Five years after the Quebec mosque attack: “We’re still paying

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QUEBEC – Hakim Chambaz had given up on most of the people in his life until the American who lost both legs to a bomb came along.

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A year after the attack, Chambaz was still tormented by nightmares and memories. He remembered that he had wanted to take his children to the mosque that night, but decided against it at the last moment.

When they heard the first shots, they thought they were firecrackers.

Outside in the snow, brothers Mamadou and Ibrahima Barry, fathers of six children, had been shot to death.

When the gunman entered, “panic ensued,” recalls Chambaz. People were shaking in all directions. The shooter was silent, methodical. Chambaz saw a two-year-old girl crawling toward her wounded father. He picked her up, shielding her with his body, and took cover behind a narrow column.

“To this day, I don’t know what prompted me to do that,” he said.

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He saw Professor Khaled Belkacemi killed, then his good friend, Abdelkrim Hassane. He saw Aboubaker Thabti shot in the head and Azzedine Soufiane, the kindly shopkeeper, executed after trying to shoot down the gunman.

Chambaz cradled the child and waited his turn to die. Then, the gunman suddenly left.

“In a city as quiet and beautiful as Quebec, it was a tragedy that shocked everyone,” Chambaz said in an interview near his home in the suburb of Lévis. “It plunged us into deep anguish. These were people who were very close to us, who we saw almost every day at the mosque.”

He avoided other people, friends, the media, to stifle the pain. Then, at an event commemorating the first anniversary of the January 29, 2017 massacre, he was approached by Celeste Corcoran. She lost both legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260. She arrived in Quebec City as part of the A Strong World organization created in the aftermath of the attack to support survivors of mass attacks and hate crimes.

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“I thought, ‘My God, I still have my legs, and this woman, she doesn’t even know us, and she traveled from Boston to Quebec City, in January,” Chambaz recalls. “And the people who committed those bombings (in Boston) were Muslims.

“At that moment, I saw someone who had been in my place, reaching out to us.”

Chambaz was so moved that he joined One World Strong, and began traveling to scenes of mass terror. In 2018, he went to Parkland, Florida, after a high school shooting that killed 17 people, to provide support to parents and siblings. He traveled to London to meet with survivors of the 2005 bombings on the transportation system that killed 39 people and injured more than 700. Helping others, he discovered, gave meaning to his survival and gave him strength.

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A week after the shooting that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, Chambaz and three friends drove 14 hours to comfort survivors in the Jewish community.

“They were in tears,” he said. “They couldn’t believe it.”

Five years later, the Muslim community is recovering, but remains cautious, said Boufeldja Benabdallah, co-founder of the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec. The survivors are moving on, but will be scarred forever. The shooting left 17 children fatherless and reduced several families to one income.

It also opened the eyes of many to the realities of a misunderstood minority in Quebec, and often demonized.

“The tragedy allowed people to realize that society is made up of multiple components, and one of them is the Muslim community, ordinary people who work, just like them, but who have a faith,” said Benabdallah, sitting on the carpeted floor of his fortified place of worship. The mosque has received $1.5 million in improvements, paid for by the Muslim community. Evacuation exits were added. Glass has been replaced with bulletproof bricks. Doors are electronically locked.

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Fueled by empathy and shock, Quebecers’ attitudes toward Muslims became more positive in the wake of the tragedy, according to polls. Benabdallah and others recall the thousands who came out in support, many of them in tears.

But the goodwill was quickly displaced by attacks on Muslims on Quebec’s trash radio and the rise of far-right anti-Muslim groups.

“I was very shocked. I didn’t expect to see this resurgence of racism so soon after the catastrophe,” said Rachid Raffa, a former president of the mosque and a Quebecker for 37 years. He recalls attending consultations on a Muslim cemetery project that the community had been fighting for more than 20 years, during which one man said, “We don’t want you here, dead or alive.” It was one of several similar comments.

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“It was an almost inconceivable degree of cruelty,” Raffa said.

Six months after the massacre, someone set fire to the mosque president’s car at his home.

