Djemila Benhabib - Troll of the Month
Djemila Benhabib, Canadian author known for her secular feminist militancy against Islam, has been featured on several Belgian media outlets, following the launch of her latest book "Islamophobie mon œil!” (“Islamophobia, yeah right!”).
On the 7th of May, the Belgian business newspaper, L’Echo, published an interview with her entitled, "Djemila Benhabib (Collectif Laïcité Yallah): "Islamism is stronger in Belgium because it is a country with multiple fractures".
In the interview, Benhabib severely downplayed the threats of Islamophobia, claiming that the term “is not intended to denounce anti-Muslim racism, but instead, tactically conceals undercover extremists, censoring public debate and shutting down critical voices.” She then added: “They pretend to be the planet's saviours, but their societal model is the ethnic and religious communitarianism.” In doing so, Benhabib is conflating freedom of speech with anti-Muslim hatred and denying the lived experience of Muslims who are systematically stigmatised.
On L’Echo, Benhabib also compared the Belgium and the French media, saying that the former lacks media plurality because “we only listen to speeches that propagate the victim dogma”. Considering that trustworthy studies such as the European Islamophobia Report have proven the rampant Islamophobia on Belgian media, this claim is false. Furthermore, Benhabib harangued “political Islam” – a term which is used to claim the existence of a secret plan to “undermine the democracy of European countries” but which lacks a definition and puts Muslim groups into political categories: good Muslims and bad Muslims.
With her Muslim background, Djemila Benhabib's positionality is used to spread Islamophobia through political and media institutions. In her previous book, “My Life Against the Koran”, the author encouraged Muslim women to abandon the religious commandments, expressed stereotyped views of Muslim women as submissive and blamed the headscarf as the obstacle to them achieving their dreams.
The Canadian writer is also a spokesperson of the Collectif Laïcité Yallah, a Belgian collective for secularism which advocates against the wearing of the hijab. In arguing that Muslim women should refuse to wear the headscarf, Benhabib denies women their freedom to continue practising their religion by using symbols that represent their religious, cultural, and spiritual identity. Although Benhabib claims to be feminist and to seek to empower women, her insistent, anti-veil narrative places Muslim women who wear the headscarf in a vulnerable position. As the GTTO manual ‘The Representation of Religious Minorities in Media’ states, “the one-sided view of Muslim women as submissive and oppressed individuals or as activists following a hidden political agenda, deprives them of their agency.”
In the past few years, Benhabib’s anti-Islam remarks have aroused several controversies in Canada. In 2014, the Quebec Collective Against Islamophobia (CQCI) asked the political party, Parti Québécois, to reject the candidacy of Djemila Benhabib, because they feared that it would have contributed to further stigmatisation of Muslim Quebecers. In 2016, a Muslim school in Montreal sued the author for slander after she likened it to militant Islamic training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
