Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.Blacklock’s Reporter recently revealed that the federal government’s Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, is using her office to advocate for Muslim prayer rooms in federal buildings, citing “Islamophobia in the workplace” when accommodations for religious practices are not made.This initiative also exposes her as using her office to advocate for federal employees “speaking out on Palestinian issues.”Without providing any examples, Elghawaby has claimed, “In the workplace, Islamophobia can take the following form: escorting an employee out of the workplace for making pro-Palestinian remarks.”Remarks like these from Elghawaby were made to the Muslim Federal Employees Network, a volunteer group founded in 2021. A total of 6,350 of 279,396 federal employees identify as Muslim, about two percent, according to a 2024 survey. Records show Elghawaby was in frequent contact with the group and advocated on their behalf with deputy ministers and others. The Employees Network was active only days after Hamas terrorists’ heinous October 7, 2023, rape, murder, and kidnapping of hundreds of Jews in Israel, including eight Canadians. On October 16, the Employees Network cynically hosted a videoconference entitled Free Expression and Safety in the Workplace.In its correspondence, Elghawaby’s Office of the Special Representative repeatedly referred to the Hamas invasion of Israel. In an October 9, 2024, email, one year after the unprovoked torture, killings, and abductions, a senior analyst expressed sympathy for Muslim employees during anniversary observances. “I hope you are well, especially during what is a very difficult week,” said the email. “Know that our office is thinking about you and your members.”.Elghawaby, in separate notes for an “anti-Palestinian racism event,” said the Hamas attacks were difficult for Muslims. “Anti-Palestinian sentiments are on the rise in Canada,” she wrote.“This has had a negative impact on Muslim Canadians who have been left feeling scared and threatened in their communities,” said Elghawaby. “I continue to raise this as a concern with government leaders and officials when I meet them.”What Elghawaby seems either totally ignorant of or unconcerned about is that the level and proportion of anti-Palestinian/anti-Muslim racism in Canada is far below its Israeli/Jewish counterparts.In 2024, most police-reported hate crimes targeting religion were directed towards Jewish (68%) and Muslim (17%) populations. This figure grossly underestimates the actual number and proportion of these hate crimes because many of them go unreported. According to the 2021 census, there were approximately 1.8 million Muslims in Canada, representing about 5% of the total population. The same census showed that 335,295 people reported their religion as Jewish, accounting for less than 1% of the Canadian population.In 2024, in Canada’s largest city, Toronto, anti-Jewish occurrences accounted for 40% of the reported hate crimes (177 occurrences). In the same year, there was a 15% decrease in reported anti-Muslim occurrences (28 occurrences) over 2023 (33 occurrences). .In short, taken together, all these figures show that antisemitic hate crimes are numerically and proportionately much higher than Islamophobic hate crimes.The National Council of Canadian Muslims described her appointment as a “historic moment for Muslims in Canada.” But days after her appointment, Quebec Premier François Legault called for her resignation, after La Presse reported that Elghawaby had written that Quebeckers seem “influenced by anti-Muslim sentiment,” in a 2019 column in the Ottawa Citizen. The same La Presse article also reported that in May 2021, Elghawaby wrote “I’m going to puke” on Twitter in reaction to an opinion editorial by Joseph Heath, a philosophy teacher at the University of Toronto, who argued that French Canadians were the largest group in Canada to have suffered from British colonialism. Prior to her appointment as the cabinet’s $191,000-a-year special anti-Islamophobia representative, Elghawaby wrote newspaper columns echoing “racist” and “colonial” themes.“Remove the Queen as head of state, a necessary step that goes even beyond a rethink about the statues and monuments that dot our cities and towns and which represent historical figures who engaged in racist policies,” Elghawaby wrote in a 2021 Toronto Star column.In other commentaries, Elghawaby called Canada Day a reflection of “dominant European, Judeo-Christian storytelling,” urged MPs to “call out Israel’s actions, not only Hamas’ rockets,” and described Jews as “hostage takers.”More recently, Cabinet advisor Elghawaby secretly paid $80,000 for pro-Palestine research to counter alleged “disinformation” by MPs, senators, and media, Access to Information records disclose. Elghawaby’s Office of the Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia had flatly denied the confidential funding at taxpayers’ expense..“Thank you again for this impeccable work,” Elghawaby wrote to researchers at York University’s Islamophobia Research Hub. “This is a report our office contributed towards to help provide Canadians with an understanding of the climate impacting our communities since October 7,” she said.The report, Documenting the Palestine Exception: An Overview of Trends in Islamophobia, Anti-Palestinian Racism, and Anti-Arab Racism in Canada in the Aftermath of October 7, 2023, was released on August 6, 2025, at a Parliament Hill news conference. Elghawaby endorsed the research without disclosing that her office paid for it.“This report will help inform the advice I provide to the federal government,” she told reporters. “We will be reviewing them.”Asked by Blacklock’s at the time whether researchers were government-funded, Elghawaby’s office flatly denied making any payment. “It has never made a donation to the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University,” a spokesperson said..Access to Information records indicate Elghawaby months before signed a January 6 Memorandum of Arrangement with York University. It paid the Research Hub $80,000. The grant was never made public.With all this biased, dishonest, and false ethno-religious baggage weighing her down, only a portion of which is listed, is it any wonder that calls for Elghawaby’s dismissal have never subsided?Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
