It's funny how politicians / leaders everywhere around the world play upon one & only one emotion of public: fear. Politicians, essentially, treat the general public as little children. Just like parents make up scary stories to make their kids to do something, e.g. eat their veggies, politicians take a small incident, blow it up a thousand times, & scare people to do their own bidding.
So be it the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ("North America is against the development of South America") or the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini ("immigrants are to blame for the poverty of South Africans") or Mr. Nigel Farage of UKIP blaming Islam & Muslims (behind the cover of anti-immigration) for economic woes of UK or Mr. Stephen Harper preaching Islamophobia to the Canadian crowds. What they all forget are the consequences of their statements? We can see the dire consequences of King Goodwill's statements in South Africa right now. Now, Mr. Zwelithini is asking for calm & blaming the media for misinterpreting his statements but the damage is already done. People are dead. Families are destroyed. Livelihoods are stolen. Those people who lost their lives won't come back now.
Since, the current government of Canada can't exactly win on job creation or economy, let's scare people about Islam & Muslims. Will Mr. Harper take responsibility when a Muslim woman, who is veiled or even simply wearing a hijab, is assaulted on the streets of Toronto? Will Quebecers come out in the support of Muslims when a Muslim woman is assaulted on the streets of Montreal?
After all, the general public keeps proving itself gullible, naïve, & a fine example in idiocy; they will believe anything & will diligently act upon it, too.
Majority of general public (all over world) = sheep = zombies ... all follow one without thinking.
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One recent poll put the Conservatives in first place in Quebec City, with similar results in the swath of mostly rural regions west of the province’s capital city.
... by coming out against the wearing of the face-covering niqab during a citizenship oath, which was the subject of a recent court decision, & the threat of another terrorist attack on Canadian soil, Harper hit upon a strain of collective fear in the province—where, as another recent poll suggests, nearly 80% of people are worried about a terrorist attack & the indoctrination of young Quebecers by Islamist extremists.
And what goes for Quebec goes for the country as a whole. The recent threat of an attack ... has only underscored the Canada-wide support for the government’s new anti-terrorism bill, which, according to recent polling numbers, is at nearly 85%.
Since the terrorist attacks in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the Prime Minister has taken to peppering his speeches with the words “jihad” & “terrorism,” whether speaking in Montreal or British Columbia or Brisbane, Australia. His national poll numbers have trended steadily upward, while the two opposition parties, the NDP & Liberals, have seen a corresponding decrease, according to poll aggregator Éric Grenier. “Jihadi terrorism, as it is evolving, is one of the most dangerous enemies our world has ever faced,” Harper said in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill recently. “We will not be intimidated by jihadist terrorists,” he said in Delta, B.C., in a speech otherwise devoted to infrastructure spending.
The message seems clear: Appealing to Canadians’ baser fears doesn’t only work—it’s also a rare source of national unity.
Quebec’s Muslim population more than doubled between 2001 & 2011, in large part because of Quebec’s immigration policy favouring new arrivals from French-speaking countries. This influx of French-speakers, primarily from North Africa, were decidedly different in appearance & in their religious practices, spurring the so-called “reasonable accommodations” debate.
Fear of Muslims erupted in Quebec’s overwhelmingly white hinterland (the very area Harper covets today) over the spectre of mosques on their skylines & pork-free fèves au lard at the sugar shack. The town of Hérouxville, home to exactly zero Muslims, banned public stonings.
Then the attacks started. Certainly, Quebecers were as aghast as the rest of the world at the various terrorist attacks against Western targets. Yet the attacks against soldiers in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu & on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill were a special kind of horror: Both perpetrators were pure laine francophone, born-&-bred Quebecers ostensibly radicalized by fundamentalist imams & the outer margins of the Internet.
“The fact that these 2 guys were from Quebec was a wake-up call,” says Quebec MNA Nathalie Roy, the critic for secular matters for the right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ). “It’s unthinkable that Quebec citizens would go so far as to renounce our values & our rights.” The attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which Islamist gunmen killed 12 in & around the office of the Paris-based satirical magazine in January, had particular resonance in Quebec. Proportionally, it received nearly 3 times the media coverage in the province than elsewhere in the country, according to Influence Communication, a Montreal-based media-monitoring company.
