The “Clash of Perceptions” in Canada since 9/11

Abstract

Arab communities in the western world faced public scrutiny in the aftermath of n September 2011. The Canadian Arab community, one of the country's largest non- European ethnic populations, was no exception.1 This scrutiny was mostly due to a failure to distinguish between the motivations and beliefs of the 9/11 attackers and the culture of the Arab and Muslim communities at large, which were still little-known, although they had been present in the western world for several decades. In the decade following 9/11, which was marked by a growing sense of threat in Canadian society, Arab-Canadian citizens felt they were victims of stigmatism, as well as racial and religious targeting.2 The assumption that all Arabs are Muslims has been another growing phenomenon found not just colloquially but in Canadian outlets as well. Indeed, what makes this Arab-Muslim confusion even more interesting in Canada is that roughly half of Canada's Arab populace is actually Christian. The Canadian Arab community is atypical in comparison not just to other western Arab communities but also to Arab populations as a whole. Another, arguably more serious, post-9/11 phenomenon has been the branding of Arabs and Muslims as fundamentalists, fanatics, Salafists, and even terrorists and jihadists.Moreover, the preventive measures developed after 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror declared by the United States have resulted in infringements on the freedom and dignity of many members of the western Arab community, as North American Arab organizations often reported. Public discussion of the Arab community's integration or lack thereof with Canadian society has escalated the rhetoric of discrimination. For the past ten years, communication has rarely been open between the Arab minority in Canada and the rest of Canadian society, leading to what is referred to as a of perceptions. The paradigm of the clash of perceptions is a more apt alternative to the of civilizations, which posits an enduring opposition between east and west. As Mathieu Guidere and Newton Howard put it, struggles are not fought between abstract entities called 'cultures' or 'civilizations' but between active individuals that are well aware of their identity and intentionally bear a conception or conceptions of their country, community or culture.3 When tackling the communication problems between the Canadian Arab community and the rest of Canadian society, one must indeed take into account the divergences of perception and points of view between the two categories of people. Analysis should also be applied to relations between the Francophone and Anglophone communities, as well as to relations between Conservatives and Liberals, since these groups also face barriers to communication on multiple levels.A MEDIA WATCH STUDY OF THE CANADIAN ARAB COMMUNITYDiffering perceptions among ethnic, religious, and political groups often harden into stereotypes, but these perceptions are rarely studied in a rigorous and systematic manner. These perceptions can nevertheless be followed and measured through precise studies that use multilingual monitoring techniques. Among these methods, the most effective is media watch.Insight into multilingual watchMedia watch is defined as a current, systematic, and comprehensive followup of the information processed by different sources and targeted in relation to a specific topic.4 In tackling a multilingual society like Canada, watch becomes necessarily multilingual (here, French, English, and Arabic), since the conceptual links, the fields' internal structures, as well as the lexical and semantic fields, vary between languages. A multilingual monitoring process consists of three phases that can occur in different orders depending on the purposes of that watch. First, a research phase consists of browsing - thanks to the numerous computer tools available today - the hundreds of thousands of pages of information published and broadcast daily on all the written and audiovisual of the world, and mainly (although sometimes solely) on the hypermedia that is the Internet. …