With Students’ Union election posters decorating campus, students may not have noticed several being replaced after some posters were targeted with hate vandalism. According to Campus Security, posters hanging in the science building were defaced with anti-religious and racist material Thursday night. With the two candidates primarily affected both being visibly Muslim women, many feel that the attacks reach beyond the specific candidates.
“Obviously it’s very disappointing when any candidate’s material is vandalized or otherwise destroyed, since these are dedicated students trying to improve the university,” said SU election chief returning officer Alastair MacKinnon. “But it is particularly disturbing when it is racially motivated vandalism promoting hate against a particular type of student, in this case Muslims.”
Hana Kadri, a candidate for arts faculty representative, was shocked to discover her campaign poster defaced with a swastika drawn on her forehead and a line drawn to her hijab with the words “This is a hate crime” beside. She says this is the first time she’s ever experienced anything like this.
Kadri says that she definitely sees this, not just as an attack against herself, but towards Muslims in general.
“The people who did this to my poster don’t know who I am,” said Kadri. “They just saw the scarf on my head, the hijab on my head, and decided to go ahead with the action.”
Campus security director Lanny Fritz says this kind of behaviour isn’t seen very often but noted that poster defacement does occur more often during SU election campaigns.
“I can’t remember a year that’s gone by that we didn’t have a little of it,” says Fritz. “Typically, it’s people with a black marker on a Thursday night, which is a heavy night for our bar crowd, though we don’t know who did this one particular case.”
Campus Security treats most poster vandalism as property damage, but when the graffiti is threatening or “hate-based” it becomes a criminal matter. Fritz said that although students should feel safe on campus from these kind of attacks, in a community of 30,000, sometimes it’s just not realistic to expect that this sort of activity won’t take place.
“We can react if we find [the crime being committed], but we’ve got dozens of poster boards so we’d have to be pretty lucky to walk by and actually catch somebody marking or defacing property,” said Fritz. “We have from time to time, but in this case we haven’t been fortunate enough to date.”
Calgary Police Service constable Kelly Mergen says that most hate-based attacks are perpetrated by teenagers trying to illicit any type of response from people. Mergen says that the best response is to remove the material as the longer it remains visible, the more it becomes commonplace.
MacKinnon agrees, and says that there is no place for this type of behaviour at the university, saying he was “disgusted” after hearing about the defacement.
Ola Mohajer, a science faculty representative candidate, was another victim of the hate attacks, but says she’s less concerned for herself than she is for others students.
“I’m really concerned more with other Muslim students on campus and how they feel walking down the halls of the university,” says Mohajer. “By default just because I can be identified as a Muslim people feel I represent Muslim students. So when someone does something like this other Muslim students can take offense.”
Ahmed Hassan, vice-president of the Muslim Students’ Association, hasn’t seen the posters himself but says that acts like this are based out of falsehoods on the part of perpetrators.
“There’s a negative impression of Muslims, generally, in the media and everywhere you go,” says Hassan. “At the end of the day, though, it’s ignorance. They’ve associated this person with anything they’ve seen or think they’ve seen before, which is generally not true, you have to give everybody a chance.”
Hassan says that these kind of attacks are unacceptable, and might lead students new to the university or the city to believe the community all hold these views.
See Poster discrimination on campus, page 7
“It’s something that we all as a general campus should take offence to,” said Hassan. “We should be collective in our approach to this, it shouldn’t be when Muslims are targeted just Muslims come to their aid, it should be a collective thing to come together and say ‘that’s not right.’ “
Kadri, a first year student, says that she had hoped at this point in her education she wouldn’t be dealing with this sort of attack.
“Growing up with the hijab on your head in this culture there will always be circumstances that will go against you, but you have to move past that,” said Kadri.
Unfortunately, this type of vandalism is not a unique occurrence. Club posters are occasionally targeted at the U of C. Clubs-coordinator Justin Brown says that groups like Calgary Hillel, the Jewish students club, have seen discrimination and their posters have also been recently vandalized.
“There is a sub-culture here on campus that’s promoting intolerance,” says MacKinnon. “It’s probably a very small group, but there needs to be a strong message sent to these people that this type of hate and intolerance is not acceptable.”
Ahmed Hassan says that the only way to end this type of intolerance is education, and his group aims to offer it at the upcoming Islamic awareness week (March 15-19).
“It’s basically that people are doing this out of ignorance, they ‘heard’ from so-and-so that Muslims do this,” said Hassan. “But if you went to a place like Islamic awareness week, MSA and Muslims in general are trying to teach people about Islam, so people can differentiate between what is Islam and what is not.”
Both candidates were allowed to replace their posters by the SU without violating election guidelines.