 All right, well, I think we're going to get started, so good evening, everyone, and welcome to the 2023 FPA Currents Lecture, Faculty of Public Affairs Currents Lecture. Welcome to those of you who are here in person, but we also do have a number of people turning in on Zoom, so welcome to those of you who are watching virtually and couldn't make it here in person today. My name is Mary Francoley, I am the Associate Dean and Director of the Arthur Krueger College, which is the host of this annual lecture for the faculty. And as we begin, I would like to acknowledge that the land on which we gather here at Carleton is the traditional territory of the Algonquin and Anishinaabe people. So this is especially important this week as we recognize the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation later in the week. So each year, if you haven't been to a Currents Lecture for the faculty before, each year the FPA Currents Lecture features a theme that is at the intersection of politics, policy, journalism, and current affairs. And the title of this year's lecture is Combating Islamophobia, Addressing an Ongoing Threat to Building the Society that We Deserve. And our speaker today is Amira Al-Gawabi, Canada's special representative on combating Islamophobia. Amira is an alumni of Carleton, graduating with an honors degree in journalism, sleeping the honors part there, and law from Carleton University in 2001, so I'm sure this is not your most significant accomplishment, but for us, we'll pretend that it is. Prior to her appointment, Amira was a contributing columnist to the Toronto Star and a frequent media commentator on equity and inclusion. She's led strategic communications and campaigns at the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. She's worked with the National Council of Canadian Muslims, and Amira has had an extensive career already supporting initiatives to counter hate and to promote inclusion, including as a past founding board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and a past board member at the Silk Road Institute. So it is January of this year that she was appointed Canada's special representative on combating Islamophobia, so this is a new position and a new challenge that I'm really excited to hear more about this evening. On a more personal note, I've had the good fortune of working with Amira on a national security transparency advisory group for the Deputy Minister of Public Safety, and I've had the pleasure of witnessing during that time your insight, your diplomacy, and your skill, and just your general kindness, so I'm really, really pleased that you said yes when I invited you to give this lecture, so please join me in welcoming Amira Algawabi. Well, good evening, distinguished guests. I am deeply, deeply humbled to be joining everyone tonight here on the traditional lands of the Algonquin Anishinaabe peoples. I want to give a sincere thanks to the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carls University and specifically to Mary Francoli, who's the Associate Dean and Director of the Arthur Krueger College of Public Affairs for extending this invitation to give the annual current lecture. This is an immense honor for not only myself, but for all communities in Canada that have or are facing marginalization, racism, Islamophobia, and who aren't often given center stage to share their experiences with others. And thanks to each and every one of you for taking the time to be here, whether in person or online, as it demonstrates your own commitment to understanding, compassion, and showing empathy to one another. Before I begin, I want to take a moment to remember a man named Alex Carter. He was a dear member of Toronto's Muslim communities, a convert to the faith, and an individual who brought love and care to everyone he met. Like many Canadian Muslims, he loved this country very much. And every day, he and his wife, Shaila, and their incredible family helped nurture understanding, empathy, and love across many communities. Through their everyday actions, they were themselves examples of combating Islamophobia and helping to build the society we deserve. Sadly, Alex, who is around my age, passed away suddenly this morning for medical complications. So tonight's lecture will be in his honour. To God we belong, and to him we return, and as my Jewish brothers and sisters so beautifully say in times like these, may his memory be a blessing. It is lovely to be back at Carlton University, my alma mater, the backdrop of an important part of my life's journey. Though it is also a little ironic to be returning in this new role. Because over two decades ago, as a journalism student walking these halls and infamous tunnels, I had never even heard of the word Islamophobia. Even further back, growing up here in Ottawa as a child and then as a teenager, the idea that I could ever one day be discriminated against because of my faith was not something I had ever worried about or imagined. Not when I sat with my mother on the second floor of Ottawa's first ever mosque on Scott Street, many of you may see it as you go by in transit. I would sit with her nestled in between other women and their children waiting for Friday prayers to begin. We wouldn't have to look at the exits in case someone came in with any type of intention to harm. I wasn't worried, not when I was invited to talk about Islam with my fellow fourth graders at Orleans Wood Elementary School by a school principal who taught me that our differences were to be shared. They were meant to be celebrated. I wasn't worried, not when the city's Muslims began overflowing the small makeshift mosques that started popping up across the city and then needed to eventually rent larger and larger spaces for their Eid prayers. Lansdowne Park, Tudor Hall, community centres, school gyms to accommodate the multicultural masses of men, women, children in their colourful traditional dress, balloons and sticky desserts clutched by small hands. In fact, it was my father who worried when I told him that I had decided to don the hijab before my final year of J School. 