Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. On the podcast today, Lauren Chisholm talks with Nadia Hassan about her report documenting the rise of anti-Arab discrimination in Canada.
Speaker: In the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, Canada saw a rise in anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Semitism that affects many areas of life and work for Canadians.
Speaker: So begins a report called Documenting the Palestine Exception. It was produced by the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University. The incidents documented in the report portray a climate of censorship, repression, and violence that cut across the country and through various aspects of life in Canada.
Speaker: Nadia Hassan is Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at York University. She joins me now. Hello, Nadia. Hi, Lorraine. How are you? I'm good, and thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker: Many community organizers in Canada have been calling out the Palestine exception, and your own report is called documenting the Palestine exception. What does that mean?
Speaker: Well, I can tell you a little bit about how the report came about and what was the impetus behind doing this documentation project. Just sort of in the immediate aftermath of October 2023, there was just such a deluge of incidents ranging from, you know, bullying an elementary school playgrounds to people at work facing reprisal and discipline over their stances on Palestine.
Speaker: And as we were sort of speaking with a number of community organizations, we were just kind of hearing these stories about how, just how many incidents they were getting, how many reports they were getting. They were all super under-resourced, understaffed, couldn't keep up with just how many they were coming.
Speaker: And we thought, you know, while not all of these incidents might get the attention they need because of this sort of shortage of of resources, we wanted to at least bear witness that this happened right here in Canada.
Speaker: And these are some of the stories that show us this exceptional treatment, not just of people who are speaking out for Palestinian human rights or speaking out against the Israeli government's actions, but also people who are simply seen as Palestinian, Muslim, or Arab in this political moment.
Speaker: Now, you give an overview of the Ra's and Islamophobic events since October 7th, 2023, and the numbers are really quite sobering and also, to me, quite shocking.
Speaker: What does that look like? Well, the numbers are, you know, one part of the story, but it's important to remember, like before I say anything about the numbers, is that according to Statistics Canada, only one fifth of hate crimes, for example, ever are reported.
Speaker: Most hate crimes go unreported. So even when we're looking at numbers, we just have to remember this huge gap in what we're capturing. And despite that gap, we still see these incredible increases that are reported by community organizations like the National Council of Canadian Muslims reporting a 1300% increase in o Islamophobia cases in the single month following October 7, 2023. Muslim Legal Support reporting receiving cases of human rights complaints between October and March
Speaker: And there are many others, like the Legal Centre for Palestine, reporting a 600% increase in cases they received in the eight months following October 7, 2023. And these community numbers that we're seeing like within these organizations, the spikes that they've seen, are paralleled by reports from hate Crime Data, from Statistics Canada, and even from police services like the Toronto Police Services.
Speaker: Overall, what we see is a really alarming picture of these spikes that are, you know, they tell a story of suspicion, of hatred, of this fear of entire communities that has become so normalized in Canada that it's almost impossible to capture in these numbers.
Speaker: It's absolutely brutal. and you're right, numbers don't tell the story. Can you give us a few examples from the many you heard about young people being singled out for expressions of Palestinian solidarity? And, you know, I'm sure that we could talk about that all day.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, one of the things that really struck out to us as we were putting this report together was just how much of this is actually, you know, young people's lives just being turned upside down and being, in some cases, their future is kind of being destroyed.
Speaker: because of really bold and courageous statuses that they're taking to call out our governments or other governments for the treatment of Palestinians that is, you know, that they felt was like violations of not just international laws, but just sort of basic humanity.
Speaker: And so we saw cases like, I'll tell you a story about this one elementary school kid in Ontario who was beaten up in the playground by a number of other kids. So it was sort of this mob mentality attack on this elementary school child whose name sounded like Hamas.
Speaker: So, he had done nothing to provoke this. he just It was just his identity, his name, that triggered this group violence that left him with serious damages to his face. He had a broken nose. He had to go to the hospital.
Speaker: There are a number of layers also about how the school didn't really handle it very well. And the parents in the end ended up having to move schools for their kid because it was just that unsafe.
Speaker: So we have these incidents of just violent hate. But then we also have these really systemic ways in which young people who are taking these stances are getting blacklisted.
Speaker: And one of the most prominent examples of that is the case of the Toronto Metropolitan University's law school where a number of students who had signed on to a letter that called on their university to do more, called out, you know, anti-Palestinian racism and demanded accountability, divestment, et cetera, et cetera. Like we all know a lot of what student movements have been about around this.
Speaker: And they, you know, in addition to being reprimanded by the university, they actually ended up on this sort of blacklist for recruitment by law firms. So a number of law firms started this initiative to actually proactively put these students' names on blacklists. So when they go up to be hired or go up for jobs at any of these institutions, that they would be, you know, automatically sort of ah not offered the job without even being pursued as a candidate.
Speaker: And this included, like within the government of Ontario, they also were engaged in this practice of blacklisting students. And that's not the only example of blacklisting students.
Speaker: so Throughout the report, we'll see there is a range of, even when we talk about young people, that's a big category. So you see this range of like young people as little as elementary school, kids in university, young professionals who are just sort of just starting their careers and having this disproportionate response that even, you know, investigation after investigation into all these incidents has found to be a disproportionate response or a really unusual way of dealing with young people. And for us,
Speaker: but What really stuck out to us was that we're seeing more and more young people being, that their ideas are met with punishment and reprisal as opposed to pedagogy and engagement and and debate and dialogue.
