Windsor Muslims honour 2017 mosque shooting victims, want national day of remembrance
Muslims in Windsor commemorated those lost and injured during the 2017 shooting that left six men dead in a Quebec mosque with a remembrance ceremony at the end of January.
Since the Quebec City mosque shooting, the National Council of Canadian Muslims has petitioned the provincial and federal governments to designate Jan. 29 as day of remembrance of those affected by it as well as the smaller magnitude hate crimes that happen every day against Islamic people.
The Windsor Islamic Association holds a fundraiser every year, but the one that stands out to president Mizra Baig was the fundraiser immediately after the 2017 events.
“Before [a delegation went to Quebec City] we had a formal fundraising event where we collected [more than] $200,000,” said Baig. “We were … the first in Canada that went there to deliver funds to the victims and the families of the victims affected.”
According to Baig, people from all different religious groups have helped with the fundraisers. This year’s total has not been calculated.
Windsor Mosque’s exterior and parking lot was outfitted with brighter flood lights as one of its increased security measures in the wake of the Quebec city shooting. Among these measures were also, the hiring of a mosque security guard, as well as the installation of high definition security cameras.
‘Extreme examples projected to represent the whole population’
The year following the attack, activist Ahmed Khalifa witnessed a crime that Windsor Police Services charged as vandalism. Khalifa requested a formal review of the nature of the charge, claiming that the statements sprayed on the door of a local media establishment “played on the irrational fear of Islam as vindictive and un-Canadian.”
For Khalifa, some Islamic hate crimes might be based on a fundamental misunderstanding.
“A lot of times the way the media portrays Muslims and Islam is they take a very small percentage of extreme examples and project that to be the entire population which is upwards of a billion people,” said Khalifa. “You have these few extreme examples which are often projected to represent the whole population.”
According to Statistics Canada the actual number of police-reported hate crimes against Muslim people were up 207 per cent in the year following the 2017 attack.
“The idea of Islamophobia is often criticized as an attempt to silence objections to certain forms of Islam,” according to Mohammad Khan, McGill chair of Urdu language and culture and associate professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies.
Khan said a common argument is that the Muslim religion is condemned and so the hatred is not racism.
“The argument is that condemning a religion is not racism and that if Muslims would simply let go of Islam, and integrate or assimilate into the majority culture, they would no longer be hated,” said Khan.
Bill 83 in Ontario puts forward an Act to proclaim a Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia. The Bill was referred to the Standing Committee on Social Policy.
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