Racial Profiling In Canada Funded By Canadians

Racial profiling is something that we, as Canadians, like to believe hasn’t been on the rise in our country since September 11th. In fact, most of us like to believe that our institutions are now beyond such activities entirely. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as an article by Stefan Christoff in the Montreal Mirror recently pointed out.

According to Christoff’s piece, CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) has been “conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their work places, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques��?.

Because of the increase in CSIS activities regarding the interrogation of Canadian Muslims, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada has shipped literally thousands of copies of a booklet to communities across the country detailing their Charter rights so that they are aware of them in the event that they are confronted by the authorities.

In the article, Christoff quotes a man from Montreal now working in Kuwait who told him during a telephone interview…

“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,��? says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.��?

We live in a world in which Western society has largely held some 1.5 billion people responsible for the act of a handful of madmen. Given the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, are we now to view Korean Canadians as possible mass murderers that, at any moment, might go on a shooting rampage? You will, of course, notice that after Oklahoma City there wasn’t a backlash against Caucasians, nor was CSIS interrogating those who use fertilizer on a daily basis or that commonly rent vans.
The enemy here is ignorance, nothing besides. And for non-Muslim Canadians to stand by and allow racial profiling to occur, racial profiling that is funded by their tax dollars, given CSIS’s budget of some $280 million dollars, is an absolute outrage.

Source : Matthew Good - April 2007