Not done, Stephen Harper’s people also announced last week — at the urging, I’m sure, of his new campaign Merlin, Lynton Crosby — that Ottawa would seek a stay of a Federal Court of Appeal decision allowing a Muslim woman to wear a niqab while swearing the oath of citizenship. What’s the point of campaigning if you can’t shake loose a few thousand votes by ginning up a few tired old racist tropes?
Harper is ‘old stock’, while Dr. Abuelaish is not. But that’s not the real difference between them. Dr. Abuelaish is a healer and uniter; Harper is a divider.
I’ve written a lot this past year about Dr. Abuelaish, a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and his noble (and ultimately futile) efforts to bring 100 children wounded in last year’s bloody Gaza war to Canada for medical treatment. Harper wouldn’t meet with him to discuss the humanitarian initiative. His government ended up refusing to grant these children visas — using the pathetic excuse that they’d be better off receiving care in Gaza’s overwhelmed and under-equipped hospitals.
Here’s the irony: Dr. Abuelaish could have turned into someone like Harper — paranoid, spiteful, vindictive. He certainly had a better excuse, having lost three daughters and a niece to Israeli tank shells in 2009. Instead, this Palestinian gynecologist who once delivered babies in an Israeli hospital — and who, along with his five surviving children, now calls Canada home — has devoted his life to fighting the kind of hate and division that Harper cynically exploits.
Dr. Abuelaish’s bridge-building routinely takes him across Canada and the world to talk about the path to reconciliation he explores in his best-selling book, aptly titled, I Shall Not Hate. “If I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis,” he wrote, “then I would accept their loss.”
Dr. Abuelaish may not be “old-stock” — but he certainly wants to be a ‘new’ Canadian. He has been waging another, much more private battle with Ottawa for years now — to become a Canadian citizen. And Harper and his faithful handpuppet, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, have basically told him to take a seat at the back of the bus.
He arrived here with his family in July, 2009, on a work permit. Almost three years later, on June 16, 2012, Dr. Abuelaish and his children were finally granted permanent residency status. In June 2014, he applied for Canadian citizenship.
On June 26, 2014, Dr. Abuelaish’s then-lawyer wrote Alexander a long letter asking the minister to consider exercising his “authority to grant citizenship for service of exceptional value to Canada” to Dr. Abuelaish — since his humanitarian work took him outside the country too often for him to meet the strict residency requirements for citizenship.
The lawyer provided Alexander with copious evidence of Dr. Abuelaish’s “service of exceptional value to Canada” — including a reminder that Alexander’s predecessor, Jason Kenney, praised his work effusively and that President Barack Obama himself cited him as an exemplar of the conciliatory approach needed to achieve peace in the Middle East.
But having a U.S. president and a cabinet minister on your résumé apparently doesn’t make you “exceptional” enough for the Harper government. On July 7, 2014, a bureaucrat from Alexander’s Ministerial Enquiries Division wrote back to say: Thanks for the letter, we’ll take a look, but only cabinet has the power to grant your request and “please be assured that it will be thoroughly reviewed and dealt with in due time.”
That was over a year ago. The man Belgium’s prime minister, in nominating him for the Nobel, called the “Martin Luther King of the Middle East” is still waiting to hear something.
In the meantime, Dr. Abuelaish has been obliged to complete residency questionnaires and to be tested for English language fluency — a ridiculous hurdle, since he already owns a home in Toronto and teaches several courses as a faculty member at the University of Toronto’s world-renowned Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He speaks English, Hebrew and Arabic fluently.
That wasn’t the worst of it, of course. In a February 24, 2015 letter, the department instructed Dr. Abuelaish to have his fingerprints taken by the police or “any accredited digital fingerprinting agencies” because there were “questions” in his case “with regard to Section 21 and/or 22 of the Citizenship Act.”
The CIC invoked those sections because someone inside the department or elsewhere in the Canadian government had “questions” about whether Dr. Abuelaish had, among other things, been “in jail” or had previously been “convicted of an indictable offence.”
Now, remember — this is coming from the same department, prime minister and cabinet that permits Conrad Black, a convicted felon who renounced his citizenship to sit in the British House of Lords, to remain comfortably in Canada. Incredible.
But it’s really not that incredible any more, is it? This is the same government that considers every shell-shocked Gazan child and every desperate Syrian refugee clinging to a rubber raft to be a potential terrorist. This is the same prime minister who lied shamelessly to Canadians during last week’s debate when he claimed the the Liberals and New Democrats “would have had, in the last two weeks, us throwing open our borders and literally hundreds of thousands of people coming without any kind of security check or documentation.”
That “old-stock” crack was no slip of the tongue. Neither was the lie about “throwing open our borders”. The niqab challenge isn’t about long-term political philosophy — it’s about short-term politics. It’s the dog-whistle at full pitch — and the longer this campaign goes on, the shriller it gets.
When viewed against this backdrop, the ongoing humiliation of someone like Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish — an accomplished man of peace who chose this country — can’t be viewed as anything other than a plank in the Harper Conservatives’ plan to secure another four years in power by stoking voters’ fears of the ‘other’. This is a government which has abandoned the right to enjoy the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters of race.
As if to prove the point, Dr. Abuelaish’s former lawyer informed him via email in mid-August that his citizenship application was languishing on somebody’s desk in a CIC office in Scarborough. That’s how these people define dealing with an application “in due time,” apparently.
And how is Dr. Abuelaish taking all this? The same way he takes every setback, every barrier ever put in his path by petty, vindictive people — philosophically. “As a Palestinian,” he said, “we learn to be patient.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Andrew Mitrovica
No comments:
Post a Comment