Hateful comments often rooted in ignorance
There is no way I can keep silent about the hate-filled comments that appeared on the TVA network’s Facebook page following the fire from hell that killed seven children in Nova Scotia.
The next day, I used the harshest words possible in Le Journal de Montreal to condemn the dimwits, ignoramuses and haters who think it’s OK to attack the victims because they were Syrian refugees.
Proudly parading one’s stupidity and ignorance on social networks seems to be a cool thing to do these days. What happened to this thing once called shame? I remember as young adults we did everything we could to appear smarter than we were, even as silly hippies.
In 1970, we were walking around with books by Simone de Beauvoir.
There were, in fact, relatively few hateful comments on the TVA page. One English-speaking reporter said it was a torrent. Not so. Radio-canada confirmed it was more like a handful. More important, it was denounced online by hundreds, if not thousands of Quebecers whose hearts were also broken.
TVA removed the entire thread and apologized, but what can we do to make haters see that it’s a crime against human dignity, the victims’ and their own, to applaud the death of seven innocent children?
There’s a great saying in French: “ou il y a de l’homme, il y a de l’hommerie,” (where there are men, there’s ‘men stuff’). There are no laws against stupidity and hate, only against inciting hatred, but it’s a difficult crime to prove and the relative lawlessness of the internet gives racists a sense of impunity.
My question: Should society try to reform, or should it sanction the sad idiots who wrote such evil comments? Yes on both counts, but we should first hear them out.
Quebec City Cogeco journalist Jean-simon Bui spoke to one man who had left a hateful message on TVA’S Facebook page to find out what had motivated him.
What a revealing interview. What a confused young man.
Jeremie, 21, from Montreal, works in customer service. He admitted he felt hatred toward Islam, that he thought Arabs were a “violent race.” After thinking about it for a few seconds, he confessed to being a racist toward Arabs, “I must accept it,” explaining he had been bullied by Arab gangs in school. “I don’t like their culture.”
Later on, he apologized for not knowing the family were Syrians, not Arabs — though in fact they were both. At one point, he said the “les judaiques” instead of “les musulmans.”
He kept repeating that Muslims wanted crosses removed from Quebec. The reporter told him no Muslim had ever asked for such a thing.
The young man was surprised. He said he had read that on the internet. “Maybe my sources are not very good.” At the end of the interview, you could hear him slowly coming to the realization that he was ill-informed, perhaps even corrupted by the internet.
“I believed things that made me a racist,” he said. “Perhaps I am just ignorant.”
An astonishingly candid interview done by a gifted reporter.
Hearing Jeremie speak was like discovering the true nature of the Wizard of Oz: not a monster, just a sad little man.
I have always argued that Quebecers are no more and no less racist, Islamophobic or anti-semitic than anyone else. The most recent police reports of hate crimes show that Quebec’s statistics are akin to Canada’s average, 3.9 cases per 100,000 population. Ontario and B.C. are at 4.4 cases per 100,000 population.
Furthermore, and this is controversial, racist views don’t always indicate the presence of deeply held opinions about the inferiority of certain “races” (although scientifically, there is really no such thing as race), but of terrifying, abyssal ignorance.
But in a way, that’s good news. Ignorance is easier to cure than hate.
Should society try to reform, or should it sanction the sad idiots who wrote such evil comments?