http://themilitant.com/2017/8106/810604.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 6 February 13, 2017
(front page)
Workers mobilize solidarity against deadly assault in Quebec mosque
Militant/Maggie Trowe
Socialist Workers Party candidate for New York mayor, Osborne Hart,
center, and Communist League candidate for Montreal mayor, Philippe
Tessier, right, visited memorial, above, to victims of mosque shooting,
and went house to house talking with workers in Quebec City Jan. 31.
BY MAGGIE TROWE
QUEBEC CITY — A steady stream of people came by the Quebec Islamic
Cultural Centre and mosque here Jan. 31 to offer support for the Muslim
community two days after a gunman attacked worshipers gathered for
evening prayers, killing six and leaving 19 injured, five critically.
They joined in discussing and debating what led to the attack and what
to do about it.
Expressions of solidarity have poured out to the Muslim community. The
night before thousands of people had come to a government-backed vigil
here, thousands attended one in Montreal and similar actions took place
across the country.
Police have charged Alexandre Bissonnette, a 27-year-old student at
Laval University with a record of anti-immigrant online posts, with six
counts of first-degree murder.
While we were here, a Quebec-born nurse from a nearby hospital stopped
by to light a candle and add it to the growing mass of messages of
solidarity, candles and flowers in front of the mosque. A
Guatemalan-born truck driver came straight from work to place flowers at
the site. A Moroccan-born worker who had grown up in the area told the
Militant he knew several of the victims.
Those killed were Karim Hassane, 41, an Algerian-born information
analyst for the Quebec provincial government; Azzedine Soufiane, 57, a
Moroccan-born owner of a small butcher shop; Aboubaker Thabti, 44, a
pharmaceutical worker born in Tunisia; Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42, an
accountant who hailed from Guinea; Ibrahima Barry, 39, also Guinean, who
worked for Revenu Quebec; and Khaled Belkacemi, 60, an Algerian-born
professor of agricultural science at the University of Laval.
Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York,
traveled to Montreal to join Philippe Tessier, Communist League
candidate for mayor of Montreal, at the Jan. 30 Montreal vigil. Both
came here the next day to show solidarity and join supporters knocking
on doors in the surrounding working-class Sainte-Foy neighborhood. They
distributed a statement issued by Tessier and Katy LeRougetel, Communist
League candidate for mayor of Calgary, Alberta, condemning the attack
(see below).
“I had to come to pay my respects,” Rollande Veilleux, a nurse, told
Tessier and Hart outside the mosque. “When I went back to college after
my kids grew up, I studied with several Muslim students. We helped each
other on the tests and got very close.” The Montreal vigil and others
around the country were backed by the government of Liberal Party Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau, who claims “all Canadians” stand together,
Tessier said.
“But this attack and others on Muslims and mosques — from Calgary to
Sept-Iles — are the inevitable consequence of the climate created by the
capitalist rulers in Canada and their government,” he said, quoting from
the statement he and LeRougetel put out. “They promote anti-Muslim
hysteria to serve their war aims and to justify spying on mosques and
Muslims.”
Veilleux took a copy of the statement and bought a copy of the Militant.
Attacks on Muslims in Canada more than doubled from 2012 to 2014. A
mosque in Lévis, a nearby suburb, closed for two days after the attack.
Members of the mosque in the Montreal suburb of Dorval have organized
volunteers in a nightly patrol since 2008, when the mosque was
vandalized in the first of nine attacks.
“I walked by the vigil at the mosque last night,” Tristan Rondeau, a
university student, told Hart when he knocked on his door. “It was good
to see such an outpouring of solidarity, and signs like ‘Muslim Lives
Matter.’”
“I was at the vigil in Montreal last night, together with Philippe
Tessier and his supporters,” Hart told Rondeau. “We came to offer our
solidarity and to discuss our program for a way forward for working
people out of the crisis of the capitalist system.”
Rondeau told Hart he works at McDonald’s and paints houses to get by,
while he is also a student. “Workers have to take on multiple jobs to
survive in the U.S. too,” Hart said. “Our sister parties in both
countries campaign to help build a movement of working people capable of
taking power out of the hands of the capitalists, whose system breeds
horrors like the killings here.” Rondeau and his roommate both signed up
to get Militant articles in French.
Quebec City factory worker Karine Morissette read the Communist League
statement. She said she liked it, but told Tessier she thought it would
be difficult to make the kinds of changes he proposed.
“The biggest challenge for the working class is to overcome what the
capitalists tell us, that we can’t do anything to change things,”
Tessier said.
He pointed to the example of the Cuban Revolution, which involved the
vast majority of working people there. “The Cuban workers and farmers
overthrew the dictatorship of capital and built a new society based on
values of human solidarity, totally different from the dog-eat-dog
society we live in,” he said.
Tessier told her about The Working Class and the Transformation of
Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism, a pamphlet by
Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes. “He describes
how education, like other institutions under capitalism, is organized to
shore up the crisis-wracked system. To transform work and make lifetime
learning a possibility for all is a good reason to make a socialist
revolution,” he said.
“I agree we have to build that kind of movement,” Morissette told the
communist candidate.
Related articles:
100s protest attack on Islamic Center in Davis, Calif.
Communist League protests Canada mosque attack
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home