The carelessness of hate
There is a level of hate which I can never entirely understand – its what I call generalized kind of hate. I get how you can hate any given individual but to use your hate to strike out willy-nilly against a ‘group’ just because its representative of your personalized general hate always fluxes me. It is probably the hardest kind of hate to understand and its often the most devastating kind of hate to encounter or overcome. The kind of generalized hate which motivates an individual(s) to carry out this specific targeted kind of violent action. Toronto Star.
Shock and anger is spreading among Hamilton’s 20,000 Muslims after the city’s largest mosque was firebombed. “They tried to burn the mosque down,” said Zakir Patel, 42, principal of the Islamic School of Hamilton, which is part of the mosque. Patel discovered the firebombing around 8 a.m. Monday when he opened his office door.
Attackers had used a large rock to smash a hole in a front window at the mosque and then lobbed in what police are calling an “incendiary device.” Javid Mirza, past-president of the mosque, said the device was still smouldering when it was found, leading many to believe the attack had occurred a short time before. The Molotov cocktail did only minimal damage to the Stone Church Road East mosque.The Hamilton police hate crime unit and chief arson investigator Sgt. Tim Bower are leading the investigation. Police are not discussing any possible motives. Police would only say they discovered “evidence of vandalism at the property as well as an incendiary device” and pegged damage at about $3,000.
I cannot count the number of Conservative bloggers and writers who have called out in the last 9 years for the Muslim communities to speak out publicly against political violence and then go on to ‘frisk’ the Muslim community for their ‘veil’ of silence. But I will let you in on a little secret; they have been but when they do – very few outside their communities take notice. I suppose its not considered blog worthy. Take this Toronto Star article about the radicalization of Omar Hammami in Toronto but tacked on in the end of the article were three little innocuous sentences – offered almost as an afterthought. An after thought which almost no Canadian conservative blogger thought enough about to mention this little bit.
In Toronto two weeks ago, the Somali Canadian National Council brought together 150 community members to condemn Al-Shabab recruitment in Toronto. “Until now we’ve been afraid to speak out,” the group’s president Abdurahman “Hosh” Jibril said in an interview. “Now we’ve reached the point of no return.”
The Canadian Muslim community deserves our support and not our condemnation.
