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Bigoted outbursts in wake of values-charter proposal expose Quebec’s cultural divisions

An old coot on a bus harasses a Muslim woman in a headscarf. A family shopping at a suburban Quebec City mall is accosted by an angry woman demanding the mother remove her hijab. A mosque in Chicoutimi, Que., is daubed with what's supposed to be pig's blood by someone who warns Muslims to "assimilate or go home."

Some of the less tolerant, shall we say, elements of Quebec society have taken the Party Quebecois government's proposed values charter as licence to vent their latent xenophobia.

The so-called charter would, among other things, bar anyone working in a state-funded job, whether it's the provincial public service, hospital, daycare or school, from displaying "ostentatious" symbols of their faith.

The reason, says Premier Pauline Marois, is to embed secularism as a core value of Quebec society. It would apply not only to crucifixes and stars of David that the religious might choose to wear, but also Sikh turbans, Muslim head coverings, Jewish skull caps and other items of clothing that some faiths require their followers to wear. It would force them to choose between their religion and their jobs.

No sooner had initial details of the proposal leaked out last month, news media began reporting a spate of incidents.

[ Related: Ugly incident of bigotry in Quebec mall underscores nasty side of values debate ]

The defacing of the Chicoutimi mosque surfaced first.

“This mosque has been baptized with fresh pig's blood from Quebec,” said a letter sent to the local Radio Canada outlet, The Canadian Press reported.

The attack and the letter, which went on to warn Muslims to assimilate or go home, was written off at first. Saguenay-region Mayor Jean Tremblay called it an "isolated and stupid" act of intolerance. The mosque's co-founder, Hussein Hassan, also dismissed it as the work of "fanatics," "unbalanced people" or "jokers."

But video of an incident recently posted on HuffPost Quebec of a tubby, balding old guy arguing across a Montreal bus with a Muslim woman, demanding she take off her hijab and cackling that soon Marois would make her remove it, also took place in late August.

The exchange, which took place en francais, lasted between five and 10 minutes, according to the McGill University student who recorded it Aug. 28.

"The conversation started when the lady entered the bus. The man told her to remove her headscarf or return to her country," the student said. Later he said "with Marois, we will remove the hat," and directed the F-word in her direction.

The woman gave as good as she got, apparently, calling the man a coward.

Badia Senouci got the same treatment earlier this month when she, her husband and son were shopping at a mall in Ste-Foy.

According to CBC News, an older woman accosted them, said "madame, change your religion," and demanded the Algerian immigrant take off her headscarf. The government would soon force her to do it, the woman said.

The exchange got heated enough that Senouci's teenage son intervened to defend his mum and got spit on for his trouble. Some pushing ensued and police were called but no charges were laid.

Muslims mostly appear to be the target of these incidents, as there seems to be a streak of ecumenism among Quebec's bigots. CBC News reported Thursday that a church in the Montreal neighbourhood of LaSalle attended by immigrants from the West Indies and Turkish bath were hit by vandals this week.

Someone inexplicably spray-painted "Go Home Greek" on the door of the St-Lawrence Anglican church, and "Go B to your country" plus "PQ" on the Turkish bath and spa in the neighbourhood.

Rev. Dorothy Samuel blamed the proposed values charter for exposing divisions in Quebec's most ethnically diverse city.

“I think it could be a part of it, because whatever is going on in Montreal… it’s really affected by it,” she told CBC News.

Several dozen people held a protest Wednesday evening in downtown Montreal demanding the government do more to protect French in the city, The Canadian Press reported. Organizer Mario Beaulieu said politicians and citizens should be better informed about the fragility of the French language in Montreal.

“Quebec-bashing and francophobia have become very common in the English-Canadian media,” Beaulieu said. “Not a day passes where we’re not called racist."

The incidents haven't helped Quebec's image abroad. In an opinion piece Thursday in the Saudi Gazette, Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan, a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge, suggested the values charter taps into a deep well of nativism among francophone Quebeckers.

The mosque vandalism may have been an isolated incident "but it reflects the Quebec elite’s suspicion of those not French.

"Former Quebec leader Jacques Parizeau blamed 'ethnic voters' after the separatists lost the 1995 referendum. When writer Mordecai Richler wrote about anti-Semitism in Quebec in the New Yorker magazine Quebec’s elite savaged him. Former Quebec Liberal premier Jean Charest banned women wearing the niqab from receiving government services."

[ Related: Is the rest of Canada hypocritical about Quebec’s values charter? ]

Official multiculturalism, largely accepted in the rest of Canada, is not warmly embraced in many parts of Quebec, said Khan.

"It’s distressing that the charter seeks to divide Canadians on the basis of race and religion," he wrote.

(It should be observed that Saudi Arabia isn't exactly a model of diversity and tolerance, and the rest of Canada isn't entirely at home with kumbaya either.)

Expatriate Quebecer Matthew Friedman, who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, wrote an open letter to Marois on his blog questioning the motives behind the values charter.

"In seeking to provide 'religious neutrality,' your government’s proposals display ambitions to police the souls of Québec’s citizens and inscribe its power on their very bodies," Friedman wrote. "This, as Hannah Arendt noted more than sixty years ago, is the essence of totalitarianism."

The National Post reported this week that about half the people who identified themselves as PQ or Bloc Quebecois supporters in a recent poll said they believed Muslims and Jews have too much influence in Quebec.

The naked bigotry is not surprising, given the debate over the values charter, the Montreal Gazette said in an editorial this week. Government officials have tried to deny any connection between recent incidents and the charter controversy, a position that's increasingly hard to defend, the paper editorialized.

"And these are just incidents that have made a media splash. There have probably been more. The Muslim Council of Montreal says it has received at least a dozen complaints about racial slurs, one of which also involved a physical attack, since a news report leaked details of the charter. Jacques Fremont, the head of Quebec’s human-rights commission, said this week that the commission has indications that there have been many more incidents than have been reported by the media.

"Doubtless it was not the government’s intent to spark racist confrontations in the streets, but it surely should have envisaged the possibility of this happening once it proposed a charter that singles out people who wear symbols of their religious belief."

In his letter to Marois, Matthew Friedman was less inclined to give the premier that benefit of the doubt.

"As I read what I have written, I find that I must conclude that you are not the heir of René Lévesque – a true Québec patriot and a man of unparalleled decency – but of Adrien Arcand and Abbé Groulx: cynical populist demagogues who mined the insecurities of what they believed was a parochial and simple-minded population in their quest for power."