Just months after the London attack, many wonder why Islamophobia, hate not an election issue
CBC
Just weeks after four members of a Muslim family were killed in what police have called act of terror, Aalia Bhalloo stood shaking in the middle of a Toronto-area grocery store, stunned at the words of a shopper who called her "disgusting."
"Making your daughter wear that thing on her head is child abuse," the woman told Bhalloo, referring to her 11-year-old's headscarf. In her 36 years in Canada where she was born and raised, never before had Bhalloo experienced outright hate. Her first instinct: to call the police. "How would I know that those people wouldn't be waiting for me outside in their car and the moment I stepped outside they run me over?" Bhalloo said. In the wake of the London attack, the fear was hardly far-fetched. Yet, as Canada enters the final week of an election only months after politicians of all stripes took to a stage in London in a show of solidarity, racism and anti-Muslim hate in particular have barely registered on the campaign trail. That's raising concerns about just how much substance was behind their words in a year marked by a so-called racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools, an uptick in anti-Asian racism amid the pandemic, and the deadliest attack on Muslims in the country since six worshippers were killed at a Quebec City mosque in 2017.More Related News