Muslims uneasy after windows shot out at school on Cavendish

CTV Montreal: Windows shot out at Muslim school Adil Charkaoui is among the local Muslims increasingly disconcerted by ongoing attacks on Islamic Montrealers, Tarah Schwartz reports.

Montreal police were busy investigating an attack on the Muslim Secondary School on Cavendish Blvd. after six windows were shot out with a gun.

Students and teachers arrived at the Montreal Muslim Secondary School Monday morning to discover at least six windows had been hit.

School authorities called police immediately after noticing the damage, but they are not certain when the windows were broken, and said it could have happened any time over the weekend.

Nobody was hurt, and nobody was at the school when the attack took place.

It’s just the latest in an increasingly-frequent set of acts of violence against Muslim Montrealers, according to the Quebec Collective Against Islamophobia.

“We had a lady who was pushed in the metro. We had a father who made a complaint against a teacher who called his daughter a 'dirty terrorist' in the classroom," said Adil Charkaoui of the Quebec Collective Against Islamophobia. “We have seen many sad incidents.”

Charkaoui said that the local French-language media has contributed to the atmosphere of suspicion with frequent reports on such subjects such as religious accommodation and investigative reports scrutinizing Quebec Islamic institutions.

Charkaoui said that he wants government and media to campaign against Islamophobia, “in the same way they fight racism and anti-Semitism. The French media also has an important role to educate and not to stigmatize the Muslim community.”

One parent interviewed by CTV Montreal said that he came to visit the school after incident out of concern.

“We need to live in peace. We left our countries to come here in peace,” said parent Nashat El Sayed, who has a 15-year-old son at the school.

He too said that he feels that Islamic Quebecers have been unfairly treated in local media.

“Why are they always talking about us? Be quiet a little bit, forget us, let us live like anybody else,” he said.

Montreal police representative Raphael Bergeron said that investigators think that they know what sort of weapon was used in the attack.

“It appears it could have been a pellet gun that was used to cause the damage. We don't have any suspects in that case at the moment,” he said.