When one reads of terrible events in history, one might wonder what it was like in the lead up to that event. What was it like to be the average man in Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s, what was it like to be the average woman in Rwanda in the early 1990s? It’s a question you ask yourself because you wonder if you would have known what was about to take place, if it was possible to see it coming, and whether you could see the signs if something similar were to happen today.
Unfortunately, it is beginning to feel like I’m finding out what it’s like to be in that modern equivalent of the terrible events of the past. This time around, it’s a growing movement of people who are expressing an anti-Muslim sentiment, to the point where it’s beginning to feel as though we’re in the middle of a frightening growing hatred of a single group, based solely on the religion they follow.
It’s not hateful people as a rule, many are otherwise intelligent, reasonable people who have been infected by an intense irrational hatred of this group. People who are otherwise normal suddenly driven to rage over the thought of “terrorists,” painting everyone in the same religion with the same broad brush, openly declaring them to be some kind of enemy of the country.
It has been absorbed into the current election campaign, with a debate about niqabs – head coverings worn by some, but definitely not all, Muslim women – becoming an issue, even though it does not matter to the vast majority of Canadian Muslims, let alone the vast majority of Canadians as a whole. It’s been a big part of the current debate over refugees, as people justify closing borders by pointing to organizations like ISIS, who also happen to be the people who these refugees are fleeing from, afraid for their lives because they don’t agree with the group.
People in the region have been radicalized, that happens when a group feels they have been persecuted against and becomes angry at the group they believe is causing their problems – and it’s not a Muslim only problem, see the FLQ in Quebec or the IRA in Ireland for other examples in the recent past – but that doesn’t say anything at all about the religion itself or the majority of people who follow it. Whether or not you agree with them, the majority of Muslims are reasonable people, just as the majority of most people tend to trend towards reasonable. We shouldn’t judge someone based on the fringe edges of their religion, just as we shouldn’t judge them based on skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else arbitrary. Yet, here we have people who have an astonishing amount of hate for a group of people. It’s frightening, because when you have people who hate another group with this amount of fervor, it begins to go down a path towards violence.
Some people who harbour this hatred have said that Muslims go against “Canadian values.” But the Canada I grew up in accepts people, whatever our differences are. That’s why so many of us have had the chance to grow up here, in the past people were able to come to Canada when they felt unsafe in the countries where they were born. It’s should be against Canadian values to openly hate a group of people because of their religion, yet it’s happening, which is frightening.
