Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to address the committee today.

I'm a Muslim scholar of racism and Islamophobia studies. I am the co-founder and vice-president of the International Islamophobia Studies Research Association, IISRA, which is a global hub for the field of anti-Muslim racism.

I have jet lag this morning since I got back late last night from IISRA's third international conference on Islamophobia, which was held in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We brought together 70 scholars from around the world to address Islamophobia as a global condition.

We held a special session with genocide scholars to consider the deadly parallels between the Bosnian genocide and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, after which we visited the genocide memorial in Srebrenica as a reminder of the deadly consequences of Islamophobia. That is something we know all too well here in Canada, as we are gathered here today on the anniversary of the London terror attack on June 6.

I've been studying Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism in Canada for the past two decades. Strikingly, over the past several months, I have felt a profound sense of post-9/11 déjà vu, as the massive scale of Israel's deadly violence in Gaza continues to unfold and the legacy of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism as a global project continues.

I wrote a book called Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation, about how Canadian Muslim communities, especially youth, navigated that fraught context when they were cast as radicals, jihadists and potential global security threats. Muslim youth became the new folk devil around which moral panics were manufactured.

However, as I shift from studying anti-Muslim racism in the experiences of the 9/11 generation to examining what the current 10/7 generation of Canadian Muslim youth, especially Palestinians, have faced over the last several months, I can say that the present circumstances are far worse. Over the past two decades since 9/11, Islamophobia has laid the groundwork that makes it easier to collectively label and punish Muslim populations.

The global war on terror has been underpinned by racist ideologies, casting nearly two billion people around the world as violent, fanatical terrorists who threaten democracy, the stability of white nations and western civilization.

For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used racist colonial tropes to strategically dehumanize Palestinians by referring to Israel's deadly onslaught as “a war between the forces of light and forces of darkness, between humanity and animalism.”

History has shown how vilifying stereotypes pave the way for disproportionate violence. The continual association of Muslims with terrorist groups breeds hate, division and violence. The tragic murder of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, in his home in Illinois on October 14, 2023, and the shooting of three Palestinian-American students in November 2023, who were targeted because they were wearing their keffiyehs, are prime examples of how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are deadly, even far away from war zones.

Despite these tragic consequences, Palestinian and other Muslim youth in Canada continue to be labelled as “terrorist sympathizers”. They are confronted with police in riot gear using tear gas and tasers for attending peaceful Palestine solidarity demonstrations, arm in arm with Jewish students on their university campuses.

It's been heartening to see the Shabbat dinners alongside jummah prayers at these encampments, yet the Jewish faculty network and independent Jewish voices were shut out of the anti-Semitism hearings. Surely silencing diverse Jewish voices is anti-Semitic; it is definitely anti-democratic.

As I documented in my book that looked at campus culture in an age of empire, when the 9/11 generation challenged the war on terror, they faced surveillance by CSIS, the RCMP and counterterrorism units on and off campuses. Now that the 10/7 generation is protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza, they face armed police endangering their physical safety on campus, yet the political safety of pro-Israel students on campus is portrayed as more dire than the physical safety of Palestinians, Muslims and their allies, both in Canada and in Gaza.

I want to be clear that we will not allow these hearings to be a distraction from the grave and internationally recognized context of genocide in Gaza. The last several months have been especially traumatizing for racialized Palestinian and Muslim youth. Nevertheless, across Canada and around the world, students have bravely upheld the right to protest injustice and demand that their universities divest from Israeli military interests, despite the violent reprisals they face.

There is a lot of targeting of free speech under the Palestine exception to free speech and the neo-McCarthyist censorship tactics that undermine free expression and political dissent, weaponizing the IHRA's definition of Islamophobia.

I want to talk, though, about what is unique about Islamophobia. Not enough is said about this.

Islamophobia is organized, networked, monetized and orchestrated. There are many examples of this, which I talk about in my book-length report on “The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia's Ecosystem in the Great White North”.