The open racism was a reminder of the growing threats directed at the mosque before the attack, including painted swastikas and a severed pig’s head left on the front steps during Ramadan. The hatred comes from a small minority, Muslim leaders said. But it is a vocal minority that carries disproportionate weight.

What concerned Raffa most was the lack of denunciation by the authorities. When racism is trivialized, it breeds more virulent expressions of hatred, amplified in the echo chambers of social media chat groups and networks, he said.

Today, Bill 21 – passed by François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government in 2020, which bans the wearing of religious attire such as the hijab by some public servants, including police officers and teachers – is the one most often cited by Quebec Muslims as a sign that they are still not accepted.

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“Law 21 has set us back in the social sense,” Benabdallah said. “It is a law that is supposed to grant secularism, but it is an extreme secularism that is far from creating concordance between different groups or layers of society. …

“In particular, it takes away the fundamental right to be able to work. And it takes away that right primarily from Muslim women.”

The community tries to build bridges by expanding awareness of their religion and practices, holding open nights at mosques and organizing forums. The fourth annual Muslim Awareness Week, with online events illustrating Quebec’s multifaceted Muslim communities, began on Tuesday and will run until January 31 of this year. A live webcast of an event commemorating the anniversary of the attack will be broadcast on Saturday evening.

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But efforts to promote peaceful coexistence are hampered when governments create laws that embolden those with Islamophobic beliefs, Raffa said. The lack of a community lobbying organization is another impediment.

“We lack a strong, concerted voice, which is necessary to bring about change,” he said. “In a democracy, what matters is the balance of power. If you don’t have it, you get crushed.”

Benabdallah agrees, but points out that concertation is difficult when the Muslim community represents only 3% of Quebec’s population and is so diversified that even in his Quebec mosque members speak 16 different languages.

Benabdallah ran in the municipal elections last fall. Despite being a familiar face in the city where he has lived for 52 years, he came in fourth place.

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“People were very positive when I talked to them,” he said. “But I think, when it came time to vote, there was still a subconscious hesitation to vote for a Muslim.”

Five years later, Mohamed Khabar is still suffering. The bullet fragments in his foot still hurt and prevent him from standing for more than three hours a day, making it difficult for him to work as a barber.

He finds it difficult to see the relatives of the dead, because it makes him wonder if he could have done more to save someone’s father or husband. Khabar tried to pounce on the shooter along with Soufiane, but was shot twice. He escaped to a downstairs storeroom, where he was sure his bloody footprints would lead the shooter to him.

“Upstairs I was brave, but when I was downstairs, it was terror like I had never experienced,” Khabar said in his small barbershop located near the mosque. “I expected to die. I thought about my son, who was two months old. My wife. My family in Morocco.

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Sometimes, he said, he still feels “locked in my head, like nothing has changed. … When you see someone die in front of you, it’s hard. Your eyes can’t forget it.”

The anniversary of the tragedy is painful. Sometimes he can’t talk. But she has found that talking, and doing, helps her release the pain. Last year he traveled to Ottawa with Benabdallah and others to participate in a gun control demonstration.

“In Quebec, you try to build bridges, but there’s always something that reminds you of everything, like the discriminatory Bill 21 law, or the reasonable accommodation debates, or other idiocy. You think, ‘What are people thinking here?'”

There is a minority that is outwardly hateful and racist, and a silent majority that is not. This situation must be reversed, he said. It is time for the majority to speak up and do their part.

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“We’ve already paid the price, with our orphans and our widows and our dead,” he said. “Yet we are still paying.”

In March 2019, a gunman killed 51 people and wounded 40 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Money was raised so that Chambaz, who has set up his own outreach group called Resilience Canada 2017, could take the 30-hour flight to speak to survivors.

They were surprised, and happy, to meet a survivor from the other side of the world.

“I told them, ‘All I can tell you is that your life has changed, as mine has. But you have to learn to accept this change, and try to move forward with a positive spirit. We don’t live in a perfect world. Terrible things happen. But you can stay strong and stand up against terrorism.

“Religion or skin color, that’s not important. The most important thing is that humans can hope to live in happiness, and well.”

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