Hard questions after mosque deaths
Quebec confronts reality of hateful history
QUEBEC CITY • Haroun Bouazzi is a moderate spokesman for Quebec’s Muslim community, working to combat radicalization of Muslim youth while defending religious freedoms. This public role has come at a cost. Since entering the fray in 2013 during the debate over the Parti Québécois’ Charter of Quebec Values, Bouazzi says he has received tens of thousands of hate messages, including death threats.
“Line him up in front of the firing squad,” one commenter wrote on Facebook last fall after he questioned the constitutionality of Quebec’s Bill 62, which would prohibit people from providing or receiving any government services with their faces covered.
Others on Facebook have said he should be hanged, set on fire or get “a bullet between the eyes.” He has complained to Montreal police, but so far nobody has been charged.
Bouazzi says the online abuse he receives is symptomatic of more widespread anti-Islam sentiment, and when he learned that a gunman had opened fire in a Quebec City mosque Sunday, he was pained but not surprised. “I know no Muslim who was surprised,” he said in an interview this week. “We’ve been saying again and again that we didn’t know what, we didn’t know when, but we knew something bad was going to happen.”
In the wake of Sunday’s attack, which left six dead and 19 injured, political leaders declared that Muslims were citizens like any others, welcome in a tolerant Quebec.
But in recent years the message received by the province’s small but growing Muslim population has been far from welcoming.
Politicians have singled out their faith in the neverending debate over secularism and Quebec values, radio hosts have denigrated them and vandals have targeted their places of worship.
None of this foretold mass murder, but the killings have forced Quebec leaders to confront the reality that, as Premier Philippe Couillard said this week, “words can be knives slashing at people’s consciousness.”
Last September, Bouazzi met the provincial minister of public security, Martin Coiteux, to present a report signed by a number of Muslim organizations and individuals seeking government action against online intimidation and Islamophobic vandalism. The document warned of a growth in hate crimes; Muslim institutions in Saguenay, Montreal, Quebec City, Saint-Jean-surRichelieu and Sherbrooke had been targeted, whether by graffiti, a pig’s head on the doorstep or lead pellets through the windows. Insults and death threats had become “common currency” online, prompting some spokespeople to abandon the debate over secularism, it said. “Urgent concrete measures” were needed to pull Quebec out of a spiral toward greater insecurity and social tension, the report concluded, but Bouazzi said nothing was done.
The poisoned atmosphere is not unique to Quebec, but it has been exacerbated here by the ceaseless debate, now more than 10 years old, over the proper place of religious minorities in a province that despite a long history of Catholicism now sees itself as secular. (While church pews have mostly emptied, 6.3 million Quebecers identify themselves as Christian, according to 2011 data.)
Caught in the struggle for secularism are many of its newest citizens. From media exposés of maple sugar shacks agreeing not to serve pork to Muslim customers, to the former PQ government’s proposed values charter prohibiting public-sector workers from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols such as the hijab to Bill 62, now before the legislature, clamping down on burkas and niqabs, Muslims have been made to feel like targets.
Daniel Weinstock, a professor at McGill University’s law faculty who researches religious and cultural diversity, noted that for most of the adult life of the 27-year-old alleged Quebec City gunman, Alexandre Bissonnette, the place of Muslims has been a recurring theme of Quebec political debate.
“We have a small (Muslim) community here — about 250,000 people out of a population of roughly eight million — who have had a spotlight shone on them, not a flattering one, for the last 10 or 12 years,” Weinstock said. “There hasn’t been any respite.”
A commission headed by two of Quebec’s leading public intellectuals, Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, advised the government in 2008 on possible ways out of the impasse, but for the most part their recommendations were ignored.
Speaking to Radio-Canada this week, Taylor said that instead of narrowing the divide between the province’s old-stock francophone majority and its Muslim minority, the province plunged into a debate over the PQ values charter.
“It communicates the idea that there is something wrong with those people, that we can’t give them the same rights as others because they represent a danger,” he said.
“Every time there is a campaign of this sort, there is a proliferation of hateful incidents.”
Writing in La Presse Thursday, his fellow commissioner lamented successive governments’ failure to act. “Our politicians, for the most part, let things slide and contented themselves with timid, useless initiatives, apparently untroubled by the explosive nature of intercultural issues,” Bouchard wrote.
“And when they finally resolved to act once and for all, with a charter, they worsened the situation by deeply dividing Quebecers and placing ethno-cultural minorities against the majority.”
The murders of the six Muslim men shot while praying — Mamadou Tanou Barry, Ibrahima Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzeddine Soufiane and Aboubaker Thabti — have forced stocktaking this week among the province’s political class. Couillard, the Liberal premier, called for an end to divisive rhetoric. “If we start presenting a foreigner as a threat, a challenge to our identity, something we should steer clear of, that does not advance the idea that we need to try and live together in a Quebec which is really inclusive,” he said.
PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée said it was a mistake last year to say Muslims could use garments like the burkini to conceal automatic weapons. Alexandre Cloutier, whom Lisée defeated in last year’s leadership race after targeting him as soft on Islamic extremism, said politicians failed to do enough to combat anti-Islam sentiment. “The time is ripe to take a look in the mirror at what we have done,” he said this week.
Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume singled out his city’s notorious radio hosts for fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment. He said it was time to hold to account the owners of “the companies who create and sell hateful products.”
The politicians’ calls for unity have not been unanimously embraced.
Montreal police reported a jump in reports of hate incidents this week, with 41 hateful acts, 11 of which they consider criminal. On Thursday, a Montreal mosque had its walls splattered with eggs and bricks thrown through its windows.
But Bouazzi is optimistic the province has reached a turning point.
“We’ve seen a huge amount of love from our fellow citizens. We think we can build on this,” he said. “Every citizen has a role to play, every media outlet has a role to play, and specifically every elected representative has a role to place to put in place policies against racism.”