A woman sits and weeps at the scene of a vehicle attack in London, Ont., on June 8, 2021.Geoff Robins/The Canadian Press
Vicky Mochama is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
On the night of June 6, 2021, the Afzaal family was on a walk, and had just arrived at a traffic light in the western suburbs of London, Ont., when a man drove a truck over the curb and into the family. The father Salman, the mother Madiha, the daughter Yumna and the grandmother Talat died that day.
The son survives.
Two years later, at a trial in Windsor, Ont., the truck’s driver now faces four counts of terrorism-motivated murder and one count of attempted terrorism-motivated murder. On Sept. 11, the trial’s first day, the Crown prosecutor described evidence from truck data that the brake pedal was never pressed.
The trial is the first case in Canadian history that has been heard before a jury on terrorism related to white supremacy. Crown prosecutors have argued that the man on trial targeted the Afzaal family because of white-nationalist beliefs, and its attendant Islamophobia.
The We’re All In This Together industrial complex would prefer that the accused be viewed as an aberration, a single instance. A lone wolf.
The data don’t back up that view. In 2021, there was a 27-per-cent increase in the number of hate crimes reported by police, up to 3,360 incidents from 2,646 the year before – when there was a 36-per-cent increase. Canada has even given rise to an ensemble cast of hate-filled actors – from the 27-year-old mass shooter who attacked worshippers at a Quebec City mosque in 2017 to race-war enthusiast Lauren Southern and white-supremacist YouTuber Stefan Molyneux.
Beneath those gathering clouds, Muslims have faced a multidecade inundation of hate. From the false digital whispers about politicians seeking to implement sharia law to the virulent anger that erupted in 2019 in Trois-Rivières, Que., over the notion that it might be home to a mosque, Muslims in Canada are regularly targets of campaigns of hate and misinformation. The violence is even a budget line item: Since 2007, the federal department of Public Safety has provided funding for organizations needing to upgrade their security after violent and destructive incidents; mosques frequently apply for this money.
Fatema Abdalla, communications co-ordinator for the National Council of Canadian Muslims, told Global News in 2021 that the wave of hate perpetrated toward Muslims after 9/11 had become “systemic” in the previous 20 years. In a 2021 Statistics Canada analysis of police-reported hate crimes, the author noted that the increases reflected a long-term continuum of terror: “Historically, the Black, Jewish and Muslim populations have been the most targeted groups.”
The practice and violent insistence of white supremacy has long been the de facto law of the land, the authority vested into its children – some of whom become its most ardent soldiers. And the internet, a library of hate-filled digital content (crucially: if you’re looking), has accelerated the phenomenon.
Once meant to represent the future, the internet is now happy to peddle versions of the past, feeding it back to users in a buffet of outrage and misinformation. If you enjoy misogyny or anti-Black racism too, as many continue to, the internet’s platforms and search engines have more in the back. The major social platforms and search engines will assist you in your self-guided meditation into contempt.
That has been on display at the trial in Windsor. In his first statement to police, which was played for jurors on the last day of the trial’s first week, the man accused of killing the four members of the Afzaal family unfurled a litany of conspiracy theories about Muslim communities, which can all be found online.
When it comes to extremist headlines and stories, “you’re going to find them if you’re looking for them,” says Aengus Bridgman of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a McGill University research group that studies the internet. Few people who are radicalized online are performing wholly innocent searches. But the internet can often accelerate a person’s journey down the rabbit hole. A 2022 study from Simon Fraser University, for instance, found that when searching for figures prominent in right-wing and conspiracy communities, Google’s auto-complete function gave “neutral or positive but never negative” subtitles for known bad-faith actors. And algorithmic decision-making in social-media sites, such as TikTok’s “collaborative filtering,” can prompt users into shared communities of interest, with few interventions between you and your fave racist TikToker.
Pointing at last week’s counterprotests organized by queer communities across Canada, Mr. Bridgman says: “There’s an enormous capacity for good and digital connection and community-building, but there’s also these platform eccentricities or design decisions that can lead to greater harm.”
Internet companies have the power to introduce friction to the slippery slide of radicalization, Mr. Bridgman says. If social-media companies can block links to news websites, as Meta is doing on Facebook and Instagram, and they’re able to throttle traffic to specific outlets, as Twitter was accused of in August, they have immense powers at their disposal to shape a person’s journey online. While apps such as One Sec help users to stall and interrupt problematic online behaviours, users are at the mercy of the tech giants and the way they choose to make information available once they’re online. Efforts by the Trudeau Liberals to regulate these companies and address online harms – developing legislation aimed at “content that incites violence; hate speech; the non-consensual sharing of intimate images; and child sexual exploitation content” – have largely stalled, though a new justice minister may take up the task again.
The internet did not invent white supremacy. But there is an unseemly ease with which people are finding templates for hate.
On the fifth day of the trial, the jury in Windsor began to hear from the accused terrorist through a video recording of his interviews with police detectives. In the footage, he said that he embarked on this lamentable path shortly after turning 18: ”From that point on, straight down the rabbit hole I went.” He continued to make false and racist claims about Muslim grooming gangs, and spoke about both his desire for vengeance and the lack of space for people like him to speak his views publicly because “you’re always afraid of being called a racist.” As for friends, community or any connection: When a detective asked him if there was anyone in his life they should contact, there was supposedly no one.
From my vantage point across the Zoom webinar provided by the court to media and family members, this speech smacks of self-conscious theatre, of yet another signalling device for ideologically motivated violent extremists to imprint their practices and methods into the popular culture. It’s why, despite being named in other publications, the man on trial is not named here; I’m uneasy about broadcasting it at the top of newspapers, websites and on phone screens. Dancing around it is awkward, but the premise and promise of violence in the accused’s claims about white supremacy require an awkward dance. I’m wary that even this trial – especially the way claims about the man’s motivations and inspirations toward violence are repeated, quoted and amplified in the news – could be its own instruction manual. And indeed, the accused in this case allegedly left a manifesto: another template available for download.
Watching the accused man pace in his cell in London, as the jury did on the trial’s fourth day, I am reminded of another of this country’s sons whose vehicular violence shattered a family, unsettled a community.
Around 1 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2017, Barbara Kentner, an Anishinaabe woman, was walking with her sister to a relative’s home in Thunder Bay when she was struck by a trailer hitch that had been thrown from a moving car by a young man. “I got one,” someone is reported to have said as it struck her. Within months, Ms. Kentner joined a sorrowful sorority of murdered Indigenous women. Last week, Ms. Kentner’s family was shocked to learn that the man convicted of manslaughter in her death had been given day parole two years into his eight-year sentence.
Unlike the man on trial in Windsor, Ms. Kentner’s killer did not need the internet’s metastasizing qualities to engage in violence; his violence lay comfortably within a culture that also produces anti-Indigenous violence. There are places in this country where racist and misogynist violence, especially as directed at Indigenous women, is simply the air that people breathe, where white children hurl racial epithets at Indigenous children.
As I say, the internet did not invent white supremacy. Yet clearly, there are young people who are learning its lessons, meting out violence in increasing yearly increments.
The trajectory disquiets me.
On the night he was arrested, the accused man on trial in Windsor began his autobiography of violence at the onset of adulthood. But as momentous as turning 18 is, that seems highly unlikely. As Dionne Brand wrote in A Map to the Door of No Return: “One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.” Long histories of violent white supremacy predate the accused; the internet’s rabbit holes, however you find them, are another avenue by which violence is passed on.
In a courtroom in Windsor, the toxic consequences of a promised-and-promising digital future are meeting with the ambient force of white supremacy’s command of this land.