Attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that left 50 people dead last week have inspired a mix of fear and defiance among regulars at the Al-Hidaya mosque in Port Coquitlam.
One of the gunmen — believed to be an Australian extremist — apparently livestreamed the event, and in a racist screed mentioned several names of right-wing terrorists, including Alexandre Bissonnette, who attacked a mosque in Quebec in 2017, murdering six people.
That brings what happened in New Zealand all too close to home, said Moncef Dif, a Port Coquitlam resident who has prayed at the mosque for the last 15 years. “When I saw it I couldn’t believe it,” he told The Tri-City News. “Any human being that would go to that level, there’s no humanity.”
Dif watched the video in horror last week shortly after it was posted.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” said the 46-year-old father of five the day after the attacks. “You have to be worried. The mosque is a place where we surrender ourselves, where you don’t watch your back.”
Nearly a week later, Coquitlam RCMP said it has increased patrols near the Kingsway Avenue building.
Mohammed Khan, executive director of the mosque, said the massacre in New Zealand only reaffirmed his community’s decision to build up security around a facility that receives over 500 worshippers a day spread across five prayers. The mosque has spent more than $100,000 on cameras and other security measures in recent years, including panic buttons in classrooms and a direct intercom to Coquitlam RCMP. “This is going to be a place that we’re going to secure and make a hardened building,” Khan said.
Despite taking such measures, the community has had trouble moving on with life as normal, said Dif, even as the younger children are spared the horror of what happened 12,000 km away. “We’re trying to protect them. We don’t want them to be worried.”
On Saturday, two days after the attack, the mosque’s gymnasium filled with kids coming in for their monthly sleepover, playing soccer and not noticing the parents who went from one entrance to the next, adapting to a new reality.
“It was the first time we had to lock all the doors,” said Dif.
Over the next few days, Dif said it was his wife’s turn to lose sleep. She, like many Al-Hidaya regulars, had been coming to terms with a video posted in warning by one of the mosque’s board members, Faizal Ismael Kathrada, on the mosque’s WhatsApp group. The shaky cell phone footage, dated last November, begins outside the front doors of the downtown branch of the Vancouver Public Library.
“We’ll just go this way and see what’s down here,” says a vlogger as viewers are taken down a set of stairs into the library’s basement level. Outside two yawning doors, the man trains the camera on a group of Muslims praying with their backs to the camera.
The video shows a stream of latecomers kick off their shoes and join the group for Jumu’ah, Islam’s Friday prayer, the equivalent of the Christian Sabbath. The video keeps rolling and, when the crowd picks up to leave, the vlogger’s agitated voice cracks the silence. “That’s not right,” he says to the camera before confronting the lunchtime worshipers.
“Nice to meet you guys. I believe it’s called an invading army, an invading army,” he says. “This is a Christian country. We don’t want to be Muslim. We don’t want to bow down to Allah because he doesn’t have a son. That means he’s not God.”
“The mosque sent out the YouTube video. They said to watch out,” said Dif, whose wife was again shaken after a friend said she saw the YouTuber walking alongside a march in support of the New Zealand victims.
That same vlogger’s website is populated with a catalogue of white supremacist conspiracy theories, from a global Jewish scheme linking Big Oil and Big Pharma in a scam to “pay them for your death,” to claims the Christchurch killer’s GoPro video footage was doctored with CGI.
Seeing a man buy into a race war so close to home has Muslim residents of the Tri-Cities on edge.
“The community is trying to stay strong, trying to free its mind from everything that’s happened, but this video makes people panic,” he said. “They say, ‘It’s the same thing, except we are lucky this guy didn’t snap like the other one.’
“From all sides it feels like a cancer,” he added. “People have to be vigilant.”
