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bemildred

(90,061 posts)
Mon Jan 27, 2014, 12:01 PM Jan 2014

An Evening with Canada’s Islamophobia Industry

By Sana Saeed - Mon, 2014-01-27 15:33- Thought Crime

Student flyers have a curious and entertaining culture about them: pinned, stapled, and taped to designated wall spaces. Each flyer vies for the attention of the quick passing, panicking, distracted student. In mid-October 2010 I – a quick-passing, panicking, distracted student – came across a conspicuously placed flyer in the midst of a few hundred others. Unlike the other flyers, this caught my attention due to the presence of the friendly, smiling and round face of Canada’s one-man Islamophobia industry: Tarek Fatah.

Four years later, it remains one of the most telling experiences of how the industry works, and why it – and similar industries built on profitable fear-mongering – will continue to prosper.

The flyer advertised Fatah being hosted as a guest speaker by the university’s Free Thought Society and Montreal’s Center for Inquiry, an organization that seeks to advance “reason, science, secularism and freedom of inquiry.” Fatah is a “progressive Muslim” writer, author, public speaker who has exceptional command of the Global War on Terror lexicon. He was coming to promote his then-new book The Jew is Not My Enemy, dedicated to “exploring the myths that fuel Muslim anti-Semitism.”

Always interested in being surrounded by people who are eager to prove me intellectually inferior, I quickly texted a fellow graduate student in my Islamic Studies program, Ayesha. Sharing my taste for intellectual subversion, she agreed to attend and see what awkward atrocities of human interaction would transpire.

http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/thought-crime/evening-canada%E2%80%99s-islamophobia-industry

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An Evening with Canada’s Islamophobia Industry (Original Post) bemildred Jan 2014 OP
Despicable conduct and hard to deicde where it falls: Jefferson23 Jan 2014 #1

Jefferson23

(30,099 posts)
1. Despicable conduct and hard to deicde where it falls:
Mon Jan 27, 2014, 01:12 PM
Jan 2014

snip* We were either listening to a sincere activist or a sincere opportunist.

Either way, disturbing.

K&R

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