Thank you for that question.
The answer is kind of both.
There are a lot of people who have become careerists when it comes to Islamophobia. They are folks that I refer to as Islamophobia influencers. They have large digital platforms on YouTube and other kinds of social media, where they get a lot of traction and are able to purvey their ideas with a great deal of impunity. That allows them to profit financially from that.
There's been a lot of research done in the United States—and I'd like to see more of that kind of work done in Canada—that follows that money trail. They found in the United States that, as I mentioned, about $1.5 billion flows through various philanthropic organizations through the use of donor-advised funds that get filtered into about 39 anti-Muslim organizations whose mandates, 24-7, are to promote anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and propaganda.
All of that, as we know, is a breeding ground for Islamophobic violence. Those ideas become part of various echo chambers. They become dog whistles. They get picked up by media, and sometimes by politicians. The ways in which those echo chambers work and the ways they filter into public opinion are very insidious and nefarious.
If you look at public opinion polls in Canada over the last two decades, which I did in my report, you will find very problematic statistics that show us that a lot of Canadians distrust Muslims. I think about a quarter of Canadians.... After Donald Trump instituted the Muslim ban in the United States, 24% of Canadians felt that Canada should do the same. There are a lot of statistics that we put together in the report that look at what Canadian polls tell us about the public sentiment about the Muslim presence in this country.
Going back to your question about who profits from this purveyance of anti-Muslim bigotry, certainly there are political agendas that are advanced because of this. There are independent careers. Folks like Rebel media and others in Canada are regularly putting out content that is promoting anti-Muslim animus. Many of their influencers.... Even the white nationalist Tommy Robinson in the U.K. was funded by the Schulman Foundation in the United States for $5,000 a month—I think that's the figure—to be an intern at Rebel media.
We see these kinds of flows coming into Canada, but we've not been able to do the forensic accounting to see exactly where that money comes from and where it is going in the way that they've been able to document it in the United States. Those figures there, I'm sure you'll agree, are quite staggering and a cause of concern.
I was able to see that some of those organizations co-sponsored events with Canadian organizations that are part of the Islamophobia industry. You see that support coming in through very tangible ways and through other ways whereby they amplify each other's work and create that wider echo chamber for those ideas to flourish and be part of what was discussed this morning as that illusory truth effect.
If you repeat a lie enough times, people start to perceive it as truth. In a post-truth world where you really don't need facts anymore—it's just appeals to sentiments, and facts become casualties of the post-truth context—those kinds of campaigns are very effective and troubling.