More than a hundred people converged on Saturday evening in Montreal to pay tribute to the victims of the massacre of the great mosque of Quebec, which continues to mark the spirits five years later.
On the evening of January 29, 2017, a killer burst into the Grand Mosque of Quebec at prayer time to fire a semi-automatic weapon and a handgun. Five years to the day after this tragic event, which cost the death of six people, injured several others in addition to leaving 17 children forever deprived of their father, the wounds are still raw.
“That attack was really a shock because any member of the Muslim community in Quebec had doubts that night when he heard about the shooting. They all wondered if they were going to know one of the victims, “said Saturday to the Duty lawyer and member of the Muslim community of Quebec, Lina Bensaidane. This shooting has thus shown, according to her, that “Islamophony has deadly consequences”.
It is therefore not only so that the memory of the disappeared does not fade, but also in order to denounce the hatred which persists against the Muslim community, that a rally took place from 5 p.m. Saturday in front of the metro. Park at the initiative of Muslim Discovery Week. January 29 has also been recognized by the federal government as the national day dedicated to the fight against Islamophobia.
Despite the freezing cold, the crowd gradually grew to more than a hundred people, many of whom held an electric candle in their hands. After a brief speech given by the organizers of the event, a moment of emotional silence, a series of elected officials from all levels of government took the floor to denounce racism and Islamophobia. Some, like NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice, lamented that the Legault government still does not recognize systemic racism. Others, like Ensemble Montreal adviser Aref Salem, stressed the importance of better addressing hate speech on social media.
“There are many heinous acts in our society that remain unreported and unpunished,” said the president of the Commission for Human Rights and Youth Rights, Philippe-André Tessier. He thus considers that awareness-raising work is necessary so that citizens denounce such situations more. Behind him, demonstrators held up large posters showing the faces of the six men whose lives were taken that evening of January 29, 2017.
“The solution, in my opinion, is through empathy. This kind of fear, the fact of being afraid of losing a loved one in circumstances [similaires]. The pain we share with people who have lost, I think it’s this kind of mobilizing empathy that will make the difference, ”said Lina Bensaidane.
dashed hopes
The choice of location for this gathering is not insignificant. At this same place, on January 30, 2017, thousands of people gathered to denounce the attack committed the day before by Alexandre Bissonnette, who has since been sentenced to a heavy prison sentence. The demonstrators also wanted to condemn hatred and xenophobia.
“In the tragedy, in the misfortune, in what we experienced as a shock, the fact of seeing so many people around us, it really touched us. It’s as if it had put a balm on the wound. It’s as if in the tragedy, we had hoped that it was going to get better and that it would never happen again, ”recalled on Saturday the president of the Week of Discovery of Muslims, Samira Laouni, in interview at Duty a few hours before this meeting.
And then the worst happened again, with an accumulation of heinous acts in recent years that culminated in a terrorist attack last June in London, Ontario. A motorist then drove into a Muslim family walking on a sidewalk, killing four of its members in its path. The Montreal Police Service also identified in 2021, in its last annual report, a notable increase in hate crimes reported in the metropolis, against various ethnic and religious minorities.
However, “it is not true that we are in [une société de] living together when hate crimes are on the rise,” sighs Ms. Laouni.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to social media on Saturday to condemn Islamophobia, which he called “unacceptable”. “We must stop this form of hatred and make our communities safer for Muslims,” he wrote on Twitter, before announcing the upcoming creation of a special representative in charge of the fight against Islamophobia in the country. . The details of this position will be communicated later.
In terms of the fight against firearms, however, expectations remain high, particularly on the part of the organization PolySeSouvient.
“In connection with the context that was taking place at the time of the mosque massacre, there is nothing that has changed that would have made it possible to prevent what happened”, sighed Saturday the coordinator of PolySeSouvient, Heidi Rathjen, in an interview with Le Devoir. She particularly deplores the lack of tight control of handguns, despite measures put in place by the federal government to ban assault weapons in the country. “We want to avoid at all costs that the federal government loses responsibility for handguns,” she insisted.