While we hoped for the victims, some hoped for someone to blame

Right-wing media and pundits appear disappointed the accused Toronto van attacker is not a Muslim immigrant

I’ve never written this kind of column before because this kind of horror — or terror, or whatever insufficient label you want to hang on it — has never struck my city.

On Monday, it did. Alek Minassian, 25, of Richmond Hill is charged with 10 counts of murder and 13 counts of attempted murder.

Though a Facebook post linked to the 25-year-old appears to praise Elliot Rodger, the misogynist who killed six people and then himself in California in 2014, Minassian’s motive for allegedly barrelling down a sidewalk crowded with pedestrians remains officially unknown.

For some, it’s strange to say, this is a relief.

When these monumentally awful things happen, most people hope and pray nobody they know and love was targeted. But some of us hope and pray for something else too: that the culprit wasn’t a member of “Group X.” If you’re Muslim, you might pray the suspect isn’t an Islamic extremist. If you’re a conservative, you might pray he isn’t a white nationalist. If you’re a person living with a mental illness or a person who loves somebody with a mental illness, you might pray the accused didn’t suffer a psychotic break.

All of this is understandable because most decent, reasonable people do not want the already vast carnage around them to give way to divisiveness and discrimination at their own expense or anybody else’s. But not everybody is decent and reasonable.

Rather than avoid speculation or pray it doesn’t turn one group against another, some people actually appear to thirst for a specific motive. In this case, yearning the accused is a Muslim immigrant.

In the last couple of days we’ve heard a lot about Toronto the Good and Toronto the Strong and it’s true — our government officials and police did not sprint to conclusions about the motivation of the attacker nor use the attack itself to sow division.

But let’s be clear: thousands of people did do this, among them right-wing journalists and pundits with enormous sway.

I’m referring specifically to the conspiracy pedlars at Infowars who continue to spread misinformation about the attack. I’m referring to Gavin McInnes and his odious “Proud Boys.” I’m referring to Ezra Levant’s increasingly hateful Rebel Media, whose regrettably popular British correspondent Katie Hopkins posted a video of herself to Twitter walking around Toronto’s Yonge and Dundas Square on Monday, cringing at its ethnic diversity, trying to find someone “that looks like they actually come from Canada, because everybody here looks like they come from Africa.”

(She would later call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “complicit” in the truck attack at Yonge and Finch, writing on Twitter to her nearly 900,000 followers that he is a “terrorist shill.”)

But what sickens me most about this yearning for an immigrant bogeyman isn’t even the fact that Minassian doesn’t appear to have been motivated by Islamic fundamentalism at all. What sickens me is the fact that of all the busy intersections in the city, Yonge and Finch is arguably one of the most diverse.

When I learned about the attack Monday, the people I reached out to in order to determine their safety — the people I know who live and work in the area — are either immigrants themselves or the children of Muslim immigrants. They are all OK. But it’s surreal and, frankly, hideous to think that while I was anxiously hoping that they were OK, the Katie Hopkinses of the world were anxiously hoping for something else: that this tragedy would bring them an Islamist villain. It didn’t.

But I’m sure they’ll keep the faith that the next one will.