The issue of Muslim & societal values came up yet again with a recent Federal Court decision that struck down a prohibition on the wearing of the niqab while taking the public citizenship oath. Like most court decisions, there are nuances to what Federal Court Judge Keith Boswell wrote. The issue wasn’t about identification, since the woman in question, Zunera Ishaq, had already shown her face to citizenship authorities.
Nor did Boswell’s decision outright allow for the wearing of the niqab during the oath. It only quashed a 2011 government directive barring the Muslim face-covering during the ceremony because it prevented citizenship judges from “allowing the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization,” as outlined in the citizenship regulations.
These nuances were mostly overlooked in the ensuing outrage over the Federal Court decision. This outrage was at a full boil when the Prime Minister first announced his government’s intention to appeal Boswell’s decision during a stop in Victoriaville, Que.
... Harper’s statement, uttered in both official languages, was a master stroke of quotable outrage. “I believe, & I think most Canadians believe, that it is offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to joining the Canadian family,” he said. “This is a society that is transparent, open, & where people are equal. And that is just . . . I think we find that offensive.”
Among those who listened at Harper’s side was Victoriaville Mayor Alain Rayes. Born of Egyptian immigrants, Rayes has been mayor of the city of 45,000 since 2009. A fit 43-year-old with a ready smile & an informal way about him, Rayes is being heavily courted to run for the Conservatives in the next election. He says the vast majority of his constituents see eye-to-eye with Harper on the topics of terrorism & societal norms.
“It’s an aberration to hear [NDP Leader] Thomas Mulcair say he is against the anti-terror bill, or to hear [Liberal Leader] Justin Trudeau say he finds it normal that a person doesn’t remove her niqab during a citizenship oath. I’m not against the veil or freedom of religion, but there is a limit,” Rayes says.
The CAQ, meanwhile, proposed a motion to perform background checks on anyone requesting a permit to build a mosque in Quebec, as well as a law banning any form of speech that “goes against the values inscribed in Quebec’s charter of rights.” It was voted down in Quebec’s National Assembly.
This makes for fertile political ground for the Conservatives, says Quebecer Stephen Brown. “In Quebec, if a deeply unpopular prime minister comes & says, ‘I want to protect you & your culture,’ he’s going to have an immediate audience. The fear of extremist Islam, which is justified, is like political catnip,” says the 28-year-old volunteer with the Quebec-based Canadian Muslim Forum.
The Tories may find this a winning strategy outside of Quebec, as well. An Angus-Reid poll published in mid-February suggested that 82% of Canadians support Bill C-51, the Conservative government’s anti-terrorism legislation. An earlier Angus-Reid poll, published about a month after the attacks in Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu & Parliament Hill, suggests why this support is so high. 62% of Canadians (including 60% of Quebecers) believe homegrown terrorism is a serious threat.
The terrorist attacks in Canada in 2014 have had a similar effect on public opinion as the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, says University of Toronto professor & terrorism law expert Kent Roach. In both cases, politicians leveraged the collective fear of terrorism to pass more stringent laws. “Like the Anti-Terrorism Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks, Bill C-51 is an omnibus bill that is being enacted amid fears of additional terrorist attacks. In both cases, there are almost daily media accounts of terrorist threats to Canada,” Roach says ... .
Citizenship & Immigration Minister Chris Alexander sent out a note to supporters criticizing the Federal Court for its stance on the niqab. He also noted his government’s intention to appeal the decision “allowing people to wear the hijab,” thus, knowingly or not, conflating the niqab & the hijab, 2 very different articles of clothing. (The term hijab is widely used to describe a head scarf that doesn’t cover the face.) ... And it took just over a week into his tenure as Canada’s new defence minister for Jason Kenney to proclaim the “high probability of future jihadist attacks from within”—a contention, coincidentally or not, that 62% of Canadians believe, according to the Angus-Reid poll. (A bit of perspective: Canadian-born terrorists were responsible for the deaths of 2 people in 2014; in 2011, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data, 2,158 Canadians died in motor vehicle accidents.)
As the Conservatives have shown across the country, fear of jihadists & face-coverings alike is a far more exploitable subject that also happens to dovetail with the government’s tough-on-crime agenda. “If I were Stephen Harper’s political adviser, I’d tell him to do exactly what he’s doing,” says Brown of the Canadian Muslim Forum. “Fear is the most powerful human emotion &, if people are afraid, they will be willing to give you more power in the name of protecting them.” In promoting this fear in Quebec & beyond, perhaps Stephen Harper has found the key to national unity after all.
