Some mosques are refusing to let MPs speak to congregants during Islam's holy month — unless they commit to anti-Israel stances
Just weeks after British Columbia’s Muslim community helped oust pro-Israel NDP MLA Selina Robinson from Premier David Eby’s cabinet, a leading national Muslim organization is using similar tactics to pressure elected officials to toe their preferred line on the conflict in Gaza.
In an open letter posted to social media last week, the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) advised members of Parliament that they would not be welcome at “community gatherings” during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, unless they first publicly committed to a list of anti-Israel stances. These stances included: condemning the Israel Defense Forces for “war crimes” committed against Gazans, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and ending the pause on funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a UN agency whose employees have been credibly linked to the Oct. 7 massacre.
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“If you cannot publicly commit to all of the above, respectfully, we cannot provide you with a platform to address our congregations (during Ramadan),” read the letter, which was signed by more than 300 mosques and other Muslim institutions. Ramadan is set to begin at dusk on Mar. 10, less than two weeks from now.
The demands issued by the NCCM and its allies puts a number of MPs, who represent competitive urban and suburban ridings, on the hot seat with the next federal election on the not-too-distant horizon.
While Muslim Canadians are still a relatively small constituency (4.9 per cent of the population, according to the last census), they tend to live in ridings with high levels of electoral competition, as Muslim voters tend to be concentrated in metropolitan areas surrounding major cities. There are, for example, around 14,000 Muslims eligible to vote in the suburban riding of Calgary Skyview, which Liberal MP George Chahal won by less than 3,000 votes in 2021.
The Canadian-Muslim Vote, an independent civic organization, estimated that during the 2021 election, the number of eligible Muslim voters exceeded the predicted margin of victory in one-third of all federal ridings.
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And while Muslims, in Canada and elsewhere, certainly aren’t a monolith, evidence is starting to emerge that the events in Gaza have had a ripple effect with pockets of Muslim voters in the West, with some moving to “punish” elected officials they see as too pro-Israel.
Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Michigan, the state that’s home to the largest concentration of Arabs in America, provides arguably the strongest evidence to date of a Muslim-driven “Gaza backlash” at the ballot box. Despite facing no real competition in the primary, President Joe Biden took in an embarrassing 81 per cent of the vote, with more than 100,000 Michiganders marking “uncommitted” on their ballot. (Biden carried the state by a margin of 150,000 votes over Donald Trump in 2020; Trump is, of course, the overwhelming favourite to face off against Biden in November.)
It was an especially ugly night for Biden in Michigan’s Arab and Muslim population centres. “Uncommitted” blew out the incumbent president by a 17-point margin in Dearborn, Mich., the only Arab-majority city in the United States. A further six in 10 voters went for “uncommitted” in Hamtramck, Mich., home to America’s only all-Muslim local government.
A Michigan exit poll of 527 Muslim primary voters conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found that more than nine in 10 voted “uncommitted.” The same poll found that Trump leads Biden by five points among Muslims who voted in the Democratic primary.
CAIR executive Robert S. McCaw said in a post-primary statement that Biden’s support for Israel likely played a “decisive factor in impacting his support within the Muslim and Arab-American communities.”
Liberal party insiders were no doubt looking at the Michigan primary results with trepidation. The backlash among Muslim voters to the Stephen Harper government’s niqab ban for citizenship ceremonies and “barbaric cultural practices” hotline likely played a role in helping the Justin Trudeau-led Liberals secure a surprise majority in 2015. Since then, the party has made relations with the community a priority. Trudeau himself stages regular photo-ops at mosques, no doubt savouring every chance he gets to flex his sock game in a setting where shoes are prohibited.
But Trudeau, who appeared to be losing his touch with Muslim Canadians even before Oct. 7, now looks to be in freefall with the community. His multiple calls for a “sustainable ceasefire” in Gaza haven’t been enough to placate intransigent pro-Palestinian activists, who’ve even mobbed the prime minister in public settings. Trudeau has likewise found mosques to be less receptive to him than normal in recent months.
For now, Trudeau doesn’t appear to be too worried about the prospect of a Ramadan mosque ban. When asked on Thursday about the open letter, Trudeau said he’d visit any mosque that would extend him the invitation and gave no indication that he’d publicly commit to the terms enumerated in the statement. Yet Trudeau can’t be overjoyed about the prospect of having to keep his socks firmly in shoe during Islam’s holiest month, especially after seeing Biden’s humiliation in Michigan.
The results of Michigan’s just-held Democratic primary hint that the war in Gaza has triggered a rising tide among Muslim voters in the U.S. Whether electorally vulnerable members of Parliament cede to the demands of the NCCM and its affiliates or risk being shut out of mosques during a critical month for Muslim outreach could be an indication of just how strong the pull of this tide is in Canada.
National Post
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