Services saw a 1,600% year-over-year increase in anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hate crimes between Oct. 7 and Nov. 20, 2023.

According to Statistics Canada, a 94% spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes and a 52% rise in hate crimes against Arabs and West Asians were recorded in 2023.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) reported a 1,300% increase in Islamophobia cases in the month after Oct. 7, rising to 1,800% over the year.

The Muslim Legal Support Centre (MLSC) documented 474 human rights complaints between October 2023 and March 2024, including 345 cases of individuals who lost jobs or were placed on leave due to support for Palestine. The Legal Centre for Palestine reported a 600% increase in APR cases over eight months.

Noting that the report captures only a fraction of what communities are facing, Hasan said: “The information included in this report is based on interviews with these organizations, data that some of these organizations provided, publicly available data, as well as media reports from Oct. 2023 to Nov. 2024.”

Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia, warned that the findings demand urgent action.

“We see it in the censorship and silencing of Canadians who defend Palestinian human rights with real consequences on their livelihoods and on their futures,” she said.

Stressing that such incidents continue to occur daily across Canada and urging that they be confronted, she said: “Old tropes that surged after 9/11 are back, amplified by the far right and others, and used again to dehumanize our communities, especially Palestinian-Muslim and Arab-Canadians.”

Download the full report HERE.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Event description from a 09/17 email from Dean of Students John McKnight:
Join us for in-depth exploration of how 9/11 has reshaped U.S. domestic and foreign policy over the past 23 years. Through an overview of key policies across four presidential administrations, Amena Ghaffar-Kucher will examine the enduring impacts of the 9/11 wars, evolving surveillance strategies, and shifting U.S. priorities in the Middle East. By connecting these policies to broader trends in counterterrorism and security, this event highlights the lasting influence of 9/11 on American governance and global power.

Although this seeming omission was the source of some concern among students, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher did not shy away from the topics of Islamophobia, in fact making it a focal point of her presentation on U.S. foreign policy and its subsequent discussion, and included additional mentions regarding anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian sentiments.

Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher began her presentation with a timeline of significant events between 9/11 and today in order to demonstrate its lasting impact. She made it clear in her presentation that structural Islamophobia in the United States is not solely tied to 9/11, but rather is part of perennial fears of a greater “Islamic peril.” She emphasized the far-reaching dangers of Islamophobia, asserting that it affects not solely Muslims, but anyone perceived to be Muslim. This segued into an analysis of three distinct—yet often overlapping—forms of bigotry: Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian racism. Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher explained that Anti-Arab racism promotes stereotypes of Arabs as backwards and violent, and anti-Palestinian racism depicts them as terrorists when they resist occupation by Western powers. Anti-Palestinian racism, she clarified, also extends to those who support Palestine irrespective of race, religion, or ethnicity. She explained that these prejudicial attitudes are among the reasons why so many Americans support Ukraine but not Palestine, explaining that through a prejudice-warped lens, the 42,000+ Palestinian civilian casualties “are not worthy of our tears.”

Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher attributed the “perpetual war on terror” to these same attitudes. She explained that Islamophobia has been used to justify America’s imperialist actions during the war on terror under every American president since 9/11. Presidents Bush and Obama both acknowledged that terrorists are not representative of Muslims altogether—a sentiment not shared by President Trump—yet escalated counterterrorism measures that primarily impacted Muslim civilians. Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher wrapped up her presentation by discussing the popular narrative surrounding Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. She stated that the media contributes to these narratives by reinforcing sensationalized stereotypes of Muslims that frame them as perpetual suspects. This, she elaborated, has historically shaped public perceptions of Muslims in a negative fashion. She concluded by asserting that this history remains relevant today, particularly with the looming presidential election, and encouraged students to educate themselves with resources like “Teaching Beyond September 11th” in order to rectify the failure of many schools to properly teach these issues.

Transitioning the event into the Q&A portion, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher began with a question for the audience, asking if anything in the presentation had surprised them. One student in attendance responded, expressing surprise that many Americans view 9/11 as a unifying force, explaining that in his and his parents’ experience the opposite was true. Several of the questions asked by the audience centered around the impact of presidential rhetoric in relation to presidential actions. Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher elucidated that while little distinguished the counterterrorism policies of Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, the “overt Islamophobia” in Trump’s rhetoric made him far more dangerous and legitimized hate crimes and harassment. When a question shifted the discussion towards the pro-Palestinian protests across college campuses, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher shared her own anxieties about giving this presentation, anxieties developed as a result of rampant anti-Palestinian sentiment on campuses. She concluded the Q&A section by sharing a personal story about her son’s teacher intended to demonstrate the normalization of Islamophobia in the United States.

