One hate crime is one too many

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/07/2016 (3355 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been 27 hate crimes in Canada against Muslims, double the number from a year ago at this time.

I know that because I recently visited the National Council of Canadian Muslims Hate Crime Map.

On that page, which catalogues all the hate crimes against members of that group that are reported to the police, you can find information about the attack against a Muslim woman in a grocery store in London, Ont., last month.

The woman, who was wearing a hijab, was with her infant child when a female attacker began screaming at her and tried to rip off her hijab. Before the attacker left, the victim took pictures of her assailant — arm raised, fist clenched, her face a portrait of anger and hate.

You can also read about the pig’s head left outside a mosque in Quebec City; a woman wearing a niqab outside a Walmart in Ottawa who was aggressively accosted by an angry man who told her to go back to her country; and a Muslim man in Mount Albert, Ont., who was subjected to derogatory remarks at a gas station by an employee who told him “you brown people are shit.”

Looking at the hate crimes map, I was glad to see none of the reported incidents occurred in Winnipeg. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also happen here, as I found out from my friend Allison Courey.

Allison, a 30-year-old white woman, is the chaplain at St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba. She was about to get on a city bus last week when a man stepped back to let her board first — a fine and generous gesture, she thought.

When Allison saw another woman wearing a hijab walk toward her, she motioned her to go ahead. That’s when the man stepped in front of both women and said: “Not her.”

Allison was taken aback. “Why?” she asked.

“It’s not safe,” he said. “They’re al-Qaida. You have to be careful. We don’t want them.”

“There is no space for racism on Winnipeg Transit,” she said to the man. He replied: “I used to execute them”— a reference, Allison believes by his accent, to the conflict that once raged in the former Yugoslavia.

Allison looked around the bus for support, but everyone else seemed to be looking away and not wanting to get involved. So she said to the driver: “Do you have a policy about this or something? This guy’s talking about killing Muslims.”

Allison thought maybe she should take a picture of the man, in case he was dangerous and she should report him to the police. But as she pulled out her phone, he became aggressive.

“He was clearly fixed on me, and my presence was upsetting him,” she says. “I was pretty sure that if I actually lifted the phone high enough to take a picture, he’d snap. That wouldn’t help anyone.”

Allison didn’t contact the police, but she did warn campus security. “I have too many dearly beloved Muslim friends to allow a man like that to just wander through the campus at will,” she says, adding that the woman, who didn’t board the bus, “could have been a newly arrived Syrian refugee.”

Unfortunately, the incident Allison witnessed is not unusual. According to Statistics Canada, there were 1,295 hate crimes reported to police in 2014 (the year for which the most recent information is available). As for the groups most likely to experience hate, they are Jews, Muslims and members of the LGBTTQ* community.

Checking the information from Statistics Canada, it was good to see that Manitoba had the third-fewest reported number of hate crimes in Canada that year. But even one is still too many.

As a white, straight, Christian male, the world feels pretty safe to me. I realize that isn’t the case for many others. It puts the onus on me to look out for any who might be in danger of hate because of their religion, race or sexual orientation.

And if I ever witness hate, I hope I can be as brave as my friend Allison.

jdl562000@yahoo.com

 

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