9-11 hadn't happened yet, but still he feared that such an obvious marker of difference would be a barrier to my success in Canada. He had left Egypt in the late 1970s and while he would have a very successful career working at Transport Canada spanning nearly three decades, he had seen discrimination and he knew that it could hold me back. Yet as I have shared elsewhere, I had drunk the uniquely Canadian multicultural kool-aid and I told him confidently, as only daughters can, that if I couldn't choose to wear hijab and succeed in a place like Canada, then where could I do it? While it has become somewhat contentious over the years, multiculturalism remains a cherished belief for me and for so many people who have long called this country home or who have arrived more recently to build or rebuild their lives here. And while other Western countries have declared multiculturalism dead or a failed experiment, it is a policy that 50 years on, since its first adoption, it is a policy that is still part of our national identity, even as we grapple with the realities of colonization and the invisibility of Indigenous peoples in the articulation of that policy. After its adoption, Canada came to be considered worldwide as a country of immense potential, hope and freedom, a place where families and individuals could hold on to who they are without having to assimilate into one narrow frame of what it meant to be Canadian. And today, over 20% of the country's population is foreign born, with more and more people arriving in the country due to evolving immigration policies that have sought to make it easier to attract talented and skilled workers and their families to help sustain the needs of our country. Yet somewhere along the story of my coming of age in Canada, Islamophobia became a defining part of my existence and in that for my fellow community members, community members who hold an intersecting range of identities, representing the world's nationalities, ethnicities and experiences. Islamophobia was a term that was at first necessary to describe what many of us had started to experience in earnest following the attacks of 9-11. It encompassed not only the racism that many within our communities were feeling, but also the institutional aspect of this form of discrimination, the over-surveillance of our communities, the undue suspicion, the unjust practices of rendition to torture and entrapment. Mehar Arar became a household name and a powerful symbol of the ways Muslims could be used and abused by our national institutions and laws. Many more names were added to that shameful legacy. Years later, during the horrific rise and reign of Daesh and the subsequent backlash against Western Muslim communities once again, the term Islamophobia became politically contentious and contested, even as it was used to explain how police reported hate crimes targeting Muslims rose by 253% between 2012 and 2015. With hate continuing to rise even after those years, efforts to address it at the highest offices of the land were repeatedly scuttled and politicized, leading to anti-Muslim rallies and harmful rhetoric that only made things worse for our communities that were still living under the shadow of suspicion and wariness by fellow Canadians, with pole after pole demonstrating negative attitudes towards our faith, our religious practices, and towards us as people. It was only after the deliberate killings of 11 Canadian Muslims over a five-year span, the highest number of deadly killings of Muslims of any other G7 country, that it seemed Islamophobia had finally become the accepted term to attempt to name a phenomenon that sometimes leads us to question whether we can ever truly belong. That realization about the realities of Islamophobia are part of a broader unease related to a society that feels more and more polarized every day, a society that is unrecognizable from that of my youth, and one that contains both reasons to hope and at times, sadly, reasons to despair. Tonight I will explore all of this. My thoughts related to how Islamophobia and hate are impacting our social fabric and how they have become core ingredients for polarization in this country. First, I'll go deeper on how Muslims in particular have been both before and particularly after 9-11 too often depicted and described as being the other in our society, constructs in which there are out-groups and in-groups, us versus them, all too often contribute to polarization. Second, I'll explore how the online space has not only permitted these narratives to exist, but have actually helped to accelerate and deepen divisions within our society. And finally, I'll explore how communities can come together and powerfully counter these disturbing trends, disturbing forces of polarization, and thus protecting our shared social fabric and democracy. Though I caution against any suggestion that such efforts would be enough, as it will take the efforts of all facets of our society to address this phenomenon with a show of unity and an unshakable commitment to social justice and equity. When the Quebec mosque shooter was asked why he had decided to walk into a place of worship and kill