Few weeks after appointing a special representative for combatting Islamophobia

Few weeks after appointing a special representative for combatting Islamophobia, for the first time, we hear about an act of vandalism in a Mandir, the Hindu temple. The police considered this act as a hate crime. Total police reported hate crimes was 3360 cases in 2021 – According to Statistics Canada report published in August 2022.

A shameful and stressful number in the times where we call for inclusion, diversity, and tolerance always. Out of total cases reported there was 884 cases motivated by religious reasons, and 1723 cases contributed to Race and ethnic motivations. The report showed that Jews were the highest with 427 hate crime reported cases, followed by Catholics with 155 reported cases, third Muslims with 144 cases, then other religions 64.

Numbers might not seem noteworthy with respect to the population and its diverse religious affiliations, yet still an alarming factor that could lead to higher confrontations between religions, especially that different religious groups tend to accentuate any incident then politicians and media play a major role to even heighten incidents, and try to create more fear among the society. Thus leading to two major results; more concessions for certain groups and more votes to politicians.

While the modern civilized world have achieved lengthy milestones towards establishing true secular nations, where religion is always kept as a personal matter and not as an identity to any human being, we find out that our country, one of the major democracies, is not following the same path or in fact is going backwards, no different than few other third world countries which cannot abandon religion as an identity and nationality determinant.

Our politicians are not able to read and learn the history and understand that the religion card only entailed unrest and conflicts, leading to turmoil that have scarred many nations till nowadays, and instead of moving forward towards progress and democracy they are still waving the blasphemy laws, the religion contempt laws and the hate crime laws in the face of its citizens, no different than the times of the inquisition carried by the church in the medieval era and till the industrial revolution and the renaissance.