A global network of Muslim thought leaders convened in Toronto on Sunday afternoon to discuss ways to combat antisemitism coming from within their community.
Over 400 people packed into a midtown venue to hear speakers assembled by the non-profit Council of Muslims Against Antisemitism (CMAA), including author Raheel Raza, political commentator Zuhdi Jasser, and an appearance by Conservative Member of Parliament Melissa Lantsman.
The group released a “Call to Action” featuring six planks, including a demand that Hamas release all hostages in Gaza, the Canadian defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), as well as designating the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist entity.
The event was sponsored by Secure Canada, an organization founded by victims of 9/11 committed to combatting terrorism and extremism. The group’s chief executive, Sheryl Saperia, hailed its partnership with CMAA and affirmed its continued mission “to raise our voices against those who seek to deny, justify, excuse, or laud the genocidal antisemitism of Hamas and the sexual atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“The failure of many institutions to take an unequivocal stand against the incontestable sexual violence perpetrated against women, children, and men by Hamas on Oct. 7, or the recasting of this violence as resistance, is a marker of a growing and insidious malaise within our society.”
Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari was given a rousing ovation from the crowd. Ghamari, an Iranian-Canadian, laid much of the blame for the Oct. 7 attacks and subsequent displays of antisemitism seen across Muslim communities on the doorstep of the ayatollahs currently ruling Iran.
The MPP does not recognize religious leaders as the legitimate representatives of Iran. “There’s a reason why we call it the Islamic regime in Iran. We don’t call it Iran because there is nothing Iranian about these Islamofascist ayatollahs.”
“Iranians have been sounding the alarm more so since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman, was brutally murdered — beaten to death just because she wasn’t wearing her mandatory hijab properly,” Ghamari told the audience.
Now, more than ever, our communities must unite against radical ideologies and find our common ground
“Iranians have been sounding the alarm on terrorism because we know what it’s like. We have lived through it for forty-five years. They have tried to indoctrinate us; we have refused to be indoctrinated.”
Ghamari sees the Iranian and Jewish communities united in a shared struggle against extremism underwritten by the ayatollahs who oppose pluralism and democracy. She shared a story of how, privately, many Iranians “raised the flag of Israel,” a crime reportedly punishable by death, in solidarity on Oct. 7. The Progressive Conservative MPP further argued that much of the money sponsoring street demonstrations in Canada and around the world can be traced back to the Iranian regime.
“The friendship and allyship between Jews and Iranians goes back almost 3,000 years,” she said.
“You would think we (Iranians and Jews) are not allies, but we are,” Ghamari told the Post after the event finished.
Daniel Koren, the founder and executive director of Allied Voices for Israel (AVI), attended the event and applauded the initiative. “Now, more than ever, our communities must unite against radical ideologies and find our common ground,” Koren said in an email. “Hearing from such incredible Muslim activists, including my dear friend Raheel Raza, sharing this message of peace and coexistence with the Jewish community, gives me optimism for the future for the first time since the war began.”
Haras Rafiq, a successful businessman turned counter-extremism specialist, told the Post before the event that he made the later-in-life career transition after a distressing conversation in 2004 with his seven-year-old daughter, who said she didn’t want to be a Muslim anymore. “Why don’t you want to be a Muslim? What have we done to you?” Rafiq remembers asking his daughter. “I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to kill anybody,” she responded.
The conversation became a lightning bolt for Rafiq, who wanted to change his daughter’s perception of Muslims. “Can you imagine? That set off a whole chain reaction in my head and I started investigating critical thinking about my own faith. Is this my faith?” Alongside former Islamic extremists (notably, Maajid Nawaz, a former extremist turned bestselling author), Rafiq led Quilliam, a think-tank inspired to counter religious extremism, within the Muslim community, for several years.
Rafiq reflected on his political evolution from an angsty teenager to eventually advising the British governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. As a kid of the 80s, Rafiq loved the British rock scene. “I say this as somebody who comes from the far-left. That was my perception of extremism as a student. I wanted to ban the bomb. I was a punk,” he told the crowd later.
With time, Rafiq began to see the loose threads of extremism coalesce around the “triple threat to our liberal, secular, democracy,” fuelled by actors on the far left, far right, and Islamists. “The frontline, the first thing, the threat that they can all bind themselves together with, is their antisemitism and their hatred,” he told the crowd.
Asra Nomani followed Rafiq during the conference’s second half and shared how her political awakening came following the murder of her Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl in 2002. Nomani returned from her foreign reporting stint in Pakistan to West Virginia and began writing a series of articles challenging sexism within her community.
“And then I started hearing the antisemitism at the mosque,” she told National Post prior to the event. Nomani uncovered more such sermons online and raised awareness about the controversial content being shared in some mainstream American mosques.
Nomani hit upon a theme echoed by several other speakers— the personal toll of speaking out against extremism. “It is hard in that the establishment wants to make you a pariah because you dare to challenge the conventional wisdom that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar Turkey, and Iran perpetuate as if it’s a true Islam,” she said. “But I have absolutely no intellectual or moral conflict, because I can see clearly that it’s a war of ideas, religion is how we interpret it.”
“We are, as a Muslim community, defined by the politics of an Islamic interpretation that happens to be anti-West, anti-woman, anti-Jew, anti-Israel, and what we have to do is what every community has ever had to do in marginalizing the extremists and make the modern view normative.”
Nomani sees encouraging signs that the pendulum is beginning to swing back behind reformers and moderates. She pointed to recent changes in Saudi Arabia, where women are now permitted to drive.
Nomani has been deeply disturbed and disappointed with the lack of condemnation and solidarity with Israel and Jews following the Hamas invasion of Israel, which left over 1,000 dead and hundreds taken hostage. “I thought that the horror of the Oct. 7 attack would cause them (Muslims) so much shame that they would have to refuse that extremist misinterpretation that fuelled the attack,” she told the Post. “October 8th just revealed to me that they are shameless in their propaganda, allegiance, and ideology to an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Israel agenda.”
Still, the panel filled with “brave voices” of fellow Muslims has given Nomani some encouragement. They have “stood up to all the tactics of isolation that the ideologies have tried to use to silence them,” she said.
“And I’m emboldened by their efforts; we are a community; we are many years in the trenches. So we trust each other and know that, while few in number, we’re unrelenting. This is our mission.”
This was originally published on March 5, 2024 by The National Post. Click here to view on their website.
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