people indiscriminately, he told police that he was afraid. He was afraid that Muslims were, quote, going to kill his parents, him, and that he had to do something. Where did such an idea come from? Why was he so consumed by fear of Muslims that he felt he had to take it upon himself to do what he did? Part of the answer lies in the construction of Muslims as other and speaks directly to what it means when we say and talk about Islamophobia. Canada's anti-racism strategy describes it this way. Islamophobia is the racism, stereotypes, prejudice, fear, or acts of hostility directed towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general. In addition to individual acts of intolerance and racial profiling, Islamophobia can lead to viewing and treating Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic, and societal level. When the killer left his parents' home, armed with two semi-automatic weapons on January 29, 2017, he left his home believing that Muslims were a threat to his family and to his community. What was later discovered after reviewing his laptop was that he had immersed himself in websites, Facebook pages, and YouTube videos related to firearms, Muslims, immigrants, and serial killers. He was also obsessively following Twitter postings of Donald Trump. With a particular interest in a travel ban, the US President had just imposed on seven Muslim-majority countries. The last straw for him was when he read a tweet from the Prime Minister in response to the so-called Muslim ban. The tweet read, quote, To those fleeing persecution, terror, and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. Welcome to Canada. With a head filled with the diatribes of right-wing commentators, as well as conspiracy theorists, and alt-right and white supremacist neo-Nazi leaders, the specter of the Muslim other loomed large enough to compel the shooter to act. Yet why are we surprised? A study released in 2018 by the Washington-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that between 2002 and 2015, The New York Times and The Washington Post gave, on average, 770% more coverage to foiled cases of ideologically motivated violence involving Muslim perpetrators than similar cases involving non-Muslim perpetrators. Between 2008 and 2012, 81% of stories about terrorism on 146 networks and cable news programs in the US were about Muslims, while only 6% of domestic terrorism suspects were actually Muslim. Found another study, leading to the clear overrepresentation of the concept of Muslims as terrorists. And over a 25-year span, Muslims garnered more negative headlines in the New York Times than cocaine, cancer, and alcohol, according to Canadian researchers. Caralty University Professor of Journalism and Communications Karim H. Karim had already chronicled the ways in which Muslims were negatively portrayed even before 9-11 in his book, Islamic Peril, Media and Global Violence. As a young journalist working at CBC Radio in the days following the attack, he was among the first guests I booked on The Morning Show. He predicted the racist stereotypes and the heavy pall of suspicion that was already beginning to cast again a long shadow on our communities. Nearly 20 years later, Laval University Professor Colette Brinn would remark in an interview, a year following the Quebec City Massacre that media reflected a fear of Islamic terrorism and a generalization that the Islamic faith in general is the problem. Not much has changed. Muslims are constantly under scrutiny, the subject of persistent, divisive political rhetoric and the subject of fear mongering. Emile Bernaud, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying how such narratives create divisions within our society and create a climate in which violence appears justifiable. She writes, if you collectively blame an entire group for the actions of individuals, it makes it totally reasonable to exact your revenge from any person from that group. A 2016 survey conducted by the Angus Reed Institute showed that nearly a third of Canadians at 33%, expressing a desire for a reduction in Muslim immigration to Canada. And as recently as this year, Angus Reed published a poll showing that across the country, Canadians are least likely to hold favorable views of Islam than the five other major religions. For those of us who are committed to working across communities to counter such negative trends, what none of us are able to fully take on is the impact of our online spaces when it comes to the otherization of various minority communities and the hate-filled responses to reasoned discourse, which has made it very difficult to provide counter-narratives to stem all of this. Dangerous narratives and ideas, including the Great Replacement Theory, which suggests that non-white immigration threatens white majorities. These are fueling the rage of non-racialized men who have taken it upon themselves to harm even kill those who don't look like them. Just this week, posters advertising a whites-only parent child group were found in Metro Vancouver. Not only is Islamophobia a common thread among far-right communities, but so is anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian racism, and hate-targeting other minorities. All this creates a toxic mix of anti-social narratives that are further amplified by algorithms that, in fact, have been designed to platform content that keeps people on social media longer and often includes content that makes people angry. As Frances Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower, told 60 Minutes, Facebook's ranking algorithm leads to the application of angry content and divisiveness. Evidence of that, she said, is in the company's own internal research. She said, Facebook's mission is to connect people around the world. When you have a system that you know can be hacked with anger, it's easier to provoke people into that anger. And publishers are saying, oh, if I do more angry, polarizing, divisive content, I get more money. Facebook has set up a system of incentives that is pulling people apart. And there has been a lot of content that makes people angry, not only in Canada, but beyond our borders. During former President Donald Trump's election campaign, media marketing company, CISN, documented a 600% increase in the amount of intolerant hate speech in social media postings by Canadians between November 2015 and 2016. Hashtags included ban Muslims, seek hail, white genocide, and white power. 