At 11:30 a.m. on March 1, Concordia University along with the SPVM, the Montreal police service, issued an immediate evacuation of the school’s Hall, GM, and EV building in the wake of a bomb threat explicitly targeted at its Muslim community. Thousands of students hastily exited the buildings, and were forced to flood the streets of downtown Montreal in a state of fear and confusion. Guy Concordia metro station was temporarily blocked, while the university kept its doors closed from 11:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to ensure the safety and security of its faculty and students.
According to the Montreal Gazette and several other news platforms, a warning letter was sent to a series of media outlets by the underground C4 Concordia chapter, the Council of Conservative Citizens of Canada, demanding that the university ban “religious activities of all kinds” because of their concerns with the Muslim community’s “Friday prayers and…anti-Christian and anti-Jewish speeches.” The letter’s prejudicial discourse went on to demean and alienate the religious beliefs and activities of all Muslim students, categorizing their actions as intolerable. As retaliation, this group threatened to plant bombs within the buildings hoping to “injure Moslem students,” unconcerned with the collateral damage it would intentionally provoke.
Concordia emailed its community, faculty, and students, exposing their refusal to cooperate. Instead, it has unitedly chosen to continue showcasing its diversity and acceptance of any and all races, religions, and ethnicities. This empowering response has been working to demonstrate the school’s inclusivity policy; it will not participate in or allow hateful and violent expressions of “intolerance” to divide the school’s community.
The group’s prejudicial and violent narrative is absolutely, entirely, and unapologetically wrong. It is precisely this form of hate that contributes to widespread occurrences and demonstrations of racism, discrimination, prejudice, and violence. It can and will only lead to forms of destruction that determinately work to divide the people belonging to different cultures, religions, and ethnicities.
A difference in people should not motivate hate speech and violent means of disagreement or discontent. We are all human. We are all equal. For some unthinkable reason, most individuals who are uncomfortable with other people, cultures, or religions that are different than they, seem to cling onto some sort of superiority complex that vocalizes the idea that their culture or whatever it may be, is better than the next. No. This is completely absurd. There are a myriad of things certain cultures or belief systems may do differently than yours, but this does not mean that they are less human, or that they are less, period.
That is not to say that you can’t disagree or even feel uncomfortable sometimes. If you do, fine. Keep it to yourself. If it doesn’t directly threaten your life or the life of another human being, then deal with it. We each have our own individual ways of being and existing.
Don’t contribute to the hate speech that chokeholds our world. It’s time we demand change.
If you’re interested in reading the group’s warning letter, you can find it here