The flashpoints in his memory are of blood in the snow, of the bare footprints of the panicked as they fled a fusillade, and of that 6-year-old girl, frozen in panic in the moment the assault rifle was turned on her.
I was listening to Mohammed Hashim, now Executive Director and CEO of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, but in 2017 a grief responder to a hate-fueled slaughter at a mosque in Quebec City.
“The 6-year-old was there with her mom to pick up their car; the father was in the mosque,” Hashim said. “The little girl was holding onto her shoulder and I asked why was her shoulder hurting. And she said that when the gunman came into the mosque, she was playing at the back of the mosque, playing as all kids do, and when the gunman came in, he started shooting, and she saw her own father get shot in the back.
“The guys at the back of the mosque saw her and jumped on her, and the reason her shoulder was hurting was that they’d kind of crushed her to shield her from bullets. The gunman turned, pointed it to her, and pulled the trigger.
“In that moment, maybe it was divine intervention, he ran out of bullets. She saw someone shoot at her.”
The cost of hate
Hashim has this stubborn idea that 6-year-olds shouldn’t have to go around explaining how they were nearly killed, which is why six years later, he was in Pittsburgh on a Wednesday afternoon talking to thousands of strangers with a similar notion.
This week inside the capacious David L. Lawrence Convention Center, enormously aspirational ideas again got their full hearing in the third iteration of what’s called the Eradicate Hate Global Summit.
The brand might sound a little ambitious in a year when Americans will soon break their own record for mass shootings, the number of organized hate groups continues to percolate at more than 1,000, and only this week an Ohio high school football team shouted out a play called “Nazi!” against their opponents from a mostly Jewish school, but be sure of this: The “global” aspect of this uniquely Pittsburgh brainchild has long since been nailed.
Inside the meeting rooms, along the exhibit floors, and throughout the massive ballrooms, a crackling global narrative for the event’s tangibly hopeful ambience belied its backstory of unearthly pain and tragedy.
This was where Victoria Jabara told of her brother, who, like her, had survived a childhood often huddled in a Beirut bomb shelter, only to be gunned down in Tulsa at age 37. This was where U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, within an hour of meeting with family members of the victims of Pittsburgh’s synagogue shooting, told how his mother forbade sleepovers when he was growing up because as a Holocaust survivor, she’d seen too many children leave home and never return.
These are global wounds, depressingly fresh every day, and require a global solution. It’s the eradicate hate thing that’s so tricky, partly because of its exhausting complexity along dark global networks, but further by the very nature of that twisted emotion itself.
The fight against hate
One study conducted at University College London appeared to demonstrate that the brain’s so-called hate circuit — areas in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, and premotor cortex — share neurological patterns and similarities with romantic love.
Yet at this third Summit, there’s an echo of something President Kennedy once said about NASA’s outsized ambitions in the ‘60’s: “We choose to go the moon in this decade and to do these other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will survive to organize the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”
Kennedy’s trademark eloquence may have channeled some bombastic determination, pretty much the opposite of the groove inside the convention center this week, but one especially compelling panel exposed a determination just as raw, just as pure.
“You don’t really think about the fact that you’re Jewish until someone hates you for the fact that you’re Jewish,” said Amy Mallinger, the granddaughter of Rose Mallinger, killed at worship in Squirrel Hill, Oct. 27, 2018, aged 97. “One of the things from some of the experts and, obviously from hearing the defendant’s words, is that people learn from each other on social media and learn how to think about these hateful ideologies from each other. If we, as family members and victims, can go and talk to people and try to change that, then we will; we’ll do anything we can.
“I remember the defendant talking about the ovens when he was killing people, things I’d never have thought, so I’m definitely more aware of all of the hate that happens. I’m definitely more inclined to make people know that I’m Jewish, but also be a little afraid that people will know. It’s made me want to fight for it. I need to fight for my grandmother, because she’s not here to fight this fight.”
How hate loses
Amy was on the most anticipated panel of the Summit, the one comprised of witnesses and family members of the 11 people murdered by Robert Bowers on that enduringly awful Saturday morning. They spoke not only of interminable heartache, but of their frustrations over the 4 ½ years it took to bring Bowers to trial and particularly with having their thoughts and emotions co-opted by the public and the punditocracy, neither of which could grasp the depths of their anger and misery.
For all of that, for all of them, the agony of the Bowers trial that wasn’t completed until August, was, even if in the smallest and least adequate ways, helpful.
“It was a necessary process; the story needed to be told, needed to be put on public record,” said Jodi Kart, whose father Melvin Wax died that morning. “Just having all those pieces come together. Afterward, there was a sense of relief, and while there is truth to that, this never goes away. You live with it for the rest of your life. Every single day.”
The Summit, now with its own president, Chuck Moellenberg, its own board of directors and its own momentum triggered by its co-founders, the international lawyer Laura Ellsworth and former Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, will be working toward a global solution on all of those days.
For everyone who gathered in Pittsburgh this week, this is a mission not at all impossible.
“I didn’t realize this until just now, but this is a testament to how hate loses,” said Hashim. “Hate and hateful acts are done to diminish your self worth, to tell you that you don’t belong, to tell you that you are not good enough or that your identity is not respected or simply that you shouldn’t exist.
“What we’re saying here is that we have the strength to not only survive but push back against that. And that will defeat hate.”
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter: @genecollier.
First Published: October 1, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