Reached for comment after the event, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher responded to questions regarding the impacts of bigotry. She provided insight on how the prejudicial trifecta of Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian racism have combined to influence Western perspectives on Palestine and Israel. “Negative views of both Arabs and Muslims stretch back hundreds of years, and the events of 1948 further vilified Arabs,” she explained, claiming that demonizing Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians “has helped justify policies and attitudes that dehumanize Palestinians and legitimize occupation,” something particularly evident in American foreign policy. She believes some who hold such prejudices are acting out of ignorance, which in turn is derived from an intentional “suppression of [Palestinian] history.” When asked about Islamophobia, anti-Arab sentiment, and anti-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher immediately pointed out that these prejudices are “not new on U.S. campuses.” She cited the fact that “many university leaders refused to name Palestine in their messages after October 7” as an example of both these prejudices and the aforementioned ignorance that fuels these beliefs, criticizing these administrators’ unwillingness to question why they refuse to acknowledge Palestine, adding that “willful ignorance has been incredibly harmful.” Explaining that such prejudice manifests in many ways, she highlighted the particular prominence of anti-Palestinian racism in the past year, lamenting “the backlash against student activism and civil disobedience—acts that are often celebrated in history.” She added that these three forms of prejudice “often intersect, leading to a compounded effect of discrimination.”

One cause for hope, however, is in college students’ efforts to combat these prejudices. Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher highlighted how students “are creating inclusive spaces for dialogue, supporting one another, and actively challenging harmful stereotypes.” She praised the students’ initiative in educating themselves and one another, as well as their coalition-building across groups. In particular, she expressed appreciation of the “Muslim-Jewish solidarity we’ve seen over the past year,” that challenges “all forms of oppression, including Islamophobia and antisemitism.” A major issue, she elaborated, “lies with our campus leaders…the Palestinian exception to free speech is a dark stain on our history, and history books will not look kindly on these leaders,” adding that they must confront their prejudices and recognize their complicity “in the various forms of oppression that exist on college campuses, whether that is anti-Palestinian sentiment, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, or Islamophobia.”

Source: Haverford’s Independent Student Newspaper

“I’m angry to learn that women wearing hijabs were the target of a violent attack in London, and a mosque in Winnipeg was the target of hateful harassment,” Trudeau said on his official X account on Friday.

According to a statement by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), two women wearing the Muslim headscarf were attacked Thursday in front of their children in London, where four members of a Muslim family were killed in a ruthless attack in 2021.

The statement noted that a knife-wielding man punched the women in their faces and made inappropriate comments. “The Israelis did a good job of landscaping Gaza. They’ll do the same to Lebanon,” and other slurs of an Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian nature,” according to NCCM.

“Needless to say, the incident amounts to yet another disturbing example of how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, often intersecting, continues to pervade corners of our communities, primarily targeting the vulnerable,” the civil rights organization said, adding that anti-Muslim hatred led to the killing of the Muslim family three years ago, and earlier this year, a Muslim family’s house was set on fire due to anti-Palestinian racism.

“It is time to act. Now. There is no time for more platitudes and words. Our leaders have to come up with a real plan to address this massive and disturbing rise in hate against our communities,” NCCM statement said.

No details were provided about the attack on the mosque in Winnipeg, in the country’s central Manitoba province.

A horrific mosque attack in Quebec province, where a lone gunman killed six Muslims and wounded 19 during evening prayers, shook the North American country in 2017.

In June 2021, four members of a Muslim family, who were out on a stroll in London, Ontario, were killed after a white nationalist man deliberately drove his truck into them. Countless other attacks occur on an ordinary basis, as Muslims across the country urge the government to take concrete action to stop the crimes.

Islamophobia is entrenched in Canada, according to a report by the country’s Senate Committee on Human Rights.

Source: Daily Sabah

Arab Americans, many (though not all) of whom have historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, were relieved for another reason. To them, Biden has been the single-biggest cheerleader of Israel’s punishing and relentless assault on Gaza, which has over nearly 10 months claimed the lives of at least 39,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the U.S. and the U.N. While the president has shown deep empathy with Israelis since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, he has struggled to convey the same level of sympathy towards Palestinians—and, at one point, even cast doubt on the extent of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

“I don’t think he was as balanced as he could have been, and that was really hurtful to a lot of people,” says Jasmine El-Gamal, an Arab American and former Middle East adviser at the Pentagon.

While many Arab Americans might have anticipated this from Trump, who’s made no secret of his disdain for Palestinians (he notably used their identity as a slur against Biden during their debate last month), El-Gamal says they expected more from the purported “empath-in-chief.” Biden’s failure to treat rising anti-Semitism and rising anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia with an equal sense of urgency left many feeling particularly deflated. “They’re similar threats, and they should be addressed with similar urgency, and I don’t think that was the impression that was coming out of the Biden administration,” El-Gamal says, noting that it made her and others feel “deprioritized as a human being because of your identity.”

That feeling had a tangible impact: Within the first month of the war, Arab American support for Biden and the Democratic Party dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. Michigan, a critical battleground state that boasts one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, appeared all but lost.