2020 research from the UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Think Tank, identified more than 6,600 online channels, pages, accounts, or groups where Canadians were involved in spreading white supremacist, misogynistic, or other radical views. On some forums, Canadians were found to be, quote, highly active, even more on average than users in the US or Britain. Is it any wonder then that 78% of Canadians are concerned about the spread of hate speech online, or that 72% about growing political polarization as found in an abacus poll commissioned by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation in 2021? The impacts of this are significant. According to a survey of online harms released this past March by Toronto Metropolitan University's Leadership Lab, 72% believe Canadians have been exposed to more harmful content, such as hate speech, harassment, and false information over the past few years. Exposure to online hate remains higher among marginalized communities. 10% of Canadians reported being targets of online hate speech, and 8% said they were targets of online harassment that caused them to fear for their safety. These proportions were approximately twice as high among Canadians who are racialized, have a disability, or identify as LGBTQ2S+. In the days and weeks following the Quebec City Mosque attack, the first such attack at a place of worship on Canadian soil in this country's history, communities came together in solidarity. People of various faiths, or no faiths at all, participated in vigils, held hands in circles of protection around mosques, and demonstrated through actions and words that such attacks on our collective wellbeing were unacceptable. As valuable and important as all of this was, it did not stop polarization. As those studying these trends discovered, what emerged was a collective of anti-Muslim groups who started pushing a narrative of, quote, encroaching Sharia law, the importation of terrorists, and a flood of other baseless and incendiary rhetoric that unfortunately became a part of their discourse. They took to the streets across Canada, and they were often blatant in their hatred of Muslims in Islam. At times they mistook people to be Muslim simply based on their skin color or what they were wearing. Many of these groups and figures that advanced Islamophobic narratives during that time would latch on later to other social issues to remain relevant. Even with new issues at the forefront, Islamophobia and other forms of racism and xenophobia were never far from the discourses centered around grievances in anti-government rhetoric, or what Adrien LaFrance, executive editor at The Atlantic, has called, quote, a solid bar of extremism. A scholar, Jasmine Zine, Laurie Professor of Sociology and Muslim Studies writes in her recently released report on the Canadian Islamophobia industry, quote, heightened fear and moral panic, proliferation of fake news, and political figures dog whistling, creating the perfect storm of anti-Muslim hate crimes. Within this complex terrain, combating Islamophobia is like playing a game of whack-a-mole as new Islamophobic agitators and groups continue to emerge, align, and gather momentum in a common cause of fomenting Islamophobic paranoia and mounting anti-Muslim campaigns. In the US, money spent on the Islamophobia industry has been estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. This has had a heavy impact on our communities, especially young people growing up in this changed climate. Professor Zine points out in her book, Under Siege, Islamophobia and the 9-11 Generation, that Muslim youth have been growing up under the shadow of what some have described as moral exclusion. Other scholars have highlighted how Islamophobia interacts, intertwines, and intensifies other structures of systemic violence, including colonialism, other forms of racism, including anti-black racism, sexism, ableism, and citizenship status discrimination, to name a few. Islamophobia in policing looks like increased number of traffic stops or carting of black and brown people, including Middle Easterners, as a study right here in Ottawa found that the most numbers of drivers stopped by police were black and Middle Eastern men and women. Entrapment and sting operations, problematic information sharing agreements with police, failures to investigate reports of anti-Muslim hate incidents and white supremacy, and problematic of racist portrayals of our communities in law enforcement training modules. As author and former CESA spy agent, Huda Mukbil writes in her recent book, Agent of Change, quote, Canada and CESA, as well as other national security organizations, like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canada Border Services Agency, needs to address the devastating militant and securitized post 