On Monday, ten people were killed and fourteen more were injured in Toronto, victims of what must legally be described as an "alleged van attack."
Of course, as details emerge about the suspect in the attack, such legal specificity becomes academic in the face of thinkpieces, columns, and tweet-storms, all hurling their own politically motivated hot takes on just how and why a person would commit mass murder.
Indeed, in the immediacy of the attack, right-wing elements in both Canada and the US were quick to pounce on the situation with opportunistic glee. Rebel Media's Katie Hopkins accused the Prime Minister of being responsible. Ted Cruz, unprompted, used the attack to promote Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. And over at the CBC, Natasha Fatah recklessly carried unverified eyewitness accounts calling the attacker "wild-eyed, angry and middle eastern."
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore Flickr via Compfight cc
Even after the suspect's identity had been released as Richmond Hill resident Alek Minassian, a 25 year-old Seneca College student who briefly served in the Canadian Armed Forces, the insistence on categorizing this tragedy as "Islamic Terror" has persisted, both in the not-so-fringe media as a literal conspiracy theory, and in the "mainstream" media with columns like Barbara Kay's, bemoaning how she "would have preferred it this had been an act of jihadism," or in Tarek Fatah's accusation that the REAL backlash was from "the now familiar alliance of the left and Islamists."
I could, at this point, remind everyone how feebly inaccurate and tin-foil hatted the right-wing columnists in our media now read, but I'd prefer instead to focus on a salient point that is tangentially related, but crucially important to how the modern discourse on terror attacks has devolved.
You see, Fatah, in clinging to his not-at-all-veiled islamophobic, racist, horseshit, insisted on categorizing Minassian as "Middle Eastern," in a feat of mental gymnastics worthy of the finest of brainwashed cultists:
"...my daughter CBC host Natasha Fatah...had tweeted multiple eye witnesses saying the attacker looked “Middle Eastern” and another who said he was “white.”
The fact that Minassian did turn out to be Middle Eastern — from the Armenian diaspora that lives in Iran, Lebanon, Syria — was of little interest to those hell bent on harassing Natasha."
I'd really like to knuckle down into this, because it is a masterclass in how idiotically racist it is to think that skin colour or religion is a strong indicator of terrorist leanings.
So let's talk about Armenia.
Armenia is a tiny country in what is commonly referred to as the South Caucusus region of Eurasia. It is bordered on the south by Iran and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (part of Azerbaijan), on the west by Turkey, on the north by Georgia, and on the east by Azerbaijan. Armenians live all over the world, including major populations in the United States and Russia, in a widespread distribution known as the Armenian Diaspora. This Diaspora was widely caused by the one thing North Americans might know about Armenia: the Armenian Genocide. The Genocide was an act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I, and has been consistently denied by the Turkish governments since then.
People of Armenian descent are found everywhere, and include celebrities such as Cher, Andre Agassi, Kim Khardasian and Dita von Teese. Alek Minassian's specific heritage has not been released. I mention this specifically because Fatah's assertion that Minassian hails from "the diaspora that lives in Iran, Lebanon, Syria" is a stupendous load of crap, and a transparent attempt to tie this attack back to the widely disproven Islamic Terror conspiracy theory. Even if it WERE somehow tied in that Minassian's parents hailed from a Middle Eastern country, Armenia has had Christianity as its state religion since about 300AD.
But this is precisely the point I'm trying to make: that sorting through skin colour, religion, and birthplace as though these things are lock-stepped, and as though they in TURN feed into any kind of predisposition towards violent acts, is an overwrought exercise in bigotry masquerading as intellectualism.
By virtue of geography, Armenia is kind of the perfect microcosm of how people in North America try so hard to drive ethnicities into perfect black-and-white lines of morality: brown skin = terrorist, white skin = privileged, black skin = thug, etc. etc. etc.
In actuality, the people of Armenia are now so widespread and diverse that categorizing them into tidy "Middle Eastern" or literal "Caucasian" people is meaningless. Indeed, the very phrase "Middle Eastern," a colonialist shorthand from the era of British Raj meant to loosely define the space between Europe and India, is so poorly defined by political borders or ethnic background as to be worthless in modern vernacular.
Which brings me back to my core point: that in no way does Minassian's skin colour or religious practices have any solid bearing on the attack he (allegedly) committed.
That people are scrambling to define Minassian as either "white and Christian" or "brown and Muslim" says much more about how brutally dishonest our discourse around terror attacks has become than it does about Minassian himself. If anything, it puts on full shameful display our collective, profound ignorance about foreign countries, and about the actual forces driving mass murderers.
Meanwhile, as the list of victims is slowly released and families grieve, a portrait emerges of Toronto as one of the world's most diverse countries. Among the dead are:
- Sohe Chung, 23
- Renuka Amarasinghe, 48
- Chul Min “Eddie” Kang
- Anne Marie D’Amico, 30
- Dorothy Sewell, 80
- Betty Forsyth, 94
- Munir Najjar, 82 (visiting from Jordan)
I would ask the people who are demanding that we focus on Minassian's ethnicity and religion: how do you place value on these victims, with their incredibly diverse backgrounds and beliefs? Are the white victims worth more? Are the asian victims? The Arab?
Or were they just people, ordinary people, who didn't deserve this?
And if we apply that lens to the perpetrator, peel away the surface layers that mean utterly nothing to his motives and means, and focus on the rhetoric and mentality and hatred that ACTUALLY spurned him to commit mass murder...well, maybe we could actually have a productive discussion on preventing tragedy from striking again.