Ottawa’s Maher Arar says the federal government should repeal its anti-terrorism legislation as part of a broader response to Islamophobia.
Arar said the Anti-Terrorism Act (formerly Bill C-51), while it does not target Muslims by name, has contributed to the public perception that those from the religious community represent a danger. The law gives Canada’s spy agency the right to actively disrupt national security threats.
“The average Canadian understands this is targeted at us (Muslims),” Arar said Friday. “With Bill C-51, you are basically saying, ‘Muslims are dangerous.’ This is the message that is being given.”
Arar called on the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to scrap what he called an unnecessary law introduced by the Conservatives.
The human rights activist was speaking Friday as three of the six people killed in Sunday’s terror attack on a mosque were mourned at a funeral in Quebec City.
An engineer, Arar was detained by U.S. airport authorities in September 2002, and rendered to Syria where he was held in a dank cell and tortured. After he returned home, Arar fought for a judicial inquiry which ultimately found that his ordeal was caused, in part, by faulty Canadian intelligence. He was awarded $10.5 million in compensation.
Now an entrepreneur — he has founded a fundraising platform aimed at millennials called CauseSquare — Arar is active on social media but rarely grants interviews.
He told the Sun that Sunday’s terror attack on a Quebec City mosque did not occur in isolation, but is the product of many years of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the media and online. “Frankly,” he said, “being a Muslim living in a post-9/11 environment, I’m not surprised by what happened. I thought this was going to happen sooner or later.”
Too often, Arar said, Muslims have been portrayed as inherently violent, as guilty until proven innocent. “The general direction is toward blaming Muslims for anything called terrorism in the world,” he said. “What we saw in Quebec is really a culmination of all of this — and I’m afraid it will not stop there.”
Asked if he had concerns about his own safety, Arar said: “I’d be lying to you if I say, ‘no.’ For my safety, the safety of my family, the safety of my community.”
He called on the federal government to address Islamophobia by repealing the Anti-Terrorism Act and by broadening de-radicalization programs to encompass young people whose minds have been poisoned against Muslims. “I think our cyberspace is dangerous,” Arar said, “and I think the government should say, ‘We’re going to treat everyone the same when it comes to danger.”
Education is also crucial to defeating Islamophobia, he said, and more must be done to teach young people the facts about Islam and to get them to interact with people of other faiths: “I’m sure that if the shooter in Quebec City had interacted with Muslims, knew people in the faith, I don’t think he would have done that.”
Arar said he was dismayed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to impose immigration bans on Syrian refugees and on travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. But it’s important to understand, he said, that the U.S. has been moving in a radical direction since 9/11.
Former President Barack Obama kept open the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, aggressively prosecuted government whistleblowers and expanded a drone campaign that has terrorized innocent civilians, Arar said. “This has been evolving over the last 16 years. People have this notion that police states are created overnight, but that’s not the case.”
Maher Arar says government should scrap anti-terror law as part of response to I
