A second Gatineau, Que., mosque was the target of anti-Muslim slurs last week just hours after vandalism at another mosque. Hicham Ouhaid, president of the Mosque of Aylmer, said he received an email early last Monday urging Muslims to get out of Canada. The message, he said, included a photo of a 2010 Time magazine cover depicting a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off.
This is not the first time the Aylmer mosque, located at the corner of Park Street and Chemin Eardley, has been targeted, he added, as a hateful letter was dropped in the mailbox last spring. “We felt very concerned. We felt our community is somehow targeted,” Ouhaid told the CBC’s Alistair Steele. “Although we don’t really understand why, because we have been there for quite some time and everything was fine.”
Ouhaid believes the email is connected to vandalism where cars were smashed outside the Outaouais Islamic Centre in Gatineau early last Monday. Then in the early morning of Jan. 5, a lone man in his 20s was caught on camera painting racist messages on the centre’s front doors, across the building’s side and on two other entrances to the building.