Amid all the uplifting messages from supporters of Toronto’s Alsoufi family, who shut down the popular Soufi’s restaurant, came a grim one from an eatery owner who was recently hounded out of her business following similar harassment:

“They made the right choice (to close) by choosing safety. For physical and mental health,” said Sophia Banks, a queer trans woman who says she had to shut down her vegan café in Val-David, Que., this past summer after alt-right groups began an online campaign of intimidation.

“It can get violent very fast with these extreme types. Didn’t feel safe,” she wrote via Facebook Messenger on Wednesday night.

Her café, the Vegan Canteen, was also vandalized repeatedly, which she said might be related to transphobia. The online harassment began after she tweeted her opposition to Quebec’s Bill 21 that bans certain public servants from using religious symbols at work. Banks has since moved to British Columbia.

On Sept. 10, a non-profit LGBTQ gym in Edmonton named Queerflex closed after it was identified in posts by Patriot Pride Canada Wide that called it a “breeding ground for domestic terrorism” and its customers “gender confused unicorns.” The far-right group also published the name and photo of one of its employees along with the gym’s address.

The gym has since partially reopened with new safety and security procedures.

The Alsoufis, too, were persuaded to reopen. Paramount Fine Foods CEO Mohamad Fakih, himself no stranger to Islamophobic attacks in Canada, offered them mentorship, some management staff and most importantly the time to regain the confidence to run the business again.

“We just want it all to end and to live in peace again,” Husam Alsoufi said Thursday.

The Alsoufis’ son Alaa was identified and doxxed as one of the masked anti-fascism protestors at Mohawk College in Hamilton within days of a People’s Party of Canada event on Sept. 29, that featured its leader Maxime Bernier and YouTuber Dave Rubin, often named as an influential radicalizer of white youth.

Alaa was photographed elsewhere without the mask, clad in an Orange Shirt Day T-shirt with the words “Every child matters’’ etched on it.

In a video that quickly spread on far-right social media channels, he is seen wearing the same T-shirt standing next to two protesters who were shouting down an elderly lady with a walker and her son, apparently calling her “Nazi scum.”

It didn’t matter that Alaa himself was neither shouting nor interrupting them. His family quickly apologized on Facebook.

“We would like to formally apologize for the incident that occurred with the elderly woman. Alaa regrets that he did not step aside and/or stand up against the act of verbal abuse that occurred against her, and would love the opportunity to personally extend his apologies to her.”

That didn’t matter, either. Alaa was physically assaulted Friday, his family said. They, too, weren’t spared the violent and obscene abuse.

However, this saga isn’t about an individual’s “bad behaviour” and forgiveness.

The Alsoufis are a Syrian refugee family, bound in the general Canadian imagination to permanent gratitude, and in the eyes of xenophobes to the embodiment of the conspiracy theory of “the great replacement,” the belief that the “white race” is about to be extinct.

“They’ve finally gained fame for their terrorism,” wrote one person on his Facebook page.

“Time for a good ole fashioned lynch mob,” wrote a commenter on another post. “Like horseback, rope pitchfork and torches.”

We stand again on the bleak threshold of overt white supremacist violence in the nation, where self-appointed guardians of a self-constructed race fighting a mythical threat are inching their way into mainstream acceptability, using fear and the politics of white insecurity as tools to goad the unguarded.

For years, commenters like these have been dismissed as trollish blowhards, not to be taken seriously. But their sinister presence, their misguided conviction that they’re heroes in an existential battle, has steadily loomed larger in real life, lashing the world with a trail of destruction from Norway to New Zealand.

Yet, they continue to be normalized with mainstream visibility.

Proud Boys Canada, whose U.S. counterpart has been listed by the FBI as “an extremist group with ties to white nationalism,” said in their social media channel that they provided security for the Bernier event.

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“Proud of the 12 Proud Boys who worked security for the Max Bernier/Dave Rubin event yesterday,” they say in a post that is screenshot in its entirety on the Anti-Racist Canada blog, captured by “Yellow Vest Canada Exposed,” a group of anonymous concerned Canadians who track far-right figures.

Another person at that event, a man who describes himself as personal security for Bernier and who showed up with him at a Toronto Star editorial board meeting on Sept. 24, is a founding member of the Canadian Nationalist Party, which advocates for white nationalism, reported my colleague Melanie Green in Vancouver.

The net is closing in on us, yet, it doesn’t seem to disturb Canadians who don’t see themselves targeted by white supremacists. They are delusional; when they run out of targets white nationalists will eventually turn on them.