Viral video shows Canadians keep Islamophobia in check

A social experiment devised by a Toronto university student to find out whether Canadians would remain true to their national values in the wake of a shooting attack on Ottawa by an apparently radicalized convert to Islam has become a viral video watched worldwide nearly 1.9 million times so far.

Following the October 22 attack, in which the shooter, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, killed a soldier guarding the National War Memorial and then stormed one of the Parliament buildings, political leaders implored the Canadian public to retain their sense of national identity.

“In the days that follow, there will be questions, anger and perhaps confusion. This is natural, but we cannot let this get the better of us. Losing ourselves to fear and speculation is the intention of those who commit these heinous act,” said Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau.

“We are a proud democracy, a welcoming and peaceful nation and a country of open arms and open hearts. We are a nation of fairness, of justice and of the rule of law. We will not be intimidated into changing that…”

In the videotaped experiment, an actor playing a white racist verbally abuses a young man dressed in Muslin garb (also an actor) and tries to convince average Canadians passersby to discriminate against him.

The people the “racist” tries to goad in to turning on the apparently Muslim man don’t take the bait. They speak up, tell the white man off and defend the presumed Muslim. In fact, the racist angers one person so much that he punches him in the face, drawing blood—at which point the experiment is stopped.

The filmed experiment, titled, “Canadians React to Ottawa Shooting Racism,” is a project put together by 18-year-old Omar Albach, who decided to stage it in Hamilton, Ontario. That is the city in which the killed soldier, Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, had lived.

“If any city would be raging just a few days after the attack in Ottawa, it would have been Hamilton,” Albach told The Times of Israel.

Albach, who is his Muslim himself, expected that the vast majority of Canadians would not express Islamophobia, but he wanted to test his hypothesis at a sensitive time.

According to Albach, not one negative thing was said about the supposedly Muslim man during the experiment.

“Not one person was racist toward him. People have asked me whether I kept stuff out of the final cut of the video, but I didn’t. There was nothing negative,” he said.

Albach was, however, surprised by how strenuously the people on the street came to the Muslim man’s defense—even to the point of throwing a punch to physically protect him.

This is not the first video made by Albach, who studies health management at York University and claims not to be politically active. His YouTube page displays his work, including some videos that amount to anti-Israel propaganda.

One, called, “Hug a Terrorist,” was posted on July 22, during Operation Protective Edge. It opens with Albach standing next to two little girls wearing keffiyahs, or Palestinian scarves, and holding a sign saying, “Hug a Terrorist.”

“For the past two weeks, Israel has been killing “terrorists” just like the ones standing next to me. These two girls will be holding up this sign to see what people react when they are labeled that way,” Albach says.

http://youtu.be/OEk69gWVYRs

Another posted on August 21, titled, “If Toronto Was Occupied by Israel,” depicts the idyll of a summer’s evening in Canada’s largest city being shattered by Israeli troops who kidnap and severely beat a teenage boy. Video clips of real IDF troops ostensibly roughing up and detaining Palestinian children follow the staged scene, as do dubious statements about the IDF, such as the unattributed assertion, “Since year 2000, almost one Palestinian child has been killed by Israeli soldiers every 3 days.”

The video ends with a BDS message: “Stop arming Israel. Boycott Israeli products today.”

“I wanted to make these videos because innocents were being killed and harassed,” said Albach, whose family immigrated to Canada from Syria before he was born.

“It’s not an angry video,” he said of the one with the mock IDF kidnapping and assault of the boy.

“It raises awareness and sends the message that there are other ways than violence to solve matters. Violence is violence and it should all be condemned,” he said.

But what about the fact that he fails to provide the larger context to the commentary he makes about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

It doesn’t concern him much.

“It’s not an equal fight,” he said.