As I write this, I’m watching Sudbury.com’s live feed of a candlelight vigil in Memorial Park on Tuesday evening.
It was a show of solidarity not only with the victims of Sunday’s attack on a mosque in the Ste-Foy neighbourhood of Quebec City, but, it seems to me, with the global Muslim community. It’s important to remember, despite all the right-wing rhetoric about Muslim extremists, it is Muslim people themselves who have suffered the most from terrorist attacks.
Six men — Azzeddine Soufiane, 57; Khaled Belkacemi, 60; Ibrahima Barry, 39; Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42; Abdelkrim Hassane, 41; and Boubaker Thabti, 44 — are dead, and 19 more are wounded. These are not abstractions; these are — were — living, breathing human beings who were gunned down for nothing more than praying to the wrong god.
The alleged murderer wasn’t Muslim, nor an immigrant from one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s seven banned countries (though Trump’s White House tried to capitalize on the attack by linking it to his tougher immigration policies). If the person they arrested is found to have been the man who pulled the trigger, he was a suburban, white, French-Canadian kid named Alexandre Bissonnette, a young man who “liked” Katy Perry on his Facebook page.
Bissonnette also “liked” (in the Facebook sense), Trump and Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right French political party, the National Front.
What does a “like” mean in the Facebook sense? Sure it’s just the click of a button, but one can assume, given that Bissonnette allegedly took a gun to a mosque within walking distance of his apartment and opened fire, that he “liked” Trump’s and Le Pen’s message: That Western democracies are going to hell because politicians are corrupt, bureaucrats are incompetent, liberal values are turning everyone into sissies and immigrants with their weird religion hate us and want to destroy us.
It’s a message of anger, xenophobia, intolerance and fear.
Maybe Trump doesn’t get it (but I bet Steve Bannon does); maybe Le Pen doesn’t get it (though I suspect she does), but words matter. Words not only have meaning, they have consequences.
When you preach that the world beyond your borders is a scary, dangerous place, that the country is falling apart and the only way to fix things and keep the ravening hordes at bay is to elect a strong, valiant leader of near-mythic ability, that’s how you end up with a Mussolini or a Hitler (and maybe a Trump).
But even if you simply play to those baser instincts as a campaign tactic, you are sowing poison seeds. Case in point: Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Sunday’s murders “barbaric” and he’s right, they were. But Harper is also the same politician who, during the last election campaign, rolled out the “barbaric cultural practices” tipline.
It was a despicable and ultimately useless attempt (that nonetheless found some fertile ground) to win support by preying on people’s tendencies to distrust “the other.” Kellie Leitch, Harper’s Labour minister and Minister for the Status of Women, has taken that ball and run with it in her bid to win the leadership of the Conservatives, calling for “Canadian values” tests (whatever that means; even she probably doesn’t know) for new immigrants.
When our leaders scorn appealing to the angels of our better nature in favour of capitalizing on the devils of our baser instincts, they give those instincts a legitimacy they don’t deserve.
Look at what’s happening beyond Canada’s shores. The rise of extreme, right-wing political parties can be seen in growing pockets of the European Union, including in France, the birthplace of the liberal democratic notion that the best governments are built on a simple, beautiful ideal: Everyone is equal; everyone has a right to be free and; we’re all in this together.
It’s easy to give into fear. It’s much harder to stay rational and stand on principle. And we need rationality now more than we have in decades.
Freedom, equality, fraternity: These ideals are under attack from right-wing demagogues bearing poison seeds of populism.
Mark my words, we have yet to reap the harvest. But that day is coming and I’m worried what it will bring.
Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and Sudbury.com.
