Rene — Fisk — How racism has invaded Canada
Topic(s): "War on Terror" | Comments Off on Rene — Fisk — How racism has invaded CanadaHow racism has invaded Canada
The Independent – United Kingdom; Jun 10, 2006
ROBERT FISK
This has been a good week to be in Canada – or an awful week, depending
on your point of view -to understand just how irretrievably biased
and potentially racist the Canadian press has become. For, after the
arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on “terrorism” charges, the Toronto Globe
and Mail and, to a slightly lesser extent, the National Post, have
indulged in an orgy of finger pointing that must reduce the chances of
any fair trial and, at the same time, sow fear in the hearts of the
country’s more than 700,000 Muslims. In fact, if I were a Canadian
Muslim right now, I’d already be checking the airline timetables for
a flight out of town. Or is that the purpose of this press campaign?
First, the charges. Even a lawyer for one of the accused has talked
of a plot to storm the parliament in Ottawa, hold MPs hostage and chop
off the head of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Without challenging the
“facts” or casting any doubt on their sources – primarily the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police or Canada’s leak-dripping Canadian Security
Intelligence Service (CSIS) – reporters have told their readers
that the 17 were variously planning to blow up parliament, CSIS’s
headquarters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and sundry other
targets. Every veiled and chadored Muslim woman relative of the accused
has been photographed and their pictures printed, often on front pages.
“Home-grown terrorists” has become theme of the month – even though
the “terrorists” have yet to stand trial.
They were in receipt of “fertilisers”, we were told, which could be
turned into explosives. When it emerged that Canadian police officers
had already switched the “fertilisers” for a less harmful substance,
nobody followed up the implications of this apparent “sting”. A
Buffalo radio station down in the US even announced that the accused
had actually received “explosives”. Bingo: guilty before trial.
Of course, the Muslim-bashers have laced this nonsense with the
usual pious concern for the rights of the accused. “Before I go on,
one disclaimer,” purred the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente. “Nothing
has been proved and nobody should rush to judgement.” Which, needless
to say, Wente then went on to do in the same paragraph. “The exposure
of our very own homegrown terrorists, if that’s what the men aspired
to be, was both predictably shocking and shockingly predictable.”
And just in case we missed the point of this hypocrisy, Wente ended
her column by announcing that “Canada is not exempt from home-grown
terrorism”. Angry young men are the tinderbox and Islamism is
the match. The country will probably have better luck than most at
“putting out the fire”, she adds. But who, I wonder, is really lighting
the match?
For a very unpleasant – albeit initially innocuous – phrase has now
found its way into the papers. The accused 17 – and, indeed their
families and sometimes the country’s entire Muslim community – are now
referred to as “Canadian-born”. Well, yes, they are Canadian-born. But
there’s a subtle difference between this and being described as a
“Canadian” – as other citizens of this vast country are in every other
context. And the implications are obvious’ there are now two types of
Canadian citizen: the Canadian-born variety (Muslims) and Canadians
(the rest).
If this seems finicky, try the following sentence from the Globe and
Mail’s front page on Tuesday, supposedly an eyewitness account of
the police arrest operation: “Parked directly outside his … office
was a large, grey, cube-shaped truck and, on the ground nearby,
he recognised one of the two brown-skinned young men who had taken
possession of the next door rented unit…”
Come again? Brown-skinned? What in God’s name is this outrageous piece
of racism doing on the front page of a major Canadian daily? What is
“brown-skinned” supposed to mean – if it is not just a revolting
attempt to isolate Muslims as the “other” in Canada’s highly
multicultural society? I notice, for example, that when the paper
obsequiously refers to Toronto’s police chief and his reportedly
brilliant cops, he is not referred to as “white-skinned” (which he
most assuredly is).
So I put this question to Jonathan Kay, a Post columnist and a
man not averse to a bit of fear-splashing in his own paper. Wasn’t
“brown-skinned” pushing journalism into racism? Here is his astonishing
reply: “These things are heavily idiomatic in the sense that, you know,
40 years ago, we would have said ‘coloured’.” Whoops! Idiomatic? My
dictionary defines the word as follows: using, containing, denoting
expressions that are natural to a native speaker.
In other words, it’s perfectly natural in Canada these days to refer
to Muslims as “brown-skinned”. Am I supposed to laugh or cry? Mr Kay
believed that, if asked to describe Toronto’s top cop by his racial
origins, “you’d say the ‘white police chief”. Quite so.
Amid this swamp, Canada’s journalists are managing to soften
the realities of their country’s new military involvement in
Afghanistan. More than 2,000 troops are deployed around Kandahar
in active military operations against Taliban insurgents. They are
taking the place of US troops, who will be transferred to fight even
more Muslims insurgents in Iraq.
Canada is thus now involved in the Afghan war – those who doubt this
should note the country has already shelled out US$1.8bn in “defence
spending” in Afghanistan and only $500m in “additional expenditures”,
including humanitarian assistance and democratic renewal (sic) – and,
by extension, in Iraq. In other words, Canada has gone to war in the
Middle East.
None of this, according to the Canadian foreign minister, could be the
cause of Muslim anger at home, although Jack Hooper -the CSIS chief
who has a lot to learn about the Middle East but talks far too much –
said a few days ago that “we had a high threat profile (in Canada)
before Afghanistan. In any event, the presence of Canadians and
Canadian forces there has elevated that threat somewhat.”
I read all this on a flight from Calgary to Ottawa this week, sitting
just a row behind Tim Goddard, his wife Sally and daughter Victoria,
who were chatting gently and smiling bravely to the crew and fellow
passengers. In the cargo hold of our aircraft lay the coffin of Mr
Goddard’s other daughter, Nichola, the first Canadian woman soldier
to be killed in action in Afghanistan.
The next day, he scattered sand on Nichola’s coffin at Canada’s
national military cemetery. A heartrending photograph of him appeared
in the Post – but buried away on page six. And on the front page? A
picture of British policemen standing outside the Bradford home of
a Muslim “who may have links to Canada”. Allegedly, of course.
What is the term ‘brown-skinned’ doing on the front page of a major
Canadian daily?