Speaker: So we are at a time where, or in a moment where this exceptional treatment, and this is why we use the term Palestine exception, is really obvious when it comes to the lives of people, of students, of young professionals who are taking stances or simply, you know, their identities are implicated in this conflict.
Speaker: Nadia, you've referred to a couple of areas where these young people have suffered the effects of this Islamophobia, ah being part of the Palestine exception. what are What's the range of effects on them?
Speaker: A report doesn't go into the effects. It really is ah it's a pretty simple report. It is you know a list of incidents that show us different aspects of how we see the Palestine exception play out in various contexts.
Speaker: But what I can say just anecdotally from what we heard is that there is a real sense of trepidation, anxiety, and or maybe even I would say like people are resigned to the fact that they are going to be targeted in these really racist and unfair ways if they take these stances and they do this knowing And understanding that this is the terrain in which we are all working within.
Speaker: And that, I think, is it's sad. It's sad in a place like Canada, which is supposed to be... somewhere where we value democracy, where we value freedom, we value people's ideas, different types of ideas, it's okay to disagree.
Speaker: Like, we're losing a bit of that culture, in large part because of the Palestine exception. And we really see this unraveling of democratic rights and freedoms when it comes to this.
Speaker: So the impacts are for sure around this chill on free speech, what many people are calling this like censorship and disciplinary way in which speech around Palestine is being suffocated in this country.
Speaker: But also we're seeing people being afraid of even expressing their identity as Palestinians. So one of my colleagues, Nihat Jasser,
Speaker: She put it in really beautiful, beautiful terms where, you know, she talked about how we shouldn't have to whisper the word Palestine.
Speaker: And she's Palestinian. And she talked about how, you know, in within her communities, within Palestinian communities, people, they know that in certain spaces, you just don't say that you're Palestinian.
Speaker: Like certain conversations you being Palestinian is going to become a danger to you and your safety and your personal um development or progress or growth within an employment context, for example.
Speaker: So there is certainly a range of impacts, and I think some of the the more troubling ones are this, we've just let it go. Like, we've let our commitments to democratic rights and freedoms go, and it's become almost normal for there to be a Palestine exception.
Speaker: Nadia, what did your report find when looking at the gender dimensions of this Palestine exception and this Islamophobia? The gender dimensions are actually kind of difficult to talk about because some of them are just so horribly violent and triggering. But one of one of the cases that we kind of opened the report with was one of the first cases of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
Speaker: that took place in Montreal, where this woman, and her name is Najjar, there are lots of media reports about her story, um but she had a Palestine flag sticker on her car, and another woman ah started to try to ram her car into Najjar and tried to hurt her.
Speaker: But this was also followed by like a racist tirade, which was caught on video. ah So it's kind of all there for anybody who wants to see. And she says things like, you should be raped.
Speaker: You should be dragged through the streets in front of your kids. And these threats of like wishing like violent sexual assault on somebody because of a Palestine flag on their car...
Speaker: It really was, you know, one of those stories where you can see the layers and the intersections between gender and Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism, really really sort of shaping this incident in profound ways.
Speaker: It's really painful to to read those stories. And even as I was going through the report, some of the pull quotes of, you know, the violence and hatefulness was really, really, really troubling.
Speaker: Nadia, what are your hopes for how the report might contribute to changes in Canadian society around anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia? Nadia Our hope, again, like doing this work of just bearing witness to what has happened right here in Canada, it really is to provide some very concrete evidence of what many people have been talking about for a long time and have known to be true.
Speaker: We wanted to compile these incidents because they're real. They show real people who have dealt with these absolutely life-changing moments that are horrific, and some of them are are truly, truly horrific.
Speaker: And there's no no denying that these incidents have happened. They've taken place. that This has happened here. You can't tell me there is no such thing as Islamophobia. There's no such thing as anti-Palestinian racism if you look at this report and look at the evidence.
Speaker: It's sad that we have to do that, but I think our hope is that this will actually serve as a way of pushing past the conversation of like, is this a problem to, you know, what do we do about this?
Speaker: And that's where we're hoping, you know, some of our recommendation would get taken up, especially some of our recommendations around schools and universities and campuses would get taken up. And we have been talking to a number of elected officials, other community partners who've been, you know, using the report to mobilize for change.
Speaker: And we're going to keep doing that work until we see the leaders in our country, especially, take clear stances to denounce this trend, to denounce the kind of violence, the exceptionalization of Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab identities and actually put in place the necessary guardrails that we need to protect our democratic rights and freedoms, no matter who you are, and no matter what your background or your political position.
Speaker: I really appreciate your joining me today. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. And thank you so much for the work that you're doing. I appreciate you saying that. I've been speaking with Nadia Hassan. She is assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at York University.
Speaker: The report we have been speaking about is documenting the Palestine exception, an overview of trans and Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Arab racism in Canada in the aftermath of October 2023.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
Speaker: Also, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or telling someone about our podcast. To keep up with the show, you can subscribe to Red Eye wherever you listen to your podcasts. And you can follow us on Blue Sky at Red Eye Radio.
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
