Is Stephen Harper tapping into, even fanning, anti-Muslim bigotry, as Justin Trudeau says? The answer, sadly, is yes.

The judgment is based on the Conservative government’s track record over eight years, not just its current conflation of terrorism with Muslims/Islam, or its own jihad against one Toronto woman who wants to keep her niqab during her citizenship swearing-in ceremony.

The Conservatives have only been marginally less crass than the Parti Québécois, whose charter of Quebec values was aimed squarely at Muslims — with Jews, Sikhs and others becoming collateral damage. That odious policy was defeated in a very Canadian way — all minorities and people of principle came together and tossed that government out.

Such a unified front has been missing at the federal level.

Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair have been making mini-statements about this or that aspect of Harper’s poisonous partisan politics — to little or no effect. But now the Liberal leader has raised the stakes with a major speech, clearly his best so far, casting majority-minority relations in the Canadian context of secular liberal values.

That he has succeeded in calling out the Harper bullies is evident in the way they are stomping up and down proclaiming their innocence.

Harper dug himself deeper Tuesday by displaying his anti-niqab demagoguery in the full glare of the House of Commons. Jason Kenney, who initiated the niqab ban that has been found “unlawful” by the Federal Court, has been tweeting away, boasting, among other things, that the Conservative government has let in 300,000 Muslim immigrants. Presumably they were admitted for their skills, not their faith. The Parti Québécois, too, claimed to be immigrant- and Muslim-friendly, yet targeted hijab-wearing women, most of them immigrants.

Even before the Harperites, senior Conservative strategist Sen. Marjory LeBreton was on the defensive at a women’s conference in Ottawa Monday. About the government’s fractious relations with Canada’s one million Muslims, she promptly blamed the media and said she, in fact, had many Muslim friends. Anti-Semites also claim to have Jewish friends and racists insist that they do have some black acquaintances. What really matters is the government’s record.

In 2007, the Harperites tried to copy the Quebec separatists in wanting to ban niqabis from voting. That attempt was thwarted by Marc Mayrand, chief electoral officer, who noted that about 70,000 voters, including inmates, mail their ballots without ever being asked to show their face.

The Harper government has systematically boycotted mainstream Muslim organizations. It deals with two small segments — the Aga Khan Ismailis and the Ahmadis, with Harper and Kenney visiting their mosques.

Like the Bloc Québécois, the Conservatives use a handful of dissident Muslims, who attack other Muslims, in the name of secularism, and praise the government. Kenney was honoured by one such marginal group for his ban on the niqab, an event at which a woman entered wearing a niqab, only to cast it off dramatically. It is hard to imagine him smirking away at a gathering at which Catholicism was mocked by a woman who came in a nun’s habit only to throw it off, or Orthodox Judaism was insulted by a man sporting a fake beard, long locks and a black hat only to disdainfully cast them off.

In 2012, when the Harper government axed the anti-hate provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act, it did so mostly at the behest of those who wanted the absolute freedom to attack Muslims and Islam. (Now the Tories want to curb free speech in the name of curbing terrorism.)

The Conservatives have courted Coptic Christians from Egypt, Bahais from Iran, and Christians and Ahamdis from Pakistan — people who fled persecution from Muslim majority nations and deserve support. But the Conservatives have exploited and fanned “old country” fault lines and mollycoddled anti-Muslim bigots.

In advocating for religious freedom abroad, a laudable goal, the Conservatives have gone to bat mostly for Christian and other minorities in Muslim nations, but rarely for the beleagured Muslim Uighurs in China, Rohingas in Myanmar, Shiites in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, or the Sunni majority in Syria, long persecuted by the ruling minority Alawite sect of the butcher Bashar Assad.

Harper’s key foreign policy plank — a blank cheque for Israel — has translated into him ignoring not just Muslims but also Canadian Arabs, an estimated 780,000, up to half of whom are, in fact, Christian. His approach is the same as that of many core Conservative supporters who, unfortunately, equate supporting Israel with opposing Arabs/Muslims. They also believe that terrorism involving Muslims is “Islamic,” despite evidence to the contrary, with terrorists of varied backgrounds citing western wars on Muslim nations as their prime motivation.

While Harper and ministers invoke the western mantra that the war on terror is not a war on Muslims, they invariably cast the war as a clash of civilizations. In 2011, Harper spoke of “Islamicism” as the main terrorist threat to Canada. Recently he explicitly linked mosques to terrorism, despite having said exactly the opposite in New York last fall.

The Conservatives are promoting their anti-terrorism legislation by posting images of menacing-looking Muslims. The party is raising funds using the campaign against the niqab. Kenney just tweeted photos of chained, veiled Muslim women and girls to condemn the Islamic State, except that the pictures were reportedly from some pantomime theatre.

Barack Obama is leading war against the Islamic State but he avoids linking Islam/jihad with the war on terrorists. But Harper cannot stop speaking of his war against “jihadists,” “jihadism,” “violent jihadism,” “jihadi terrorism,” “the international jihadist movement,” etc. This only confirms the terrorists’ claim of being “jihadists” against governments that are anti-Muslim and it undercuts the overwhelming majority of Muslims who say the terrorists are, in fact, murderers.

Cumulatively, it is clear what the Conservatives have been up to. “They’ve done it deliberately,” Trudeau said, and what “they’ve done is deeply wrong.” In fact, quite un-Canadian.

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Haroon Siddiqui’s column appears on Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca

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