The Quebec Great Mosque Massacre — Never Forget.

Dear friends — Do something.

One month from now on January 29th, we will mark the one year anniversary of the largest political mass shooting in 25 years in Canada. Six Muslims murdered while praying, for praying. Azzeddine Soufiane, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti, Ibrahima Barry and Abdelkrim Hassane. The Quebec Great Mosque Massacre.

Their story, and the interconnected story of Islamophobia in this country is being forgotten. There is almost no media coverage. Where it is, it is framed as a single incident of hate and not a symptom of laws and policies. It is so forgotten that the largest anti-Islamophobia protest in the country since, didn’t even mention it in their call out.

We can change that. We have to change that.

One year after the Montreal Ecole Polytechnique massacre in 1989, Quebec media tried to suppress the story, make it about a single incident but it took artists, activists, academics, journalists, and every day people to make, write, sing, argue and insist on a different story. We must do the same.

We have been told that this was a single incident, an aberration. But this aberration came from a specific world view. The murders didn’t happen simply because there is white nationalist fears of a brown horde at the gates — which there is. Rather it happened because Muslim life, Black and Brown lives are expendable everyday in the wars and bombs that rain upon places so many of us call home. Making it so that our lives can be wasted away here by any man with a gun. This must be examined, unravelled, unmade.

We have been told that the correct emotional response to the tragedy is love, and hope and unity and courage. But that is just one part of the spectrum. Many of us feel hatred, and confusion and calamity and a deep petrifying grief. We have to insist upon these and other emotional responses. Talk about them. Write books. Make music. Organize discussions.

Too many of us feel like we must wait for direction from those directly affected. But there is direction from them. And the field of who is affected is immense. Following January 29th, groups of people across the country showed up signs of support at local mosquest. We did so, because we knew that the ripples of the snuffing out of lives too early is an intense and unbearable tsunami that is flooding the imaginations and the lives of too many people.

You are impacted. You were impacted that day. But somewhere in between the constant nightmare that is Trump’s tweets and the seemingly glossy reality that is Canada, you’ve put it aside. You can’t do anything about Trump, and many of his laws and policies don’t affect you. But you are here. And there are laws here. And there are Muslims being murdered here. You can do something about it. At the very least, you can keep talking about it as a moment that continues to affect us to this day.

Sometimes all we can do is remember. Never forget.