Why won't Canadian Conservatives say the words "Radical Islamic Terrorism"?
The Canadian Conservative Party followed its American counterparts as "warriors on terror", but change their tune to stick it to China.
One of my earlier memories of the Obama years was people complaining that Obama wouldn’t “condemn radical Islam” or say “Islamic terrorism”, which meant that he was actually a secret Muslim bent on destroying America. It could have made sense had Obama not spent his years in office drone striking civilians in Muslim-majority countries, but alas.
The foreign policy of western neoconservatives and liberal imperialists alike, and the aims of Islamist extremists tend to align rather nicely. This has been going on for decades, and can be traced far back to when when the U.S. funded not only Islamist militant activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but their ideology as well.
This is nothing to say of the American and Canadian governments’ alliance with the Wahhabist state of Saudi Arabia, support for Hamas over its secular counterparts, the bi-partisan support for Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria, and the reckless empowerment of Islamist opposition in Libya.
Image: REUTERS/Aaron Harris
The Muslim is only an enemy when it’s time to rally a population against immigration and in favour of invasive and antidemocratic counterterrorism measures. In other words, the nihilistic extremists are not the threat in Canada’s eyes, but rather the overwhelming majority of Muslims that are often the primary victim of these extremists.
So why do I bring this up now? I have already discussed it before, haven’t I?
Well, today I came across an article talking about how the Canadian Conservative Party wants to move the Olympics because of what is happening with China and its Uyghur population. The Liberals were reluctant to use the term “genocide”, which of course opened a big twitterstorm.
This is what caught my attention:
What I found strange about it is that Canadian Conservatives are no stranger to rhetoric that’s oppositional to “Islamic radicalism” or “Islamic extremism.” Stephen Harper had no issue stirring up anxieties about Islam and Muslims during his last campaign. Previous candidate Andrew Scheer seemed reluctant to ~ stand up for Muslims ~ in the way Trudeau apparently is now. And O’Toole himself laughably might be a different story, though he scrambled to assure everyone that he doesn’t want… Sharia Law
Okay, this one is very funny. But what’s funnier is that O’Toole seems to have time to stand up for Muslims across the world, but not the ones at home. Weird.
Now, here’s the thing. I’m not writing this to challenge the existence of carceral policies against Uyghur Muslims in China, and as someone who is not a particularly pro-carceral person, the idea of imprisoning a socially salient religious group does not appeal to me. Whether it’s in Canada, the United States, and abroad, I am always repulsed by state-sanctioned Islamophobia. Let’s get that out of the way.
What I want to suggest, however, is that these Conservatives clutching their pearls about Trudeau would probably have similar, if not worse, carceral solutions that they are condemning China for.
The Uyghur issue first came to my attention as someone who pays careful attention to the status of Christians in the Middle East where I learned that there were up to 5,000 Uyghur militants fighting with Islamist extremists in Syria. Some others have joined ISIS and have threatened China with “rivers of bloodshed”, and maintain connections with Turkey, allegedly occupying areas where Syrian families have traditionally lived and farmed. In turn, China itself has suffered terrorist attacks at the hands of Islamist extremism.
I want to be very clear here. I opposed the American War on Terror, and similarly do not believe that terrorism justifies any carceral measure imaginable. Please know, on the record: I DO NOT THINK TERRORISM JUSTIFIES A CARCERAL POLICE STATE. Nor should my thoughts here be used to suggest otherwise. Rather, I am merely pointing out rhetorical inconsistencies.
I bring attention to this to ask: how do you think Erin O’Toole and his party would react if Canada was subject to numerous Islamist terrorist attacks, and if thousands of Canadian Muslims went to Syria to fight with ISIS, and if they threatened bloodshed in Canada? I would wager that if Trudeau did not have a highly carceral and authoritarian solution to this, they would complain rather heavily and call him soft on terrorism.
Actually, there is a way to know how the party would react. Let’s ask Canadian Citizen Omar Khadr, who was detained as an adult in Guantanamo Bay at the age of 16 and treated in ways that were brazenly violating international law. He did end up getting a settlement, which I’m sure the Conservative human rights defenders were ecstatic about, because in Good Liberal Democracies it’s expensive to violate Charter Rights.
Perhaps not.
Of course, Khadr is one person. I would be interested in hearing what O’Toole would do if there were thousands of of-age Khadrs that weren’t only killing combatants, but civilians in Canada and abroad.
Does this justify what China’s response is? Of course not. I am simply not convinced that these morally righteous China watchers would have a more angelic response, and am in awe at the utter softballs Canadian media throws them in light of it.
Discourse around Islamist extremism will always be tiring here, because it’s nothing more than a way for politicians to garner support when they need it. At the end of the day, our politicians don’t care about extremism. In fact, it’s good for them. It justifies tightening their grip on security and rousing fear and suspicion of immigrants. They themselves will likely not be impacted by it, but will forever be able to wield it as the ultimate looming other and rally the people behind them to “fight” it. They will be able to use it to accuse their enemies of being soft, and then turn around to promote profiteering from selling weapons to religious tyrants.
Do we really need more of this? I don’t think so. We need our politicians to stop treating us like we are unintelligent, stop making platitudinous declarations about what other countries are doing, and start focusing on the millions of Canadians that are suffering during this time.