Yes, I wrote an article last October about the disinformation campaigns that had been very rife historically, and especially so after October 7. Those campaigns already had the infrastructure to begin to continue to purvey a lot of disinformation about Muslims and Palestinians.
That, of course, has material consequences. I have already talked about some of the attacks in the United States in which students were shot and a six-year-old boy was killed. We already know what happened in London, Ontario, on this day three years ago.
We were hearing about sentencing, and so on, of the assailant in that attack. However, you also have to realize what motivated him. He talked about the great replacement theory, which was also discussed earlier today—the ideas of white genocide. He talked about white nationalism and “we have to get them before they get us”. There's a lot there in terms of looking at some of the drivers and some of the kinds of ideologies that support acts of terror.
Whether we look at Christchurch in New Zealand, Anders Breivik in Norway or Nathaniel Veltman, there's a lot of commonality, in that they rely upon a lot of conspiracy theories that are quite prevalent about Muslims. For example, there's the idea that Muslims are going to be like a Trojan horse or a fifth column and take over the west, and there's this Islamist bogeyman.
At the core of a lot of the pursuit of Muslim charities is the idea that they are fronts for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood. We've seen all of these kinds of discourses and ideologies and we've heard that Muslims are wolves in sheep's clothing. There's this idea of taqiyyah, that they will be nice but they're actually going to stab you in the back. I've documented about a dozen or more of those discourses in Canada in particular.
The consequences are very clear in terms of the violence we've all talked about and are commemorating today, and we're seeing it in tangible ways.
Also, because we're not hearing enough about what's going on right now with students and campuses, I want to point out that in London, Ontario, where the terror attack happened, a report came out at Western University in 2023 that documented campus hate incidents that included death threats; Muslim female students being accosted and told they should be raped and killed; others being warned that “all Muslims should die”; and a female student wearing a keffiyeh being pushed and physically assaulted, while another one was spat on during convocation. One student had her tires slashed on campus because she had a Palestinian flag on her mirror.
I could go on and on about the hate crimes and manifestations, but we need to look at where those ideas that inspire, justify and rationalize those acts are circulating—