They were six. Five years ago, to the day, they fell under the bullets of a killer blinded by anti-Muslim hatred. And the whole of Quebec sank into obscurity.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Ibrahima Barry
Mamadou Tanou Barry
Khaled Belkacemi
Abdelkrim Hassane
Azzeddine Soufiane
Aboubaker Thabti
In front of the Great Mosque of Quebec, a monument has been erected in their memory. This sentence by the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran has been engraved on it: No one can reach dawn without passing through the path of night.
Five years later, dawn is slow to break, note the Muslims of Quebec interviewed by my colleague Gabriel Béland. “We are still at night. But we are on the right path, “said Hakim Chambaz, who saw death in the face, on this winter evening which should have been ordinary, but which changed everything, destroyed everything, on January 29, 2017.
Hope is there, finally, at the end of the road.
The hope that prejudice, hatred and intolerance towards Muslims will disappear. The hope that we admit that it exists, that it macerates and that it has been rotting for 20 years in Western societies. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
There are some encouraging signs. Hate crimes against Muslims, which peaked at 359 in Canada in 2017, fell to 82 in 2020.
Many explanations can be found for this marked decline. The most optimistic is that the shock of the attack provoked within the population a real examination of conscience.
Five years ago, shaken, we swore: never again. Maybe we kept our promise, in the end. Maybe there is a before and an after.
We sincerely hope so, of course. But I can’t help but think that there is at least one other explanation for this relative appeasement: the pandemic.
Could it be that SARS-CoV-2 has succeeded, better than all the calls for post-attack introspection, in granting some respite to the Muslim community?
Remember the horrors that happened after the shooting. In the darkest corners of the web, there was no time for questioning. Internet users were downright happy about the massacre.
The slippages were not only virtual: barely six months after the attack, a village refused, without the slightest valid reason, to host a Muslim cemetery. Out of sheer Islamophobia.
Later, on January 31, 2020, a wave of anti-Muslim hatred swept through François Legault’s Facebook page. The Prime Minister had the misfortune to write that the attack on the mosque had been “the kind of event that we did not believe possible in Quebec”.
Racist reactions rocketed: “Vermi…” “I piss in their face. “Câlice, gang of bastards.” »
A month and a half later, the pandemic hit.
Since then, François Legault’s Facebook page hasn’t looked the same. We are attacking the Prime Minister himself and his so-called health dictatorship. Hate has changed its target.
Supporters of La Meute, a far-right group fueled by racism and xenophobia, have swelled the anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-everything movement.
Steeve “L’Artiss” Charland, for example, obsessed over Islam and immigration when he was a senior member of the La Meute council. Now he is blocking the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel and is obsessed with sanitary measures.
Other conspiracy leaders leading the charge against the “dictatorship” in place gravitated, before the pandemic, around La Meute. Among them, Stéphane Blais and André Pitre.
The phenomenon is far from exclusive to Quebec. One of the organizers of the “freedom convoy”, Albertan Pat King, called on his supporters to lead an armed revolution against the federal government.
Before the pandemic, the same Pat King was rather against Muslims, whom he held responsible for a “genocide of whites”. Nothing less. “We are being invaded,” he shouted in August 2019 in a video shot at the wheel of his car.
It’s not just far-right sympathizers who have shifted gears.
The day after the attack, remember, Quebec radio hosts had been accused of having contributed to rotting the social climate by spreading racist remarks. The mayor at the time, Régis Labeaume, denounced people “who get rich with hate”.
When the City of Quebec withdrew its advertisements from CHOI Radio X, in September 2020, Régis Labeaume explained that “trivialization is dangerous”.
This time, however, he did not denounce the trivialization of hate speech, but of that on the health measures introduced to limit the spread of the virus.
I hope I’m wrong. But I have the impression that if the Muslim community can breathe a little, in Quebec as elsewhere, it is because the attention of those who were hounding it is occupied elsewhere.
If so, what will happen when the pandemic is (finally) behind us? Will we witness a return of the pendulum?
It’s possible. And that would be awful. Once the crisis has passed, it seems to me that every effort will have to be made to prevent a return to the main programming.
Mamadou Tanou Barry, Ibrahima Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzeddine Soufiane and Aboubaker Thabti don’t deserve this. They don’t deserve to have died in vain.
They deserve the dawn, at the end of the night.