Taking issue with column
Re: The agony of an attack without explanation, Barbara Kay, April 25
I read Barbara Kay’s reaction on the van attack this week, an attack that happened as I sat in a café metres away and witnessed firsthand the incredible response from Toronto citizens and first responders, and I found myself utterly disgusted.
Never mind that Kay was not present at the scene and thus has absolutely zero sense of what calmness in the face of chaos might actually look like, her description of the “agony” of an attack that isn’t “Islamist terrorism” is offensive beyond belief.
Kay is free to think such a thing, but it serves the national discourse no value. To want an attack to be jihadi terrorism? For what? For the sake of being able to take action?
And even if hatred toward women ends up not having been the motivation in this attack, as has been suggested, other mental ailments — depression, etc — can be seriously confronted, too. Perhaps not with Kay’s preferred stigmatization of an entire group of religious people, but by actual investment in access to mental-health support and other resources. You know, investments in building community in this country instead of tearing it apart. Corey Atad, Toronto
Barbara Kay is quick to conclude that the attack was the result of an addled madman, unpredictable and unpreventable. She laments it as more terrifying than ideologically motivated terrorism, because at least those events are predictable. She is explicit: Although the end-agents of Islamic terror may be more motivated by maladjustment than ideology, the Islamic Jihad movement has a defined goal (destruction of the West).
Kay has repeatedly denied that Alexandre Bissonnette, who killed six at a mosque in Quebec, was motivated by an organized ideology, or at least one that poses as much a risk to Western democracies as Islamism, even though there is more and more evidence that this is exactly what happened.
There is emerging evidence that van attack suspect Alek Minassian might have been motivated by a very specific ideology with explicit violent goals against women. Although those who commit violent acts are often mentally ill, including the man who murdered Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, they are also often motivated by very specific, violent ideologies that give them a sense of belonging.
Kay claims she would be happier if the perpetrator was a Muslim because Islamist violence is predictable. Personally I would argue that any ideology that would motivate an individual to kill and maim 24 people is extremely harmful to our values, regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrator. If Kay wanted to feel purposeful, she could take a stand against misogyny instead of using a tragedy not even remotely related to Islam to vilify Muslims. Colin Blair Meyer-Macaulay, Ottawa