Consultation process supports agenda set by PERT report

On the drive to work Tuesday morning, I saw a young woman on the street wearing a hijab. She was walking with downcast eyes and I wondered what she was thinking.

After the deadly hate crime perpetrated in London, Ont., Sunday night, does she now feel unsafe on a city street that she would not have hesitated to walk along just days before?

Does she brace herself with every vehicle that approaches? Does she see this community — her home — with different eyes? Anxious eyes? How could she not be shaken after three generations of a family were obliterated by a terrorist in a Dodge Ram pickup: a grandmother, husband, wife, their teenage daughter. Talat Afzaal, Salman Afzaal, Madiha Salman, Yumna Afzaal.

A seriously injured nineyear-old boy in the hospital finding out that his family is gone, killed by a stranger. Their lives ended, his forever changed.

Hate strikes again. Does that young woman think, as Saboor Khan, president of the London, Ont., chapter of the Muslim Association of Canada, told CTV News, “This could have been any one of us”?

How could she not? How would you ever feel safe again? That sense of security has been shattered for Muslims in our community and across this country.

I wanted to stop the car and tell her that we do not hate.

We respect her faith. We are pleased to be part of this community with Muslims and others from different cultural backgrounds than our own. We are made richer by diversity.

But I don’t even want to say the word “we,” because “we” implies that there is a “they,” and the idea of “we” and “they” is somehow what motivated this 20-year-old white man to mow down an innocent family; his fellow Canadians.

How can someone get into their vehicle, drive down the street, see people out for an evening stroll and decide to end their lives in an obscene act of violence and hatred?

We like to think that Canada is a peace-loving land where crime rates are low, people are unfailingly polite and we all happily coexist in a great multicultural mosaic.

But then we are reminded of underlying truths, like the state-sanctioned genocide carried out on Indigenous peoples. Examples of systemic racism brought to light in our health-care system, the justice system. Mosque attacks, antisemitism, anti-black racism.

In London, Ont., a mound of flowers and stuffed toys flanked by pylons mark the street corner where the Afzaal family’s lives were taken as they stood waiting for the light to change.

The place where South Carriage and Hyde Park roads meet has become an intersection of shock and disbelief and outrage, where people stop to pray and cry and mourn and shake their heads. A place where hopes and dreams for the future were shattered. Why?

There is no easy answer and no simple means of preventing such an act of terrorism from being carried out again.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to do more to root out hate groups that pose a threat to public safety. Discovering and dismantling identifiable groups will be easier than finding individuals planning to act alone.

How can we know when and where hate is bubbling in dark corners, people nursing and stirring their rage until it explodes in horrific acts?

We must be vigilant. Hopes and prayers and sympathy are not enough. We must call out hate and denounce it.

As the chief executive of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, Mustafa Farooq, said in a statement, “This is a sorrow that will run deep for a long time. But let that sorrow be the ground where we stand for justice, and stand for change.”