‘It could have been us’: Canadians rally on two-year anniversary of mosque massacre
By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours
Middle East Eye | January 29, 2019
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Leila Nasr, communications coordinator for the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), said Muslim communities across Canada are in a sombre mood on the two-year anniversary of the attack.
“We’re sort of in this period of reflection on what happened in the past, but then also anxiety on what’s about to come in the future,” she told Middle East Eye, pointing to the fact that Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for early February.
Nasr said the conversation in the immediate aftermath of the attack rightly focused on the Muslim community and the role Islamophobia played in what happened.
Over the past two years, however, people in Canada have “evolved to have also broader conversations about not just Islamophobia, but hate and intolerance in general”, she said.
Nasr said the question has now become: “How can we tackle not just Islamophobia, but the hate that breeds these kinds of incidents more generally?”
“How can we get to the foundations of where this racism comes from? And how can we work together as diverse communities to bring solutions forward to these problems?”