9-11 policies and culture that have amplified Islamophobia and destroyed the lives of people in marginalized communities. Islamophobia in employment looks like the underemployment of Muslim women as chronicled by the Canadian Council of Muslim Women and others. One study said that in spite of their higher levels of education, Muslim women are concentrated in lower paying clerical and sales and service occupations, often underemployed despite their education. And recently, findings from the Canadian Arab Institute showed that Arab Canadians, as just one subset of Muslims, had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country at 17.9% compared to a national unemployment rate of 9% in the fall of 2020. In 2022, Arab Canadians continued to be among those with the highest unemployment rates according to the March 2022 Labor Force Survey. And again, it was women, in this case, Arab women who are among the worst off. Why do Arab women have a higher unemployment rate than most non-Arab women? Question the report's authors. Our main objective in the study is to understand these knowledge gaps behind the ever increasing employment barriers facing Arab women and filling these gaps with evidence that informed policy recommendations. A 2023 report by Islamic Relief Canada titled Muslims at the Margins found that 80% of Muslims felt precluded from working in particular jobs despite being highly educated and that 67% of workers have experienced formal discrimination and 83% informal discrimination due to their Muslim identity. When I met with Muslim women living in Quebec this past spring, they expressed their frustrations with Law 21, which prevents anyone from wearing religious clothing, including a kippah, turban or hijab to work in a variety of roles, including as teachers, lawyers or police officers and expressed how it made them feel excluded from being fully participating in public life. Islamophobia in healthcare, education, in the charitable sector, in banking and immigration is also documented to varying degrees in Canada pointing to systemic issues that require policy change and intentional work as chronicled in the recent book, Systemic Islamophobia in Canada, a research agenda edited by Anver M. Emon, candidate research chair in Islamic law and history and director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. In the book, an essay titled Centering the Black Muslima penned by Rabia Takande, an assistant professor at Osgoode Law School explores how the vulnerability in all of these sectors described above is, quote, heightened in the case of black Muslim women. The added axis of blackness compounds the black Muslim woman's experience of anti-Muslim oppression and marginalization. And as such, she argues that when we talk about Islamophobia, it is crucial that we also ensure to center intersectional experiences. Indeed, despite the complexity of these issues and the general apathy that exists to address them, there are those who understand that social cohesion and solidarity go hand in hand with the idea of building a resilient society for all of us. We have to continue to find our allies and champions to work alongside our communities to make systemic change and that won't be easy. As journalist Radia Shoudry points out in her new long form feature in this month's shadow lane exploring the topic, half of Canadians don't believe Islamophobia is an issue according to a March 2023 study by Angus Reed Institute. Those most likely to view Islam negatively are also most likely, surprise, surprise, to say there is no problem, the study found. Do we need more people to die? For more of our fellow Canadians to understand that Islamophobia is a problem in Canada, it is a problem that isn't only crucial to our community's safety, well-being and success, but to the collective success of our country. Community solidarity is of incredible importance. Not only must it be sustained, but must engage with political discourse, address underlying grievances and work cleverly at defending not only our pluralistic society and democracy, but roots such work within an anti-racist mindset that acknowledges systemic racism and supports the rehabilitation of our institutions. With hate on the rise, among many minority communities, including a 71% increase in hate targeting Muslims between 2020 and 2021, we must understand that such data represents real and present danger to our social fabric. In communities across Canada, including London, Ontario, where the Afzal family was tragically killed in a hate-motivated terrorist attack by an individual who chillingly has described how he was bent on killing Muslims, or in Alberta, where black Muslim women in particular have been facing increased harassment, violence, polarization. This is all real, and sending a frightening message meant to keep communities from participating, from contributing, and risks leading to further marginalization and exclusion. Rather than despair, we must learn from history. In his 2012 book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, journalist Doug Saunders chronicles how fear and prejudice against particular minorities have been common throughout Western history. In fact, the very same types of myths perpetrated about Muslims today have been previously used against minorities in the past, albeit now with far more powerful tools of dissemination than at any other time in history. And as I mentioned, Islamophobia industries that are meant to advance such myths. So what does that mean for us here, today? On the one hand, it requires that we infuse our efforts of understanding differences from a place of openness and