The Tories approach a point of no return
This week’s debate over ‘Islamophobia’ highlights the need for the Tories to root out the fringe forces rapidly dumbing down their party
There are quite a few lessons in civic hygiene that might be drawn from the jamboree of bigot-baiting and mob incitement attending to the shabbily-drafted but otherwise sensible Liberal motion on the contested subject of “Islamophobia” that has preoccupied the House of Commons this week.
Most obvious is that the Conservative Party of Canada has reached an event horizon of indecency. It is a point of no return from which a great many respectable people in the party’s rank and file, along with the Conservative MPs backing a substitute anti-bigotry motion of their own design, can flinch no longer.
While the term “Islamophobia” is a wholly inadequate and often disingenuously-applied description of the gangrene at work here, the Conservatives cannot simply let it go on spreading inward from the party’s fringes.
It is a pathology that several Conservative leadership contenders have been brazenly happy to traffic in, most recently in response to Liberal MP Iqra Khalid’s modest but unhelpfully ambiguous anti-Islamophobia motion, which asks the House of Commons for little more than an acknowledgement of the worsening public climate of hatred and fear across the country, and a standing committee to study ways the government might make a dent in systemic racism and religious discrimination, “including Islamophobia.”
Read more:
No comments:
Post a Comment