A test in compassion
#TORONTOSTRONG NEEDS TO PROVE ITSELF BY EMBRACING THE SHOOTER’S PARENTS
To try to look on the bright side, maybe the reason last weekend’s Danforth shooting rampage has pushed some people into an abyss of hysteria is that Toronto truly is one of the world’s great peaceable cities, and the horror of what happened has been just too much of a shock. Maybe it’s got something to do with the ubiquity of rancid disinformation and malicious pseudo-news these days that a meanness and heartlessness so quickly intruded into what was, in the early goings, a moment of shared mourning, a “Toronto Strong” moment of quiet civic decency and resilience.
Maybe the simple, ugly reason that so little sympathy has been on hand for the parents of the severely mentally ill and now-dead shooter — they have another son who has been in a coma for more than a year, and their daughter died in a car accident about five years ago — is that they are Muslim. Or maybe it’s just because it was their son who committed the unconscionable act, that their own crushing anguish and sorrow is cruelly dismissed as somehow less deserving of any public sympathy.
Maybe now that the socalled Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Danforth mass shooting, the hoarse, howling voices at the margins will come to wholly overwhelm the public conversation. Or maybe their inanities will implode and collapse around their heads while everybody else notices that the official propagandists for ISIL “caliph” Abu Bakr al Baghdadi also claimed that last October’s mass shooting in Las Vegas was one of their jobs — an absurdity the FBI unequivocally dismissed. And that the security evacuation of Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris a month earlier was not because of bombs ISIL claimed to have planted, but rather because of an unruly woman who was prevented from boarding a plane. And that the shooting rampage at a casino in Manila that ISIL claimed as its own operation last June turned out to be the frenzy of a deeply indebted gambler.
Maybe a lot of things. Innocently genuine speculation isn’t always easily distinguishable from rumourmongering, and the public platform that social media so readily provides does tend to lower the tone.
When the shooter was first identified as a white male, the novelist Christine Estima, who is ordinarily quite the comedian, took to Twitter this way: “We need to put a ban on white men until we can figure out what’s going on.” This might have been funny, even, were it not for the screaming sirens, the sheer terror of that night in Toronto, the wounded strewn about the street, and the dead. Reese Fallon, 18 years old, had planned to study nursing at McMaster University this fall. Julianna Kozis, from Markham, Ont., was 10.
For a while there, it might not have been wholly unreasonable to wonder out loud about whether the shooter, who turned out to be 29-year-old Faisal Hussain, could have been possessed of a motive, if you could call it that, that derived in some fashion from the crackpottery of deathcult jihadism. But there is nothing reasonable about the sort of thing making the rounds that was typified by the notorious Ezra Levant when he chimed in, this way: “Did the police withhold the shooter’s name for a day so they could scrub evidence of Islamist (sic) from his social media accounts?”
Levant followed that up with this: “I’m curious how the name of the Toronto shooter was withheld for a day, and the moment it was released, a Muslim reporter at the CBC state broadcaster issues an official statement from ‘the family’ — that he was mentally ill, nothing to do with Islam.”
Even that might have been funny, although too clever by half, had it come from a parody account. But it wasn’t even intended to be funny. It was a filthy insinuation. There is nothing that distinguishes the CBC’s Shanifa Nasser, who may or may not be Muslim for all that it matters, except that she is a damn fine journalist, and she was not alone in reporting the Ontario Special Investigations Unit’s decision, arising from what the SIU called “the exceptional circumstances of this tragic incident,” to identify the shooter by name. Neither was Nasser alone in reporting the contents of family’s statement.
It doesn’t exactly help clarify anything, being invited to see something sinister in the involvement of Muslim community activist Mohammed Hashim, an organizer with the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, in the preparation and distribution of a statement on behalf of Hussain’s parents. The Toronto Sun referred to Hashim as the family’s “spin doctor,” but if Hashim had a hand in helping the family compose their statement, fair play to him. As events have proved, the family was going to need help, precisely because they happened to be Muslims. It’s a wonder Hussain’s parents haven’t been hounded to present themselves in some public place to loudly swear a loyalty oath.
In their statement, the Hussains express their condolences to the families victimized by their son’s horrific actions, and then get straight to the heart of what is a soul-crushing, heartbreaking and lonely predicament endured by tens of thousands of families across Canada: “Our son had severe mental health challenges, struggling with psychosis and depression his entire life. The interventions of professionals were unsuccessful. Medications and therapy were unable to treat him.”
They go on: “While we did our best to seek help for him throughout his life of struggle and pain, we could never imagine that this would be his devastating and destructive end. Our hearts are in pieces for the victims and for our city as we all come to grips with this terrible tragedy. We will mourn those who were lost for the rest of our lives.”
Evidence may yet emerge to the effect that at perhaps some very recent stage in the psychosis that tormented him, Faisal Hussain had been twisted beyond recognition by imbibing the online vileness of some bloodthirsty Islamist hate preacher. But all that is, or should be, immaterial to what is required right now of the people of Toronto — Toronto Strong, as the city likes to describe itself in the teeth of these tragic events. If the people cannot find it within themselves to discharge the same duty of solidarity and compassion in respect of the Hussain family, to enclose them as warmly within the embrace of their empathy as the families of Reese Fallon and little Julianna Kozis, then they should be ashamed of themselves.