respect and recognition of these forces around us. And that we infuse our educational systems with critical thinking skills for our young people who need to have an understanding to counter such a climate and have environments where respect and dignity for all is inculcated. It is that we call for regulation of our online spaces and other interventions to stem hate and polarization. It is also that we continue to acknowledge Canada's history as a colonial nation and the subsequent harms to indigenous, Inuit, Métis communities, as well as to others, including Canadians, immigrants and newcomers of various backgrounds, including Black, Jewish, Asian, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and so many more. Hope can be found in surveys that show nearly half of Canadians want to be allies to Muslims. It can be found in the incredible achievements of Muslims in every facet of public life as author and journalist Haroon Siddiqui chronicled this past weekend in an essay in The Globe and Mail. Hope can be found in the allyship that community members in Cold Lake Alberta provided to their local Muslim community after their mosque was vandalized or in Peterborough after their mosque was torched or here in Ottawa after a local Islamic school was vandalized. Hope can be found in the anti-Islamophobia municipal campaigns underway in places like Edmonton, led by Muslim women at the Sisters Dialogue and in Hamilton under the banner, Salam Hamilton, about to be launched for this upcoming Islamic History Month. Hope can be found in the City of London's appointment of its first Muslim community liaison advisor to oversee an anti-Islamophobia strategy for the city. Hope can be found in the creation of this office. On July 22, 2022, the government of Canada held and convened a national summit on Islamophobia organized by the federal anti-racism secretariat in response to the horrific killing of four members of the Afzal family on the streets of London. They were beloved in their communities and the attack sent shockwaves and fear across this country. The calls for action to combat Islamophobia got much louder. The summit provided a national platform for Muslim communities to identify concrete ways to combat this phenomenon across the country with full political support. In complement to the outcomes of the summit, the National Canadian Council for Muslims proposed a number of recommendations on how to tackle this, including after much community-based consultation, the establishment of an independent office to combat Islamophobia to be led by a special representative. The creation of this office signifies a clear commitment by the government of Canada to tackle Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate across our country, in our institutions and online. Through the provision of expert human rights and evidence-based advice, my office, which has finally been fully established with a full complement of staff, will work with all relevant federal and civil society stakeholders to address Islamophobia head on. Using a whole-of-government approach, which is a way of noting that we will work in tandem to bolster Canada's current toolbox on combating Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate crimes, we are going to continue to provide the advice that Canada must hear. In fact, just this past week, this office helped to upgrade our toolbox with the launch of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's practical guide on understanding anti-Muslim hate crimes. And while there are many in our communities who have become understandably worried, even skeptical, that not enough will be done to stem the rise of hate and address long-standing issues of Islamophobia, I am confident that we will continue to make positive advancements. When I first started an advocacy over a decade ago, the existence of such an office was unimaginable, though it is heartbreaking that it has taken the senseless loss of so many lives to lead to its necessary creation. Throughout my talk today, I have woven in aspects of Islamophobia to raise its intersectional dimensions. This point cannot be overstated enough. And so before I end near the end of my discussion, I just want to again highlight the uniquely gendered and intersectional nuance of Islamophobia in Canada. Visibly Muslim women are disproportionately more targeted than their male counterparts when it comes to violent attacks for a plethora of reasons, but most importantly, because of the imposed symbolism of their hijab. Ultimately, when boiled down, it is men attacking women because of what they choose to wear and believe, and that has no part in our society and our country. I am deeply committed to ensuring this intersectional and gendered nuance is adequately captured in my advice to colleagues and throughout the development of Canada's anti-racism strategy and the strategy of this office. Before I conclude, I would like to end an important and heavy discussion on an uplifting and positive note. As I look into this audience today, I see a diverse auditorium of students from all sorts of backgrounds, belief systems and communities. I see fellow community members from all sorts of backgrounds as well, and I've witnessed you learning together, seeking to understand and coexisting with mutual respect. When put into descriptive nouns and values, your engagement can be described as respect, tolerance and compassion, and it is these values that drives my team and I and our colleagues in the anti-racism secretariat to work even harder every day. Thank you for igniting my hope, and together we will have a brighter future. Insha'Allah. Thank you.