Racial disparity on display in van attack treatment
In the aftermath of the van attack on Yonge St. that killed 10 people and injured 16 others, the calm and measured response by authorities has elicited widespread praise: for politicians refraining from reflexively branding the incident an act of “terrorism”; and for police managing to arrest suspect Alek Minassian, who appeared to be armed and repeatedly goaded the officer to shoot, without any further bloodshed.
The handling of the Toronto van attack was exemplary — of racial double standards pervasive in policing and national security. The restrained treatment of Minassian, who had allegedly executed the most fatal act of mass public violence in Canada in almost 30 years, throws into sharp relief the lack of restraint regularly exhibited by security agencies, politicians, and police in situations involving Muslims and people of colour.
Officials have maintained that Minassian’s rampage was not “terrorism” — defined in Canadian law as harm to people or property committed for “political, religious, or ideological purpose” — despite indications that he was inspired by Incel (involuntarily celibate) ideology, classified as a form of “male supremacy” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
What a stark contrast to the response to Abdulahi Hasan Sharif’s similar (but non-fatal) van assault in Edmonton seven months ago, which was denounced by the prime minister as a “terrorist attack” motivated by “hate” and “violent extremism” — even in the absence of sufficient evidence about Sharif’s motives to charge him with any terrorism offence.
Minassian has been described in headlines as a “socially awkward tech expert” — far more sympathetic than headlines about Muslim men like security certificate detainee Mohamed Harkat, who is routinely labelled as nothing but a “terror suspect” even though he has never actually been accused of any crime.
A tweet from CBC journalist Natasha Fatah inaccurately reporting that the Toronto van driver was “wide-eyed, angry and Middle Eastern” was retweeted 1,500 times: seven times more than her followup correctly identifying Minassian as “white.” National Post columnist Barbara Kay openly admitted she “would have preferred if this had been an act of jihadism or something else linked to a clear ideology” for the sake of preserving her own “mental order.”
These reactions reflect the racism embedded in the concept of “terrorism”: a category that has been reserved almost exclusively for Muslims, even though right-wing, white-supremacist, and misogynistic extremists have killed at least 17 times more people in Canada (35 known fatalities — 45 if Minassian’s victims are included) than Muslim extremists have (2). Alexandre Bissonnette, who murdered six people in a Quebec mosque last year, wasn’t prosecuted for terrorism. Neither was Justin Bourque, who went on a targeted killing spree against RCMP officers in 2014.
In 2015, then-justice minister Peter MacKay explained that the trio of neoNazis who plotted a Valentine’s Day massacre in a Halifax mall weren’t terrorists because “the attack does not appear to have been culturally motivated.”
After the horror in Toronto last Monday, writer Stephen Marche congratulated officials for “refus[ing] to give in to the terrorism trap.” But refusal to spring the “terrorism trap” on white non-Muslim men who plan or commit mass carnage isn’t the exception; it’s the norm.
Similarly, Toronto police’s much-lauded bloodless takedown of Minassian emblematizes deep racial disparities.
This is the same police force that has repeatedly brutalized people of colour, particularly those struggling with mental illness, including Sudanese refugee Andrew Loku, who was shot dead while holding a hammer in 2015; Syrian immigrant teenager Sammy Yatim, who was barraged with bullets for brandishing a pocket knife in 2013; and Michael Eligon, who was gunned down while carrying two pairs of scissors and wearing nothing but a hospital gown in 2012.
The CBC’s Deadly Force investigation, released just a few weeks ago, found that killings by police in Canada have doubled over the past 20 years, and that Black people are more than four times more likely than the general public to be killed by police in Toronto
Instead of celebrating authorities for treating Alek Minassian like a human being, we should be asking why so many people from marginalized communities are not.