Urz Heer is no “conservative”, she is a Muslim double agent

Muslim Conservative Uruzurum Heer made headlines recently for castigating the Islamophobic campaign run by her party in the last election. “This party worked actively and aggressively against my people,” Heer said, at the Conservative convention. “It didn’t differentiate who Muslims were versus the enemies.”

The Harper-headed Conservatives certainly deployed a particularly crude form of anti-Muslim animus during the election: a continuation of their governing modus operandi. However, Islamophobia did not begin with Stephen Harper, and it will not end with his exit from power.

It is very tempting to relegate Islamophobia to a past we have overcome or to a future we have avoided. It is too easy to project racism onto other times or onto other people: onto those like Stephen Harper or Donald Trump, who ostentatiously brandish anti-Muslim stereotypes as political weapons. It is far more difficult to confront the normalized Islamophobia that has permeated Canadian national security law and policy since the initiation of the War on Terror, under both Liberal and Conservative governments.

“Islamophobia is about more than microaggressions,” writes Professor Deepa Kumar. “Daily acts of hostility, hate crimes and even job discrimination, are the outward manifestations of a system that is fundamentally racist … Islamophobia is an ideology that has come to be accepted as normal, as common sense, in the War on Terror era. In this sense, it is not just an individual bias but a systematic body of ideas which make certain constructions of Muslims — that they are prone to violence, that they are misogynistic, that they are driven by rage and lack rationality — appear natural.”

Stereotypes about Muslim violence have sustained the War on Terror’s project of violence since its birth. The War’s dangerous excesses in Canada — an extra $92 billion allocated to national security spending in the decade after 9/11; expansion of state powers of surveillance, which have been used to monitor and stifle activists and dissenters; the proliferation and broadening of terrorism offences, to now include such vague crimes as “promoting or advocating the commission of terrorism offences in general” — have been justified by citing the supposedly excessive danger posed to Canadians by Muslim “terrorists.”

This fear of irrational Muslim “terror” has itself proven remarkably impervious to rational analysis. Indeed, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2015, “Islamic fundamentalism was not the primary driver of lone wolf attacks [the predominant source of deaths from ‘terrorism’ in the West since 2006], with 80 per cent of deaths in the West from lone wolf attacks being attributed to a mixture of right wing extremists, nationalists, anti-government elements, other types of political extremism and supremacism.”

And yet, Muslims in Canada have been made to bear the brunt of the state’s suspicion, have been made profoundly insecure in the name of protecting the security of the nation.

There are Maher Arar, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin, who were secretly imprisoned and tortured in Syrian detention chambers, with what the United Nations Committee Against Torture has condemned as “complicity” by Canadian governmental agencies. While Maher Arar has received compensation, the rest have been forced to fight tortuous legal battles for recompense: battles which the new Liberal government has persisted in opposing.

There is Abousfian Abdelrazik, who was stranded in Sudan for six years — where he was incarcerated and tortured — while successive Liberal and Conservative governments actively thwarted his efforts to return home to Canada.

There are the “Secret Trial Five” — Mohammad Mahjoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, Mohamed Harkat, Hassan Almrei, and Adil Charkaoui — who were indefinitely detained as threats to national security without charge, and on the strength of secret evidence they were not permitted to see, under Canada’s security certificate regime. Their ordeal began under the last Liberal government, and continues for Mohammad Mahjoub and Mohamed Harkat, who are currently facing deportation to torture. Mahmoud Jaballah’s certificate was overturned as unreasonable last week, more than 16 years after the state first branded him a security threat.

These abuses, and others, all originated under Liberal rule. At their convention, the Liberals adopted a resolution “condemning all forms of Islamophobia” — but will they confront the systematic biases of the national security apparatus they are so deeply implicated in constructing?

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst and writer based in Toronto.