The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has cancelled a book event by the Yazidi Nobel Prize-winning author Nadia Murad. The reason provided by the Canadian school to justify its decision was that the book written by her could “promote Islamophobia” and “offend” the Muslim students.
Murad, a Yazidi human rights activist, was 19 when she was taken as a sex slave in 2014 by the Islamic State terrorists who invaded her village in northern Iraq. Nadia had become the second-youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Murad was invited to talk at Tanya Lee’s book club- A Room of Your Own, which invites young girls aged 13 to 18 from various secondary schools and allows them to read a book and then discuss it virtually with the author. The event in which Nadia Murad was invited to carry discussions on her book, ‘The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State’, is scheduled to be held in February 2022. This is Murad’s autobiographical book on how she was enslaved by Islamic State.
However, now, the Toronto District School Board has disallowed students from participating in the event, saying that the event would foster Islamophobia. TDSB superintendent Helen Fisher expressed concern over Murad’s book telling book club organizers that students should not participate in an event with the author scheduled for February.
“This is what the Islamic State means,” Lee said in response to the board’s decision to Helen Fisher, adding, “It’s a jihadist group. It has nothing to do with the Muslim community as a whole. The discrepancy should be recognised by the Toronto school board.”
The Toronto District School Board (TDSB)’s decision was criticized by several Canadian writers and media.
Canadian commentator Rex Murphy wrote: “For those with a cynical mind — and I am of course exempt from that failing — it might be concluded that equity departments actually hold existence for the sole purpose of contradicting their own purpose. And, in particular, those within school boards have honed that skill to supernal perfection.
It may be noted that the Toronto District School Board had, similarly, withdrawn support from the event the book club was to host in October because the featured author, lawyer Marie Henein, had defended Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi on sexual-assault charges. Jian Ghomeshi had in 2016, been acquitted of all charges in the first trial itself. Despite this, TDSB had forbidden its students to participate in the October event.
Explaining the board’s rationale behind the decision, TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird told The Globe and Mail, “There seems to have been a misunderstanding because the ‘fairness’ department does not review and approve books for book clubs”. He also explained that “the two books were nevertheless examined by the members of the council, as is the practice, in order to decide or not their distribution to the pupils”.
