Once again, leaders of local religious communities turned out en masse to lament a mass slaughter. On Sunday, it was at the Islamic Center in Getzville following last week's mass shootings at two New Zealand mosques.In October, the service wasn't very far away: at Temple Beth Tzedek. That time, the concern was about a mass slaughter in a synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood.
This time, the spillover crowd was there to huddle together over the killings of 50 people in New Zealand by a white supremacist. Many of the same faces from October were in the room Sunday.
Casey Middle School sixth-grader Rima Khan said she does not understand what happened.
"My parents tried to explain it to me, but it made no sense," Khan said. "A fog filled my head. Why were these people killed? And what have they done wrong? How is 14-year-old Hamza, who survived the war in Syria but who was killed in New Zealand a threat to anyone? Or why does a four-year-old Abdullah have to die for being there."
Masjid Nu'man's BaBa Eng attacked white supremacy as the basis for the latest murders. Eng made the most political statement of the day.
"Today we come together to speak truth to each other<" Eng said. "We must speak truth to the powers that be, to say that we will stand for them saying the kind of things we hear from the White House. (applause)."
Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul was there to say New Yorkers push back, united.
"The Jewish community after the slaughter in the synagogue in Pittsburgh. We've done this after Charleston, the slaughter of Christians in that community and elsewhere," she said, "and so I think that's one of the great strengths of Western New York, is that we have organizations who will always step up and say you are not alone, you don't have to go through this alone."
Speakers came from a very wide array of religious communities, from the Muslims of various local mosques to a wide array of Christian churches and congregations to Baha'i to Sikh, representatives of religious groups seeking a more peaceful and less violent world.
