Haroun Bouazzi, an elected official from Québec Solidaire, must publicly explain some of the comments he made at the beginning of the month.
More precisely at the Gala of Excellence of the Club Avenir Foundation, a venerable non-profit organization working for “the integration of Maghreb communities into the host society”.
The member for Maurice-Richard affirmed that he saw “every day in the National Assembly” the mechanism of racism, “the construction of this Other […] who is North African, who is Muslim, who is black, who is indigenous and of his culture which, by definition, would be dangerous or inferior.
Having also been at “Assnat” on a daily basis, I really wonder what Mr. Bouazzi is referring to.
Slander
His reasoning pointed to alleged doublespeak. During the controversy surrounding the Bedford School, those responsible for the toxic climate were allegedly defined as “Maghrebis” and their culture designated as a “danger”. While in another case, that of the educators of a youth center in Cité-des-Prairies (nine educators accused of having engaged in unacceptable behavior with minors), the origin of the latter was not raised.
We are surrounded by slander. First of all, the two cases are completely different. In the first, religion is a determining element. Two reports have demonstrated this. In the other, not at all.
Then, all those who spoke about Bedford were careful not to put all North Africans in the same bag! Marwah Rizqy of the PLQ. Minister Bernard Drainville. And PSPP: “The teachers who wanted to offer resistance to this religious entryism, they are North African!”
Bouazzi preferred to suggest that all North Africans have been demonized. With his aura as a deputy, in front of an audience of people brought together by an organization wanting to build bridges, he knowingly sought to break them by fueling a distrust, even a feeling of rejection, towards the “host society”.
We need to talk to each other
Such false statements will have the effect of discouraging several members of the Maghreb communities from maintaining links with those who are now called the “Kebs”.
This is how we produce and encourage withdrawal reflexes like those which animated the Islamist-leaning group at the Bedford school.
To work in the opposite direction, different people need to talk to each other and hang out with each other from a young age.
Thanks, for example, to this extraordinary initiative that a reader told me about recently: the School Correspondence program. It seems trivial, but it’s wonderful.
Yesterday I contacted Isabelle Bergeron, a teacher from the Nicolet region who founded, six years ago, this program through which students from different places correspond in French, by post.
For example, students from Côte-des-Neiges exchanged handwritten letters with young people from Nicolet. Subsequently, they came to visit the region. In this group of 25 young people, only one had already left the island! “I wanted them to understand that outside the island, they are still at home, and we want them to feel at home.” I’ll talk to you about it again.
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