So be it the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ("North America is against the development of South America") or the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini ("immigrants are to blame for the poverty of South Africans") or Mr. Nigel Farage of UKIP blaming Islam & Muslims (behind the cover of anti-immigration) for economic woes of UK or Mr. Stephen Harper preaching Islamophobia to the Canadian crowds. What they all forget are the consequences of their statements? We can see the dire consequences of King Goodwill's statements in South Africa right now. Now, Mr. Zwelithini is asking for calm & blaming the media for misinterpreting his statements but the damage is already done. People are dead. Families are destroyed. Livelihoods are stolen. Those people who lost their lives won't come back now.
Since, the current government of Canada can't exactly win on job creation or economy, let's scare people about Islam & Muslims. Will Mr. Harper take responsibility when a Muslim woman, who is veiled or even simply wearing a hijab, is assaulted on the streets of Toronto? Will Quebecers come out in the support of Muslims when a Muslim woman is assaulted on the streets of Montreal?
After all, the general public keeps proving itself gullible, naïve, & a fine example in idiocy; they will believe anything & will diligently act upon it, too.
Majority of general public (all over world) = sheep = zombies ... all follow one without thinking.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
One recent poll put the Conservatives in first place in Quebec City, with similar results in the swath of mostly rural regions west of the province’s capital city.
... by coming out against the wearing of the face-covering niqab during a citizenship oath, which was the subject of a recent court decision, & the threat of another terrorist attack on Canadian soil, Harper hit upon a strain of collective fear in the province—where, as another recent poll suggests, nearly 80% of people are worried about a terrorist attack & the indoctrination of young Quebecers by Islamist extremists.
And what goes for Quebec goes for the country as a whole. The recent threat of an attack ... has only underscored the Canada-wide support for the government’s new anti-terrorism bill, which, according to recent polling numbers, is at nearly 85%.
Since the terrorist attacks in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the Prime Minister has taken to peppering his speeches with the words “jihad” & “terrorism,” whether speaking in Montreal or British Columbia or Brisbane, Australia. His national poll numbers have trended steadily upward, while the two opposition parties, the NDP & Liberals, have seen a corresponding decrease, according to poll aggregator Éric Grenier. “Jihadi terrorism, as it is evolving, is one of the most dangerous enemies our world has ever faced,” Harper said in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill recently. “We will not be intimidated by jihadist terrorists,” he said in Delta, B.C., in a speech otherwise devoted to infrastructure spending.
The message seems clear: Appealing to Canadians’ baser fears doesn’t only work—it’s also a rare source of national unity.
Quebec’s Muslim population more than doubled between 2001 & 2011, in large part because of Quebec’s immigration policy favouring new arrivals from French-speaking countries. This influx of French-speakers, primarily from North Africa, were decidedly different in appearance & in their religious practices, spurring the so-called “reasonable accommodations” debate.
Fear of Muslims erupted in Quebec’s overwhelmingly white hinterland (the very area Harper covets today) over the spectre of mosques on their skylines & pork-free fèves au lard at the sugar shack. The town of Hérouxville, home to exactly zero Muslims, banned public stonings.
Then the attacks started. Certainly, Quebecers were as aghast as the rest of the world at the various terrorist attacks against Western targets. Yet the attacks against soldiers in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu & on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill were a special kind of horror: Both perpetrators were pure laine francophone, born-&-bred Quebecers ostensibly radicalized by fundamentalist imams & the outer margins of the Internet.
“The fact that these 2 guys were from Quebec was a wake-up call,” says Quebec MNA Nathalie Roy, the critic for secular matters for the right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ). “It’s unthinkable that Quebec citizens would go so far as to renounce our values & our rights.” The attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which Islamist gunmen killed 12 in & around the office of the Paris-based satirical magazine in January, had particular resonance in Quebec. Proportionally, it received nearly 3 times the media coverage in the province than elsewhere in the country, according to Influence Communication, a Montreal-based media-monitoring company.
The issue of Muslim & societal values came up yet again with a recent Federal Court decision that struck down a prohibition on the wearing of the niqab while taking the public citizenship oath. Like most court decisions, there are nuances to what Federal Court Judge Keith Boswell wrote. The issue wasn’t about identification, since the woman in question, Zunera Ishaq, had already shown her face to citizenship authorities.
