Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'd like to express my deep concern and regret for the treatment of the members in your community who have experienced discrimination or hatred. I think there's a lot of agreement at this table from all sides that our pursuit is to have every Canadian live a life that's free of any kind of discrimination, hatred, persecution, or unequal treatment, for that matter, vis-à-vis some of the things you were talking about with regard to the CVs or resumés of people with Iranian or Persian names.
By the way, I have a lot of Iranian friends, and they prefer to be called Persians. I'm not certain how that goes, if that's a broad spectrum of the community or not, but anyway, they've kind of trained me like that.
The one problematic thing for us is the word Islamophobia, and it's not just problematic for us. About 30% of the witnesses have a problem with it. For me, the most important ones are the ones who come from the Muslim community themselves and who have an issue with it. There were quotes about how the definition has been hijacked and is irrecoverable.
As far as any kind of hatred or racism goes, we want to fight that. We want to be clear on it so that no one can co-opt a word and have it mean something else.
I want to go back to one of the things you were mentioning about Iran. I've been on the Subcommittee on International Human Rights for the better part of a dozen years now, and it's been the Iranian community in Canada that have come to us and asked us to defend their family members and friends in Iran. We've always been careful, as Mr. Reid said, to point out that the regime, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij, the mullahs that run it, are the ones we're targeting. These are people, this regime, who kill their own people. Their reputation is very bad. It's at the top echelon of all human rights offenders, but we call out the others pretty equally on the subcommittee.
We do have an Iran Accountability Week, and I certainly hope that no one ever misconstrues that as anything against a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent, Persian descent, at all. What we'd like to do is see every person in Iran free, and hopefully we'll see a democratic nation one day there in Iran. I want to be clear on that.
The other problem that has arisen from—