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Remembering the shooting at the mosque in Quebec City is always a painful anniversary. This year the occasion is even more sombre.
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After seven years, it’s hard to find new words to condemn a familiar fiend.
I was only a few weeks into my job as The Gazette’s city columnist when a gunman opened fire at the mosque in Quebec City the night of Jan. 29, 2017, killing six. In the days that followed, I poured my incomprehension and heartsickness into pixels and ink. From my tribune, I attempted to make sense of the senseless.
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Every year since then, I’ve wrestled with a heinous crime that shattered any illusions that Quebec and Canada are immune from the forces of hate roiling the world and challenged our very identity as an open and tolerant society. I’ve sought to distil the lessons we ought to draw from this tragedy to prevent history from repeating itself.
But after seven years, the shock has not worn off, the wounds are still raw, the pain is still searing — all the more so, no doubt, for the loved ones of Mamadou Tanou Barry, Ibrahima Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzeddine Soufiane and Aboubaker Thabti; for the 13 worshippers who were injured, including one who was paralyzed; for the 17 children left fatherless; for the Muslim community, both local and national, who were robbed of their sense of security and belonging in the rampage.
Seven years later, I struggle to find the right words to bring meaning to this terrible anniversary — despite the fact the world seems like an even darker and more dangerous place than it was on that frigid night in January 2017, when I was awoken from sleep to this chilling nightmare.
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Yet the pearls of wisdom that have been shaped from immeasurable grief matter more than ever these days. The warnings about how to avert a similar catastrophe blare that much louder.
Jan. 29 is now rightly recognized as a national day of remembrance and action against Islamophobia. A day and an acknowledgment of a terrible scourge are important, if symbolic steps.
But Islamophobia has swelled, rather than ebbed.
Since 2017, four members of a Muslim family were deliberately rammed by a truck in London, Ont. The white nationalist killer has been convicted and is awaiting sentencing while the court weighs arguments about whether these murders constituted terrorism. The murderer who sprayed the Centre culturel islamique de Québec with bullets, however, was never charged with terror or hate. Neither deserves to be named to deny them the notoriety they craved. But it is essential to call out their misdeeds for what they were, as the nadir of a powerful evil.
If the number of incidents against Muslims was alarming previously, reports of Islamophobic bullying and vandalism have skyrocketed since Hamas’s attack against Israel on Oct. 7 sparked Israel’s war in Gaza. The National Council of Canadian Muslims recorded a 1,300-per-cent spike in complaints about hate in little more than a month last November.
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But here’s the thing, the inescapable grain of truth that has emerged seven years after the bloodshed: Islamophobia is not the only brand of toxin poisoning the well.
The forces of hatred and division are rising, not receding, in a public square dominated by polarizing politics and uncivil discourse. And many “others” are feeling the disconcerting glare of suspicion, intolerance and enmity. This includes, but is not limited to, racialized minorities, the LGBTQ community and Indigenous peoples.
Saturday was also International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, was a particularly sombre occasion, with the Jewish community still reeling from Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians. With 1,200 murdered on Oct. 7, it was the highest death toll among Jews on any single day since the Holocaust. More than 100 of the over 240 Israelis taken hostage are still being held captive, including women and the elderly. The echoes of history are devastating.
Yet, the unspeakable calamity has had the perverse effect of stoking the embers of antisemitism globally. Opposition to the humanitarian casualties of Palestinians caught in the crossfire of Israel’s war in Gaza can no more justify antisemitism than outrage over Hamas’s pogrom can legitimize Islamophobia.
But these are just the latest excuses to mask the depths of an age-old loathing.
In Montreal, Jewish schools have been hit with bullets and synagogues targeted by firebombs. Even if no one was injured, this violent intimidation is a warning of what can happen — and a reminder of what already has.
Fourteen women massacred at École Polytechnique in 1989 by a misogynist. Six Muslims slaughtered in 2017 by a xenophobe. Different targets, same venomous snake laying coiled in the grass, ready to strike when we least expect it.
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Allison Hanes: Four years after Quebec City mosque massacre, what have we learned?
What is the antidote? After seven years of pondering this question, I’d like to say it’s our common humanity. But even that seems scarce in these times of lost innocence and murky moral clarity.
One day, we light candles. Every day, we must arm ourselves against a shared foe: hate in all its forms.
ahanes@postmedia.com
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