Nor did Boswell’s decision outright allow for the wearing of the niqab during the oath. It only quashed a 2011 government directive barring the Muslim face-covering during the ceremony because it prevented citizenship judges from “allowing the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization,” as outlined in the citizenship regulations.
These nuances were mostly overlooked in the ensuing outrage over the Federal Court decision. This outrage was at a full boil when the Prime Minister first announced his government’s intention to appeal Boswell’s decision during a stop in Victoriaville, Que.
... Harper’s statement, uttered in both official languages, was a master stroke of quotable outrage. “I believe, & I think most Canadians believe, that it is offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to joining the Canadian family,” he said. “This is a society that is transparent, open, & where people are equal. And that is just . . . I think we find that offensive.”
Among those who listened at Harper’s side was Victoriaville Mayor Alain Rayes. Born of Egyptian immigrants, Rayes has been mayor of the city of 45,000 since 2009. A fit 43-year-old with a ready smile & an informal way about him, Rayes is being heavily courted to run for the Conservatives in the next election. He says the vast majority of his constituents see eye-to-eye with Harper on the topics of terrorism & societal norms.
“It’s an aberration to hear [NDP Leader] Thomas Mulcair say he is against the anti-terror bill, or to hear [Liberal Leader] Justin Trudeau say he finds it normal that a person doesn’t remove her niqab during a citizenship oath. I’m not against the veil or freedom of religion, but there is a limit,” Rayes says.
The CAQ, meanwhile, proposed a motion to perform background checks on anyone requesting a permit to build a mosque in Quebec, as well as a law banning any form of speech that “goes against the values inscribed in Quebec’s charter of rights.” It was voted down in Quebec’s National Assembly.
This makes for fertile political ground for the Conservatives, says Quebecer Stephen Brown. “In Quebec, if a deeply unpopular prime minister comes & says, ‘I want to protect you & your culture,’ he’s going to have an immediate audience. The fear of extremist Islam, which is justified, is like political catnip,” says the 28-year-old volunteer with the Quebec-based Canadian Muslim Forum.
The Tories may find this a winning strategy outside of Quebec, as well. An Angus-Reid poll published in mid-February suggested that 82% of Canadians support Bill C-51, the Conservative government’s anti-terrorism legislation. An earlier Angus-Reid poll, published about a month after the attacks in Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu & Parliament Hill, suggests why this support is so high. 62% of Canadians (including 60% of Quebecers) believe homegrown terrorism is a serious threat.
The terrorist attacks in Canada in 2014 have had a similar effect on public opinion as the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, says University of Toronto professor & terrorism law expert Kent Roach. In both cases, politicians leveraged the collective fear of terrorism to pass more stringent laws. “Like the Anti-Terrorism Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks, Bill C-51 is an omnibus bill that is being enacted amid fears of additional terrorist attacks. In both cases, there are almost daily media accounts of terrorist threats to Canada,” Roach says ... .
Citizenship & Immigration Minister Chris Alexander sent out a note to supporters criticizing the Federal Court for its stance on the niqab. He also noted his government’s intention to appeal the decision “allowing people to wear the hijab,” thus, knowingly or not, conflating the niqab & the hijab, 2 very different articles of clothing. (The term hijab is widely used to describe a head scarf that doesn’t cover the face.) ... And it took just over a week into his tenure as Canada’s new defence minister for Jason Kenney to proclaim the “high probability of future jihadist attacks from within”—a contention, coincidentally or not, that 62% of Canadians believe, according to the Angus-Reid poll. (A bit of perspective: Canadian-born terrorists were responsible for the deaths of 2 people in 2014; in 2011, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data, 2,158 Canadians died in motor vehicle accidents.)
As the Conservatives have shown across the country, fear of jihadists & face-coverings alike is a far more exploitable subject that also happens to dovetail with the government’s tough-on-crime agenda. “If I were Stephen Harper’s political adviser, I’d tell him to do exactly what he’s doing,” says Brown of the Canadian Muslim Forum. “Fear is the most powerful human emotion &, if people are afraid, they will be willing to give you more power in the name of protecting them.” In promoting this fear in Quebec & beyond, perhaps Stephen Harper has found the key to national unity after all.
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