Edmonton Alberta Canada - It was pitch dark at 6 a.m., when Mahmoud Elkadri arrived at the Islamic Centre of Cold Lake. His mind on morning prayers, he didn’t notice anything wrong. Only once he let himself inside did he notice the broken glass on the mosque’s floor — and the two bricks someone had thrown through the mosque’s two front windows. Then he saw the ugly red graffiti scrawled across the front of the pretty building with the green dome. “Go home,” it read. “Canada. Go home.” It was especially hard, he says, to explain to his daughter, who turned 15 on Thursday. “When she saw the writing, she left crying. She said, ‘Daddy, I was born here. I was raised here. This is my home.’ ” But as news of the attack on the mosque spread through the city of 16,000, some 300 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, something remarkable happened. People started arriving from the city and the nearby airbase: dozens of people, some in military uniform, bringing flowers, bringing money, bringing Tim Hortons coffee, bringing ladders and paint and paint brushes, bringing posters reading “Love your neighbour” and “You are home!” and “#Canadastrong.” Together, they worked until that ugly graffiti vanished. “I haven’t had a chance to feel bad,” says Elkadri. “I’ve had all kinds of people here saying, ‘Welcome to Canada, this is your town, this is your home.’ Person after person after person. People have come here crying, and they’ve hugged me and we’ve cried together.” Northeastern Alberta has a deep Muslim history. Lebanese fur traders, pedlars and shopkeepers first started arriving in Alberta in 1905, setting up business in communities like Lac La Biche and Fort Chipewyan. Edmonton was home to Canada’s very first mosque, which now sits within Fort Edmonton. But Cold Lake’s own Muslim community is relatively small and new. The mosque only opened in 2010, in a building that once housed a tattoo parlour. For a big celebration like Eid, says Elkadri, they draw about 100 or 120 people. For morning prayers it’s more like half a dozen. Elkadri, 42, a father of four, runs a Cold Lake computer store. He came to Edmonton from Lebanon as a teenager in the 1980s. He graduated from Ross Sheppard High School, and then from NAIT as an electrical services technician. In 1996, he and his Brazilian-born wife moved to Cold Lake to raise their family. “We’ve never found a better place to live,” he says. The assault on the mosque hasn’t changed his mind. Elkadri doesn’t even want to assume that the vandalism was a response to Wednesday’s assault on Parliament Hill. The neighbourhood bank and the liquor store have also been vandalized recently, he notes. “It could be a coincidence. Maybe it was just our turn.” Maybe. Maybe this wasn’t a hate crime so much as a spiteful act by immature ignorant yahoos. But given the high emotions provoked by the brutal murders of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, given that six CF-18 Hornets from CFB Cold Lake left just this week to join in the fight against ISIS, given all the fears whipped up on social media about terrorist plots and Muslim threats, the timing is deeply unsettling. In this time of national mourning and national angst, when we are once again sending Canadians into battle, we need to stand together, not turn neighbour against neighbour. Muslim pioneers helped build this province 110 years ago. Most recent arrivals help build our economy and our cultural fabric every day. We need to work in concert, to make this a better place for everyone. Lashing out against Canadian Muslims, in “real life” or on social media, making people feel marginalized or afraid, isn’t just cruel and cowardly. It plays right into the hands of extremists by sending young Muslims a message that there is no place for them in Canada. Right now we must do everything we can as Canadians to fight that lie. On Thursday, the mosque posted a message on its own Facebook page, condemning the attacks in Ottawa and St-Jean-sur-Richelieu. “At times like this, we draw on our collective national character, to seek the Canadian sense of resilience,” read the message, from the Muslim Association of Canada. Now, we need to draw on that same national character in the face of this attack on our fellow Albertans in their special place of worship. As far as Mahmoud Elkadri is concerned, Cold Lake, his city, the city he loves, has already done that. “Maybe it will cost us three or four thousand dollars to fix the windows — but the support from the community has been priceless.” psimons@edmontonjournal Twitter/Paulatics Paula Simons is on Facebook. To join the conversation, go to facebook/EJPaulaSimons or visit her blog at edmontonjournal/Paulatics
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 04:18:46 +0000
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