Factsheet: Christine Douglas Williams

IMPACT: Christine Douglas Williams is a regular contributor at the anti-Muslim website Jihad Watch. Although her Islamophobic writing led to her dismissal from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, she continues to position herself as an authoritative voice on Islam in the West.

Christine Douglas Williams is a daily writer at the Islamophobic website Jihad Watch. JihadWatch is a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and is run by Robert Spencer. Spencer has been designated a “misinformation expert” by the Center for American Progress, and has been named “one of America’s most prolific and vociferous anti-Muslim propagandists” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  

In 2017 Williams was fired from her position as a board member of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a foundation created and partially funded by the Canadian government, after her anti-Muslim writing surfaced.

Although Williams had been writing for JihadWatch since her initiation into the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, it was specifically an article called “My Personal Warning to Icelanders” that led to her termination. The article purports to caution Icelanders about the “duping” of European countries by “unvetted” Muslim migrants that is rendering Europe “vulnerable to Islamic supremacists.” Williams also furthers right-wing and Orientalist tropes of Muslim masculinity by warning of  Islamic “doctrine that states that Muslim men can take infidel women.” She also advocates the far-right notion that even “seemingly moderate Muslims” use “Taqiyya” to hide their campaign to overtake Western “land and […] freedoms.”

Williams protested her dismissal from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation on the grounds that it was a violation of her free speech. She similarly was a staunch opponent of Canadian motion M-103 on the grounds that it curtailed public debate. Writing for the conservative Gatestone Institute, she posits that as a non-binding motion that condemns Islamophobia “M-103 puts Islam above all other religions in that any other religion can be discussed openly, criticized openly and even be mocked openly without punishment or state penalty.”

Williams has also authored the book The Challenge of Modernizing Islam (2017) which interviews select Muslims about their efforts in reforming Islam. Among the “Muslim reformers” interviewed are prominent affiliates of the anti-Muslim Clarion Project Zuhdi Jasser and Raheel Raza.The book claims, without evidence, to be the first major work on “Islam that is consistent with human rights, equal rights and modernity.”

Williams also writes prolifically on JihadWatch and other conservative sites on Muslims as a threat to Christians, the purported threats of migrant refugees, veiling as a symbol of Islamic supremacy supported by Western feminists and anti-Islamophobia efforts as a threat to free speech, among other topics.

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This factsheet is published in collaboration between the Bridge Initiative and researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University. More information about this project can be found here.