At this moment, there are 50 dead with many others injured from last week’s attack, fueled by a tempest of Islamophobia, on the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. One of the worshippers greeted the alleged gunman as he approached the entrance, saying, “Hello, brother.”

He was killed immediately after.

I find myself once again faced with the murder of my fellow Muslims. For years, I’d watch the news and see how Muslims in Somalia were killed by terrorist groups like Al Shabab, only to later see it suggested that Muslims have to answer for global terrorism (despite the fact that we are the most victimized by global terrorism).

But it wasn’t until January 29, 2017, that my worst fears were realized in my home country. On that day, Alexandre Bissonnette, a 28-year-old white man radicalized by the alt-right, entered the Islamic Cultural Centre mosque in Quebec City, Canada, and murdered six Muslims after the last prayer of the night.

In the days following the attack, I was glued to my screen in horror—this could have been any mosque in Canada. I sobbed for these men and their families, but more than anything I wanted to understand how a man like Bissonnette could be led to attack a group of innocent worshippers in what has always been the safest place imaginable to me: a house of prayer, and a type of second home to Muslims worldwide.

We soon learned the nature of Bissonnette’s mindset: He admitted he was motivated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s repudiation of Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban. In the weeks leading up to the attack, Bissonnette obsessively checked the Twitter feeds of a range of right-wing American commentators, including more mainstream figures, as well as conspiracy theorists, alt-right personalities, and outright neo-Nazis. When he saw on television that our prime minister offered to accept and welcome refugees to Canada, Bissonnette said, “I saw that and I, like, lost my mind. It was then that I decided it was time to go.” Despite expressing remorse in court, Bissonnette told a social worker that he regretted not killing more Muslims.

In my day-to-day life, I feel the threat of a hate crime looming, and not without reason—statistics show they’ve been steadily on the rise in Canada and the U.S. If there was any time to discuss anti-Muslim racism and bigotry, surely it was when the wounds still felt fresh. But if anything, the Quebec City attack was quickly forgotten, and not even three weeks later, I found myself covering an anti-Muslim rally for work. The rally was in opposition to a motion put forward by a member of parliament to look into Islamophobia and other forms of anti-religious hate speech. I sat in a crowd of Islamophobes, watching them jump to their feet cheering for their right to hate me.