Hate, terror and destruction have many faces
On Sept. 22, a man stole a heavy-duty flatbed truck near Maidstone, Sask., and sped off. Mounties broke off their pursuit, fearing it might put the public in danger. The truck tore down the highway until it smashed into a minivan. Inside the van were four Edmonton women on a trip to visit family friends.
Eva Fatu Tumbay, 37; Glorious David, 35; and Jeannette Wright, 53, were killed. Janet Wright Gaye, 32, was airlifted to hospital in Edmonton with severe injuries.
A Lloydminster man, Brandon Stucka, 26, has been charged with criminal negligence causing death, criminal negligence causing bodily harm and a variety of other offences.
It was a shocking tragedy. And, as it happens, a far more deadly event than Edmonton experienced last weekend when a truck fleeing police plowed into pedestrians near Jasper Avenue. The driver was wanted in an earlier attack involving a police officer who was struck by a vehicle, then stabbed by its driver.
Abdulahi Hasan Sharif, 30, faces 11 charges, including five counts of attempted murder.
Two terrible, terrifying public acts.
Two criminals fleeing police in speeding trucks.
So why are our emotional reactions so different?
The easy answer, you could argue, is one accused is a white Canadian, while the other is a Somali refugee.
But that’s far from the whole reason.
We’re all at considerably more risk of dying in a horrific highway crash caused by a reckless driver than of dying in a terrorist assault. Yet it’s a risk we’ve decided to accept because we value the freedom highway driving gives us. We’re inured to the threat. For us, it’s just a normal part of Canadian prairie life.
But the moment the Edmonton Police Service labelled this weekend’s events as acts of terror, an entirely different set of reactions set in. Since Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve been sensitized to the threat of Islamic extremist terrorism in North America. We’ve all seen the stories, from Boston and Orlando, from London and Paris and Jerusalem. The T-word summons up the fear of some huge overarching conspiracy against the secular West, of radical Muslim ideologues out to get “us.” It was disorienting to see our own local U-Haul rampage on BBC and CNN.
The Edmonton Police Service and the RCMP held a curious news conference Monday. The RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams had taken over the investigation into allegations of terrorism. But Sharif hasn’t been charged with any terrorism offences.
RCMP suggested they need more evidence before they can lay terrorism charges.
Legally, terrorism is a hard case to make. Sharif allegedly had an ISIL flag in his vehicle, but the court has to consider whether the accused uses a name that is associated with a terrorist group, whether he frequently associates with persons who constitute the terrorist group, whether he received any benefit from the terrorist group, or whether he engages in activities at the instruction of such a group.
Those Criminal Code provisions make sense for a highly organized, hierarchical, old-school terrorist group. They may not fit a wannabe ISIL lone wolf, whom ISIL has not yet deigned to claim. A terrorism charge may be tough to sustain.
Still, it’s alleged Sharif tried to kill five people, including a police officer. Those are heinous offences, no matter what you call them.
But the repetitive online argument over who gets called a terrorist and who doesn’t spins us in circles.
On Sunday night, a Las Vegas gunman opened fire from his hotel room on a concert crowd below. It was a bloodbath: more than 515 wounded and at least 59 dead, including Jessica Klymchuk, a teacher’s aide and mother of four from Valleyview, Alta.
Las Vegas police termed the shooter, Stephen Paddock, 64, a psychopath, but not a terrorist. Because he killed himself, we may never know what toxic cocktail of ideology, hate and disturbance drove him. He’s just the latest mass shooter to terrorize America, a country almost as fatalistic about mass shootings as we are to highway crashes.
Instead of having the same divisive arguments, over and over again, about who is and is not a “terrorist,” we might agree that criminals who bring terror and destruction to our public thoroughfares and public spaces are all deserving of denunciation whatever their motives, their ethnicities, their religions, their nationalities or their weapons of choice.
As we mourn for the dead and care for the injured, perhaps we should worry less about who gets what label, and concentrate, instead, on finding ways to stop the angry, the hate-filled, the disaffected and the heedless from sowing chaos and grief in their wake.