Photo / EFE
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Montreal, Mar 3 (RHC) The Muslim community in Canada has called for measures to be taken to stop hate crimes following the increase in Islamophobic attacks against Muslim women in that country.
Mustafa Farooq, the executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM, for its acronym in English) denounced in a statement on Tuesday that racism is a “real problem” in Canada and called for “the immediate creation of a provincial-municipal committee bipartisan to face the challenge of racist and Islamophobic street harassment ”.
Emphasizing that “tension and fear are high,” the Muslim rights group accused Canadian authorities of turning a blind eye to this crisis.
The statement comes after a series of recent attacks on black Muslims in Canada.
Five Somali-Canadian Muslim women were attacked in the city of Edmonton, the capital of the province of Alberta, in the last ten weeks. Last year, more than 60 crimes of this type were reported in the city.
Local media reported 140 hate-related incidents in 2020, including death threats, in the cities of Edmonton and Calgary, in the same province of Alberta, where there are an estimated 113,000 Muslims.
Assam Ali, a nurse at the Edmonton hospital, told Global News that she has been repeatedly attacked with insults because of her hijab (the Islamic veil) and her dark skin.
“Most of my visibly Muslim friends and family have a history of some kind of Islamophobia,” said the victim, later lamenting that there are many hate crimes that go unreported because they are so frequent.
Last month, a man railed against a Muslim woman at the University of Alberta and, in another incident, a man ran over a woman, threatened her with death, and ripped off her burqa, an Islamic garment worn by some Muslim women.
Also, on February 17, a man cursed a black Muslim woman wearing a hijab and threatened to kill her.
While Alberta Prime Minister Jason Kenney and others condemned the attacks, Farooq stressed that more must be done to combat Islamophobia. (Source / HispanTV)
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