The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) should concern itself with identifying terrorist threats, including (and not limited to) threats from radical Islamists within our borders — and not with “Islamophobia.”
Last month, CSIS director Dan Rogers met with Canada’s special representative on combatting Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby. The two apparently discussed how they might work together to “combat Islamophobia and all forms of hate.”
“Islamophobia can unfairly lead to viewing and treating Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level. I met with CSIS Director Dan Rogers to discuss how we ensure Canadian Muslims are treated equitably and their civil liberties upheld,” Elghawaby posted to X after the encounter.
We should all agree that Canadian Muslims do indeed deserve the same rights as any other citizen. That is not in question. The activities of CSIS are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — in addition to every other Canadian law. That said, CSIS is not a civil liberties association or an anti-racist social justice group. Its role is not to concern itself with trendy activist causes — of which “Islamophobia” undoubtedly is.
CSIS is our national security agency.The organization’s purpose is to investigate — and sometimes reduce — threats to Canada’s national security, and to report on these threats to our government. Surveilling threats requires monitoring potential assailants.
It has been conspicuously clear to Canadians, since the October 7 Hamas massacre in 2023, that CSIS has good reason to consider that Muslims have notable prevalence in the anti-Israel movement, which celebrates Hamas’s horrors. That is neither a racist nor an Islamophobic sentiment.
Take, for instance, that our government currently recognizes 86 terrorist entities — and that 66 per cent of these groups are explicitly Islamic, many of them with the stated goal of destroying Israel. This figure doesn’t include Samidoun, as they do not call themselves Islamic, though the group recently celebrated when their international coordinator, Canadian citizen Charlotte Kates, was given an “Islamic Human Rights and Human Dignity Award” while visiting Tehran. Samidoun, when not busy organizing the ongoing Palestinian movement in Canada, is also concerned with “Islamophobia,” and expresses solidarity and sympathy towards Hamas and even “Islamic Jihad prisoners.”
In the past 16 months, who has brayed for “Death to Canada” on our streets? Who celebrated the anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attack on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery? Who has been planning or carrying out antisemitic attacks in our country? When you subtract the far-left “Queers for Palestine” lunatics from the equation, you are left with an obvious answer: many supporters of the Palestinian cause hail from the Middle East, where there are high numbers of Muslim people. It’s not bigotry. It’s basic math.
Last spring, after protestors in Canada’s capital chanted “Long live October 7!” on our streets, Elghawaby took to X to lament what she believes was the unfair criticism of “problematic speech” of a few pro-Palestinian protestors. Around the same time, Elghawaby had claimed on X that those criticizing the pro-Palestinian protests were “creating more divisions that are leading to violence.”
Six months later, the ongoing protests, largely organized by designated terrorist entity Samidoun, included notorious chants of “Death to Canada, death to the United States, death to Israel.”
A few individuals? “Problematic” speech? Islamophobia? I don’t think so. What a slap in the face to Canadian Jews, who are faced with a staggering increase in antisemitism and hate crimes in the wake of Hamas’s despicably evil attack.
That said, intelligence officers shouldn’t be monitoring people solely on the basis of religion. Doing so would unfairly lump lawful citizens in with bad actors, and, concerning Islam, it would cast the net too wide: Canada had more than 1.8 million Muslim citizens in 2021, according to Statistics Canada. Police have to be more precise, targeting involvement in extremist groups, Samidoun being the perfect Canadian example; and if these groups happen to have members from mostly one religion, so be it. That’s not discrimination.
Canada also recognizes several neo-Nazi groups as terrorist entities. If these neo-Nazis were using Holy Bibles as instruction manuals, and I happened to subscribe to the same belief system — I would not be offended to see CSIS sniffing around the local pews.
CSIS has already been accused of “Islamophobia” for its work — without, to my mind, any proof that their surveillance was inappropriate or unlawful. Such complaints tend to be anecdotal and one-sided — and don’t take into account that CSIS needs to speak to citizens to do its job. Just because a CSIS agent speaks to a Muslim Canadian, is not proof of ill intentions or Islamophobia. The same goes for one-sided stories by former employees: former CSIS desk agent Huda Mukbil, who sued the agency and accused it of racism, insisted that her employer asking her to report on encounters with “subjects of interest or sources” in the Muslim community was hateful, rather than pragmatic.
And therein lies a larger problem: activist accusations of racism or “Islamophobia” result in fear — fear of being labelled a bigot. A fear that could very well lead CSIS to look the other way if it is faced with uncomfortable truths about who is committing specific crimes. Just as we saw with the United Kingdom’s rape and grooming gang scandal.
Our special representative on combatting Islamophobia — Canada’s first, the position being created in 2023 — should not be giving advice or direction to CSIS. Our security agency should do its work free from the influence of government-funded activists whose agenda is antithetical to national security monitoring.
Director Dan Rogers, however, has signalled otherwise. How can we trust that his organization will prioritize our country’s security over the phobia of being labelled a bigot? We cannot.
National Post