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 Canadas 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 universitys Free Thought Society and Montreals 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