We must say this aloud: Alaa Soufi did the right thing.
Soufi’s — a Syrian run restaurant — received national and international media coverage when they were forced to close after receiving numerous death threats. The increased media coverage resulted in support from many quarters and they are now open again. The family was targeted by an organized right wing internet campaign after their son Alaa Soufi was part of a protest against People’s Party of Canada’s Leader Maxime Bernier.
Alaa, along with three other people, were charged Tuesday, they are now out on bail. Clearly Hamilton Police waited till after the Oct 21st federal election to make the arrests.
While a lot of analysis has been shared about the targeting of the Soufi’s one thing must be repeated, loudly and clearly: Alaa, and the protest, did the right thing.
Alaa, a Syrian refugee, was protesting the public platform given to the People’s Party of Canada.
To understand who the party and Maxime Bernier are, consider the first question he was asked in the Federal Leaders Debate earlier this week. “Mr. Bernier, you like to tweet, so let me read some of your tweets back to you. You called diversity in Canada a cult and extreme multiculturalism. You’ve used the words ghetto and tribes to describe newcomers whom you say bring distrust and potential violence. On Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist, you called her, quote, clearly mentally unstable.”
The People’s Party of Canada is so racist that they will not exclude candidates who are blatantly Islamophobic, but kicked a candidate out who asked for a condemnation of racism.
Public platforms where such vitriol and hatred against racialized people and migrants is drummed up must be loudly and urgently condemned. The fact that Mr Bernier, and his ultra right wing party, was given space to share their viewpoints in meetings, candidate debates, and on television resulted in their party gaining a quarter of a million votes this election.
To be clear, shutting down these racist spaces is not censorship. For a racialized refugee from a Muslim country to protest against an organization that wishes to do him, and the rest of us harm, is the definition of responsible citizenship and free speech.
An outrage machine has gone into high gear attacking Alaa seemingly for standing in front of an elderly grandmother trying to enter a building. We must be clear: this woman was entering a public arena to listen to anti-immigrant, racist vitriol. Stopping her from entering is an acceptable response.
But the fact is, he nor others, actually stopped her. She entered the building, and her primary complaint is that she did not get a good seat.
In case there are doubts about this woman’s political position, here is what she said, “I look at the Middle East and it frightens me, because there’s no democracy … and the fighting in Syria and the values are different than ours.” and “maybe we shouldn’t open the floodgates [on immigration]”.
Remember that she made these statements after learning that Alaa is Syrian. Not a single news story about her or the protest bothered to include a viewpoint explaining how intensely racist these words are.
The phrase “values” or “western values” has been mobilized by the People’s Party of Canada along with populists the world over, incite hatred and bigotry against migrants and racialized people. It is a dog-whistle, a coded term, that aims to cast non-White people as backward aggressors, and outside of society, despite the presence of migrants, and their values, here for centuries.
This is not a story of an innocent grandmother being blocked, this is story of people proclaiming racist views going to listen to a racist, and them largely being given carte blanche to do so. And while Canadian and American commentators are casting Bernier’s defeat at the polls as a rejection by voters of their ideals, the fact is this campaign has given racists a much larger megaphone to draw more people to their hatred cause.
The fake outrage engineered around the protest in Hamilton, framed as a limiting of free speech, remained intact, even as Soufi’s was attacked. A false analogy was created where death threats on a family, was framed as equal to a protest against an event by a politician to engender violence and hatred.
There must be no equivocation in our public position against deplatforming of racists and hate mongers, irrespective of our internal analysis of tactics.
While even the leader of the third-placed New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh called on the Elections Commission to disinvite Maxime Bernier from the Leaders Debate, with some very important exceptions, there was no cross-country organized effort to shut down People’s Party candidates getting a platform, or other party candidates refusing to debate them.
If there is one thing we must learn from the rise of Donald Trump is that racist ideas if allowed to be propagated create enormous suffering for so many of us. Yesterday’s joke can soon become today’s authoritarian.
Alaa, like many others that are stepping up against anti-people ideology, did the right thing. More of us need to join him.
