Speak out
or keep quiet

>> The Bouchard-Taylor commission has
Montreal’s Jews and Muslims worried, but not everyone agrees on how to approach it

HEARINGS BRING DISCRIMINATION TO THE FORE:
Canadian Muslim Forum’s Mohamed Kamel

by SAMER ELATRASH

Among the oddities that emerged from the Bouchard-Taylor hearings on reasonable accommodation was the theory—hitherto confined to extreme right wing circles—that kosher foods artificially inflated food prices in the province.

After it was raised by several participants in hearings across the province, commissioner Charles Taylor began objecting to it, a welcome intervention, according to Rabbi Reuben Poupko, in hearings that he says have become soap boxes for bigots. Poupko says he was dismayed by the timbre of comments about Jews made in the hearings, often undisputed by commissioners Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard, but says the Jewish community has deliberately not made its presence felt in the commission.

“[The hearings have] twisted the Jewish community into a pretzel,” says Poupko. “There’s a stereotype that Jews are complainers. How do you respond without seeming like the stereotype? One approach is, if you back off, and allow other people to react, that would be helpful and have more credibility, and we don’t become part of the story.”

Abdel Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, a coalition of more than a dozen Montreal mosques, says the MCM decided not to intervene in the hearings for a similar reason.

“We decided not to go for the hearings, but we encouraged Muslims as individuals to attend,” he says. “We decided not to take any actions, so as not to be accused of organizing against the commission. We wanted the response to come from Quebecers. Our response would have appeared self-serving, and would not be taken with the proper value.”

Engagement versus confrontation

Muslims and Jewish groups have been ambivalent toward the hearings, with some trying to make the best of what they say has been an unsettling trend. For months before the hearings began, Muslims, Jews and Sikhs, among other groups, came under scrutiny as politicians and Quebec newspapers took umbrage at accommodating public expressions of religiosity by minorities, whether real or imagined (the debate took off when the small town of Hérouxville issued a statement advising immigrants that they would be not be permitted to stone and burn women in the town).

Elmenyawi says the commission tempered the debate on accommodation. “When the commission came, the debate was taken from people who were biased by people who were willing to be fair,” he says.

Other Muslims groups decided to participate in the hearings, submitting testimony to the commission. “We wanted to take a constructive, not a confrontational, approach,” says Mohamed Kamel, vice-president of the Canadian Muslim Forum. Kamel says although he objects to allowing participants licence in making anti-Muslim remarks in the hearings, the hearings have brought the prejudice to the surface. “It gives the chance for others to react,” he says. “Now people can’t say there’s no discrimination.”

Not everyone agrees. Both Elmenyawi and Kamel say they opposed last week’s demonstrations against the commission organized by immigrants rights groups No One Is Illegal—“it’s an inappropriate approach, and creates confrontation between Muslims and the commission,” says Kamel—but Mubeenah Mughal, who participated in the demonstration, says the commission adds legitimacy to xenophobic views.

“It’s become a platform for them,” she says. “The message is, ‘Say what you want, it’s a legitimate view.”

“There’s the view that in Quebec [to the effect that], at least people are saying what they think,” says Poupko. “I don’t think that’s a good thing. I’d rather live in a society where people are ashamed to say these things.”

Blame Mario

Poupko says minority groups should be more assertive in criticizing politicians and journalists who exploited the issue. “I think we have to go after [Action démocratique leader Mario] Dumont especially. Demand of him a public statement of his vision, and clear denunciation of racism against Muslims and Jews and other groups.”

Poupko and Elmenyawi are critical of Dumont and Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest, who seemingly appointed the commission as a hasty response to Dumont’s campaigning on reasonable accommodation in the last provincial elections, but they place much of the blame on the media, which they say grossly exaggerated the topic.

“They were lying to the people,” says Elmenyawi. “They were not able to manage a serious issue, and made it more miserable.” Elmenyawi says the media partly manufactured the debate by seizing on every incident of religious accommodation.

“It was created in the media in the sense that if it weren’t for the media, the issue would not have been reported,” counters Montreal Gazette reporter Jeff Heinrich, who’s been covering the hearings. “But it tapped into the issue of Quebec identity.”