With Biden out of the race, the prevailing question now is: Can Harris win them back? So far, there seems to be a guarded optimism. Several Arab American activists and analysts who spoke with TIME say that their community is still waiting to see what changes, if any, the presumed Democratic nominee will pledge to bring to U.S.’s policy on Gaza should she win in November. Most all of them recognize that Harris has the potential to have a better relationship with Arab Americans than her predecessor—a relatively low bar that shouldn’t be too difficult for Harris to clear. But they don’t want her to take their support for granted, either.

“There’s a sense of hope,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, tells TIME of Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid. His organization’s latest nationwide poll of Arab Americans, conducted in May, found that an overwhelming majority (79%) have an unfavorable view of the president. Although AAI doesn’t yet have polling on views towards Harris, Zogby says that she has largely been seen as more empathetic. “She’s reached out to the community and individuals in different ways to let them know of her concern and her staff have been responsive,” he says, “which is far different than the White House.”

For those who couldn’t countenance a vote for Biden but regard Trump as a threat to the country, the vice president’s candidacy offers a much-needed reprieve. Despite the deep animosity towards Biden, Zogby says AAI’s polling has shown that the Democrats could win back much of support they lost among Arab American voters—many of whom joined the “uncommitted” campaign in a bid to pressure Biden to change tack on Gaza—if there’s a meaningful policy shift.

In the aforementioned poll, 60% of those surveyed said they’d be more likely to vote for Biden in November if he were to demand an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian aid into Gaza or if he were to suspend diplomatic support and arms shipments to Israel until they implement a ceasefire and withdraw forces from Gaza. While Biden has unveiled a proposal to end the war that would involve a six-week ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from populated areas of Gaza, he has been less willing to withhold military aid to Israel, save for only the largest of munitions.

While Harris hasn’t articulated any major policy deviations from Biden when it comes to Gaza—like the president, she has repeatedly pledged support for Israel’s security and self-defense—she hasn’t been seen as driving the administration’s policies on this issue either. Instead, she has offered Americans a rhetorically different approach. In March, she became the first senior administration official to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. She was also quicker than Biden to sound the alarm about the humanitarian catastrophe in the besieged enclave, where scores of Palestinians have been forced to live in inhumane, famine-like conditions, and explicitly laid blame on the Israeli government for its part in creating the crisis.

Unlike Biden, whose longtime devolution to the Jewish state has earned him the reputation of being perhaps most pro-Israel American president in history, Harris has long been regarded as being more evenly empathetic when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians. Hala Rharrit, a former American diplomat and Arabic language spokesperson in the U.S. government who resigned earlier this year in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, tells TIME that the State Department often relied on her speeches when communicating to the Arab world for this reason.

Some Arab Americans are hopeful that this record could make Harris uniquely suited to mending the divide within the Democratic Party as a result of the war on Gaza. “I think she’s the only one who can unite us,” says Sami Khalidi, the president of the Dearborn Democratic Club and a former 2020 Biden delegate who is due to reprise his role at the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago. He notes that while Arab Americans in his community still want to wait and see who Harris might pick as her running mate, “they favor her over Trump.”

Not all Arab Americans share this view. Indeed, many will be of the belief that Harris’s record, as Biden’s vice president, is inextricable from current U.S. policy. “There’s a genuine and really deep-seated anger and hurt that the Arab American community and the Palestinian American community, in particular, has felt,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and policy network, tells TIME, noting that while these communities may be able to engage with Harris in the way they were unable to with Biden, “There’s still going to be a lot of Palestinian Americans and progressive Americans who are like, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough of the establishment Democratic Party,’ and this kind of ties into a deeper resentment around electoral politics.” Some “uncommitted” delegates have already signaled that they will withhold their endorsement unless Harris commits to big policy shifts, such as ending military aid to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington offers an early test of how Harris will approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should she win the presidency. Many Arab Americans and progressive Democrats perturbed by Israel’s conduct in Gaza were cheered by Harris’s decision not to preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress—a scheduling conflict, her team said, that many nonetheless regarded as a clear snub. But perhaps the clearest sign of her strategy will be revealed following her meeting with the Israeli premier later today, in which she will reportedly tell him that “it is time for the war to end.”

“I don’t think anyone expects her to drastically announce a shift from Biden, especially when she is running [for the presidential nomination],” Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former chief foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, tells TIME. “But I think there are things she can say that will indicate a different path.” One option championed by several of Democratic lawmakers is to consistently apply U.S. laws to future military aid to Israel, which prohibits American tax dollars from going to foreign military units suspected of committing human rights violations.

“I’m optimistic, but I’m waiting,” says Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American who earlier this year became the second political appointee to resign over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. He and others tell TIME that while they are realistic about what is possible when it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, they also believe that there is leeway for change. “It is past time for talking points,” Habash says. “You also have to back it up with action.” If Harris does, he says, maybe Arab Americans will too.

Source: Time Magazine