Seven Oaks Magazine.

This past Saturday, October 23, the Palestine Community Centre in Vancouver held a gala dinner to celebrate its first birthday and to help raise funds for its continuing activities. The Community Centre is an important hub for the Palestinian and Arab community in the city, as well as for solidarity organizing for justice in the Middle East.

Dr. Hani Faris presided over the evening's program, which included talks by Dr. Sunera Thobani of the University of British Columbia and Dr. Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachussets, Dartmouth. Working TV will be broadcasting the evening's program. Seven Oaks brings you the opening of Dr. Thobani's speech, on the subject of the impact of September 11 on the Arab and Muslim communities in North America.

It’s just great to see so many of you here tonight. And I would like to thank the organizers, because I know how much work goes into pulling a night like tonight together, a fabulous event. Thank you very much. I was asked to come and speak tonight on the impact of 9-11 on the Arab and Muslim communities.

And just this week, in the Globe and Mail, actually on the cover of the Globe and Mail, with a front-page story, there’s a photograph. These are schoolchildren. And the title of the story is ‘Emergency: code red, code red.’ ‘Without missing a beat the children run to a corner and huddled behind their teacher’s desk.’ So, this is a story about children in Ontario, in a school, being prepared for emergency measures, in case their school is attacked. Now when I looked at this picture, it’s really very interesting. All of the children, – I would draw your attention to the fact – all of the little children who are under the threat of attack, who are being prepared for emergency responses, are, white. I mean there’s just no other way of putting it.

So, you know, it was just a graphic reminder, to me, when I saw this, and these are grade two students. So these are very, very young children, and they are practicing a lock-down drill in case there is an attack on their school. And the teachers, who are preparing them for an attack of this kind, in rural Ontario, I would remind you, talk about the risks that they are trying to deal with. And, here, they specifically name the attack, the Beslan attack that took place. So there’s a linking of terrorism, of the struggles of the Chechens, and innocent children in rural Ontario who are preparing to deal with this. There is a very astute professor who is interviewed in the article and I just want to read what she has to say, she says “why not train them to prepare to be struck by lightening, because that is more likely to happen”, right they are more likely to be struck by lightening than being attacked Beslan style – which it is commonly referred to now. What does this type of thing do? This is the world we live in, this is the world that our children live in North America after 9-11. So what does this do? It teaches children to be afraid at a very, very young age. Who does it teach them to fear and be constantly watching. Terrorists. And who are the terrorists? What is the image these children see? What is the image that adults see?

The image of the terrorist today, is the Muslim. Who are the Muslims that are being wholesale associated and linked with terrosrim? Who are these Muslims? If we look after the attack of 9-11 immediately in Canada like in the United States people where attacked on the streets. If we look at who it was that was attacked it becomes very, very clear that Muslims today, don’t just refer to a religious identity– Muslims have become a racialized category of exclusion. If we look at who was attacked in Canada and in the United States, Hindu temples were desecrated, Sikh temples were attacked. In the United States, two Sikh men were shot to death, Hindus were attacked, Pakistanis were attacked, an aboriginal woman –a Cherokee --was attacked. So when we look at who is being constructed in the popular imagination of this potential Muslim terrorist, it becomes very clear that it is black and brown people who are being targeted regardless of what their religion is like. As I say, Hindus were attacked in this country and the United States, so were Sikhs.

So when we look at how this terrorist threat is being constructed in 9-11 that the nation has to watch itself against and prepare itself against that this is a racialized category this is people of colour that they are talking about. This is very clear. As many people noted and were very much aware of after 9-11 there was this backlash against Muslims or people that looked like Muslims, women reported being chased in parking lots and scarves being torn off their heads. Children reported being bullied in school. In fact, a number of Muslim associated issued warning not to sent their children to school a week after the attacks because of the of the level of harassment that the children were facing. This is the popular racism that came quite spontaneous from below and in this country it was directed towards people of colour. But what is also important to recognize is that the state also organized a racism from above and it did so in way that specifically linked the terrorist threat to immigration policy, to refugee policy. And almost one of the first action taken by the government was to issue special guideline to immigration officers at the boarders, to watch out, and to increase surveillance against this threat that was entering the nation, and to secure the nation’s borders.

So what we saw was this popular racism from below. At the same time we had this very organized racism coming from above. The anti-terrorism measure, they specifically linked immigrants and refugees with this terrorist threat. So I think it’s also very important for us to recognize, that while initially many of us thought that this was a backlash against people of colour, against the Muslim community, against those “who look like Muslims,” it became very clear very immediately that this was not just a backlash that was coming from the bottom up, but that this was a very calculated restructuring of Canadian society that had been initiated by the state. And that this would have long-term consequences. These were not short-term measures that were being put into place.

After 9-11, the popular sentiment in the media – that we were all completely saturated with – was that “we were all Americans now.” Many newspapers had that as their banner headlines, I don’t know if people remember that or not. But “we are all Americans now.” There was this intense identification with the United States, with Americans, after 9-11. But at the same time, there was this intense exclusionary impulse towards people of colour, who were defined as not only a threat to the United States now, but a threat to the nation [Canada] itself. And Muslims became constituted, in the popular imagination, in Canada as they did in the United States I would also argue, as the biggest threat to the nation’s security. And that is the space we have been assigned to following 9-11. And I think it’s very important to realize the racialized discourse that goes along with how Muslim people are represented.