[ A word cloud projected during a recent Muslim Association of Canada conference youth session contained the phrase "Jew free, submitted by an anonymous participant. This will not happen again, promises the association. (File photo) ]
The Muslim Association of Canada has released an update following an incident that occurred during its convention in Toronto in May when the phrase “Jew free” was shown on a word-cloud screen of submissions during a seminar session.
“First, MAC wishes to re-iterate that this phrase is offensive and hurtful to Jewish Canadians, to Muslim Canadians, and to anyone committed to a pluralistic society,” MAC says in the August 12 statement, adding that it “is unequivocally against Islamic teachings.”
This kind of “offensive and discriminatory” statement has “no place in the Muslim community, and MAC unequivocally states that the submission of this word was unacceptable and does not represent its values, the values taught at our Convention, or the values of Muslims.”
In June 30 submission to National Post, Sharaf Sharafeldin, president of strategy at the Muslim Association of Canada, stated that during the three-day conference that attracted thousands of Muslim-Canadians, speakers and attendees examined “faith-rooted life” in Canada. The incident involving the “jew-free” phrase occurred during a youth session and was “a public, anonymous audience-participation exercise” that produced a word cloud image, when asked what kind of community they wanted. It has since been widely circulated.
There were 50 entries visible in the word cloud, wrote Sharafeldin. But the facilitator did not notice the “jew-free” entry.
The August 12 update follows an “internal investigation” into the incident.
“MAC regrets that this phrase appeared at our Convention, even briefly and even though it originated from an anonymous, bad-faith submission with no connection to the youth or the discussion taking place in the session.” The organization did not explain what it meant by bad faith.
MAC states that the person who posted the antisemitic phrase could not be identified since all postings during the word-cloud exercise were anonymous.
Despite this, states MAC, “the incident was preventable. Controls available within the third-party application used to run the word-cloud exercise were not in place at the time and should have been used to screen submissions before public display.”
Going forward, MAC says it “is committed to ensuring that these controls are used.”
Meanwhile, facilitators of youth sessions are to receive training “to ensure any attempt to express hate during a live session is identified and addressed at the moment.”
Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.
O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.
https://quranx.com/Hadith/Muslim/Reference/Hadith-2922
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:
The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.
https://quranx.com/Hadith/Bukhari/DarusSalam/Hadith-2925
Narrated `Abdullah bin `Umar:
Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "You (i.e. Muslims) will fight with the Jews until some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, 'O `Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.'"
I love how it simultaneously "originated from an anonymous, bad-faith submission with no connection to the youth or the discussion taking place in the session"… and also… "could not be identified since all postings during the word-cloud exercise were anonymous."
It also was absolutely not just one person. The platform is Mentimeter and the very nature of a word-cloud is that the size of each word grows larger the more frequently it's submitted.
If "competing" and "thinking" – and the curious "manipulate" – were submitted by a one single person each, then "Jew free" was submitted at least 2-3 times, at least as many times as "Freedom" and "helping."
I think they might be lying to us.
