OP-ED: Anti-Islamophobia czar demands Muslim prayer rooms in federal buildings

Hymie Rubenstein writes, "Cabinet advisor Amira Elghawaby has been lobbying government managers to install Muslim prayer rooms in federal buildings."

Author: Hymie Rubenstein

Cabinet advisor Amira Elghawaby has been lobbying government managers to install Muslim prayer rooms in federal buildings. A total of 6,350 of 279,396 federal employees identify as Muslim, about two percent, according to a 2024 survey. It is unknown how many of these Muslims observe Islamic prayer requirements.

This was recently revealed by Blacklock’s Reporter.

Still, Elghawaby claimed in notes disclosed through an Access to Information request by Blacklock’s Reporter that failure to accommodate Muslim prayers in business hours was “Islamophobia in the workplace.”

“Islamophobia in the workplace looks like many things,” said Elghawaby’s notes for a June 20, 2024 videoconference. “It can manifest when Muslim employees face challenges in accessing reasonable accommodations for religious practices such as prayer breaks, fasting during Ramadan or dress code requirements.”

“Islamophobia is a clear and present danger to our social fabric,” wrote Elghawaby. Her remarks were for a videoconference arranged by the Muslim Federal Employees Network (MFEN), a 60-person volunteer group claiming to represent all Muslim government employees.

In one case, Elghawaby’s office complained the Canada Revenue Agency did not promptly respond to her request for Muslim prayer rooms. “Unfortunately, we have not yet received a response from the Agency regarding our inquiry into contemplation spaces,” said a staff email. “We do have plans to follow up with departments that did not issue a response in the coming weeks.”

Elghawaby had her office draft letters “to be sent out to deputy ministers regarding concerns raised by the Muslim Federal Employees Network,” according to a January 17 letter. The contents of the correspondence were censored.

In a Managers’ Guide to Supporting Muslim Employees, the MFEN said prayer rooms were mandatory. “Muslims have five obligatory prayers a day,” it wrote. “Sometimes up to three of the five prayers occur during a 9 am to 5 pm workday. Prayers must be performed within their allocated time periods which vary day to day.”

The Managers’ Guide also cautioned against handshaking at work since “physical contact between opposite sexes unless married or closely related is forbidden.” And it advised that managers should be aware that Islam “teaches there is only one god.”

A Strategic Plan circulated by Elghawaby’s office also proposed that the MFEN receive taxpayer funding. No figure was detailed. Federal managers should also “send out messaging to acknowledge significant Islamic occasions,” it said.

The Strategic Plan demanded that Parliament amend the Employment Equity Act to ensure “Muslims are a designated group” like Indigenous Canadians, and that the Treasury Board “collect data on Muslim public servants to understand their barriers.” Federal managers should also “include religious minorities in job postings,” it said.

Access to Information records show Elghawaby’s office circulated an undated memo entitled Championing Inclusion that stated the “spectrum of Islamophobia” went beyond overt racism but “failure to accommodate,” specifically “employer refusal to adapt its policies, rules and practices to provide Muslim employees with equal opportunities to perform their jobs.”

In scripted comments for a 2024 videoconference, Elghawaby, an Egyptian-born Muslim, claimed:

“Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms, including justifying violence against Palestinians, failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people or as having a collective identity, erasing the human rights and equal identity and worth of Palestinians and defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander that seeks to represent them as threatening, violent or opposed to democratic values.”

It is hard to call this “anti-Palestinian racism” when Jewish Israelis are the true indigenous people of the disputed territories between the Jordon River and the Mediterranean Sea. As for a sense of “collective identity” among the so-called Palestinians, it was slowly born no earlier than the late 19th century in reaction to diasporic Jews returning to their aboriginal homeland.

More questionable still is her claim that the Muslim occupants of the thoroughly undemocratic West Bank and Gaza are not “threatening, violent or opposed to democratic values” when they fomented or led wars and other battles against Israel in 1947-1948, 1967, 1967-1970, 1973, 1982, 1987-1993, 2000-2005, 2006, 2008-2009, 2012, 2021, and 2023-present.

Without providing any examples, Elghawaby has also claimed, “Islamophobia looks like escorting an employee out of the workplace for making pro-Palestinian comments.”

In its correspondence, the Office of the Special Representative has repeatedly referred to the Hamas invasion of Israel. In an October 9, 2024 email, one year after the unprovoked genocidal attack against innocent Israelis and other nationalities, a senior analyst expressed sympathy for Muslim employees during anniversary observances. “I hope you are well, especially during what is a very difficult week,” said the email. “Know that our office is thinking about you and your members.”

Elghawaby, in separate notes for an “anti-Palestinian racism event,” said the Hamas attacks were difficult for Muslims. “Anti-Palestinian sentiments are on the rise in Canada,” she wrote. “As I know everyone is aware, the Islamophobia landscape has greatly evolved. There is a series of recent incidents just since mid-March which demonstrate how targeted the Muslim community has been in the aftermath of October 7, 2023.”

“This has had a negative impact on Muslim Canadians who have been left feeling scared and threatened in their communities,” said Elghawaby. “I continue to raise this as a concern with government leaders and officials when I meet them.”

What Elghawaby seems totally unconcerned about is that the level and proportion of anti-Palestinian/anti-Muslim racism in Canada is far below its anti-Israeli/Jewish counterparts.

Elghawaby was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on January 26, 2023 for a four-year term as Canada’s first special representative on combatting Islamophobia. Her office has a budget of $5.6 million to cover the first five years of activities.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims described her appointment as a “historic moment for Muslims in Canada.” But days after her appointment, Quebec Premier François Legault called for her resignation, after La Presse reported that Elghawaby had written that Quebeckers seem “influenced by anti-Muslim sentiment,” in a 2019 column in the Ottawa Citizen. The same La Presse article also reported that in May 2021 Elghawaby wrote “I’m going to puke” on Twitter in reaction to an opinion editorial by Joseph Heath, a philosophy teacher at the University of Toronto, who argued that French Canadians were the largest group in Canada to have suffered from British colonialism.

On August 30, 2024, Elghawaby sent a letter to Canadian college and university heads, suggesting that to improve the dangerous climate on campuses and to ease tensions since the war between Israel and Hamas, educational institutions should support freedom of expression, brief campus leaders on Islamophobia, and hire more professors of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian origin.

Quebec Premier François Legault and higher education minister Pascale Dery were opposed, with Dery noting that hiring professors based on religion goes against provincial principles of secularism. Also in response, Dery referred to the alarming rise in antisemitism on campuses and stated, “I will spare no effort to ensure that our institutions do everything they can to restore a healthy and safe environment for all students and to counter bullying and hatred.”

With all this biased ethno-religious baggage weighing her down, only some of which is listed here, it is no wonder that calls for Elghawaby’s dismissal have never subsided.

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.