“This past week four men were arrested, three in Ottawa, as part of a 2-year investigation entitled “Project Samosa” (cultural sensitivity training seems to have missed the fact that not many Pakistanis and Indians actually like samosas)… The men must be presumed to be innocent, both in the court process and in public consciousness. Media sensationalism, government statements, and public commentaries have revealed that the men are being considered and treated as guilty terrorists. This is despite the fact that defence counsel Anser Farooq has said that he knows almost nothing about the specifics of the case and that the charges are vague.”
Read the whole statement on “Project Samosa” from No One is Illegal (Vancouver). Among other things, it reminds us about the 2003 “Operation Thread” arrests of South Asian men wrongly accused of being an Al-Qaida cell and the 2006 “Toronto 18” cases.
South of the Canada-US border, New York City has been the epicentre of anti-Muslim racism sparked by the plans to build a Muslim community centre in Manhattan. Read Deepa Kumar’s article “The Challenge to Islamophobia.”