Canada has appointed its first special representative to combat Islamophobia following several attacks on the Muslim community.
Journalist and activist Amira Elghawaby will fill the post to “serve as a champion, advisor, expert and representative to support and enhance the federal government’s efforts in the fight against Islamophobia, systemic racism, racial discrimination and religious intolerance,” a statement by the prime minister’s office said.
Who is Amira Elghawaby?
The communications head for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and a columnist for the Toronto Star newspaper, Elghawaby is an active human rights campaigner. She has previously worked for more than a decade at public broadcaster CBC.
Prior to that, Amira worked in Canada’s labour movement in communications and human rights. She also previously spent five years promoting the civil liberties of Canadian Muslims at the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) between 2012 to the fall of 2017.
Born to Egyptian parents, Elghawaby emigrated to Canada at the age of two months with her mother, and spent four of her early years in Bandung, Indonesia. Elghawaby has a degree in journalism and law from Carleton University.
According to her official website, Amira has had an extensive career supporting initiatives to counter hate and to promote inclusion, including as a past founding board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and past board member at the Silk Road Institute. She has served two terms as a Commissioner on the Public Policy Forum’s Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression. She currently sits on the National Security Transparency Advisory Group, an independent, arms-length committee that advises the Deputy Minister of Public Safety Canada.
Further, Amira was a writer-in-residence at the 2019 Literary Arts Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her 2019 TEDXOttawa talk is titled “Multiculturalism: Worth Defending”.
Hate against Muslims in Canada
For years, Muslim community leaders in Canada have called on authorities at all levels to tackle racism, hate-motivated violence, and the prevalence of far-right groups.
Researchers in 2020 found that the number of hate groups operating in the country had tripled in recent years, with anti-Muslim rhetoric one of the “most salient” topics among right-wing extremists online, according to a report in Al Jazeera.
Following this, a year later, Trudeau’s government held national summits on Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in a push to tackle the problems. This was done in an effort to curb attacks on Muslims. A series of deadly attacks and harassment targeting Muslim communities across Canada raised alarm and spurred calls to action.
In a series of tweets Thursday, Elghawaby listed the names of those killed in the recent attacks, adding: “We must never forget.”
