Halton Region joins fight against Islamophobia in Burlington, Oakville, Milton

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Published February 17, 2022 at 10:32 am

An urge to stop the rising incidents of Islamophobia was passed by Halton Region councillors from Burlington, Milton, Oakville and Halton Hills.

The resolution, which was brought to the floor by by Burlington councillor Rory Nissan, calls on the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) to condemn hate and racism in all its forms, including Islamophobia.

It also asks FCM to endorse the municipal recommendations to address the issue advanced by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) and calls on the federal government to consult municipalities in the process of establishing a special representative to address Islamophobia.

“It has only been nine months since the attack in London, where a man murdered four Muslims,” said Nissan during his support of the motion.

“The root cause of this attack is Islamophobia, which is on the rise in Canada.”

According to Nissan, Islamophobia takes distinct shape at various intersections. For instance, many Muslim women experience distinctly gendered forms of Islamophobia that may stem from preconceived notions that Muslim women are oppressed or from seeing visible symbols of Islam such as the hijab as foreign or a menace.

In a similar vein, Black Muslims experience distinct forms of Islamophobia that intersect with anti-Black racism.

Also, Islamophobia affects non-Muslims. Other religious groups that include Sikh Canadians often experience Islamophobia as well by hateful actors who mistake them for Muslims.

The federal government held the National Summit on Islamophobia last July.

To ensure that the summit was focused on action, NCCM engaged in a process of developing recommendations after hosting consultation sessions with mosques, community organizations and collectives representing a diverse intersection of Muslims in Canada.

The recommendations represented recurring themes and submissions coming from organizations that collectively represent hundreds of thousands of Canadian Muslims.

Within those recommendations is a subset that is targeted to municipalities. The resolution before you today is to endorse in principle these recommendations and ask staff to look into them further for applicability to the Halton context.

The resolution also calls on FCM to pick up this issue as part of its new Anti-Racism and Equity Committee.

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