Last Friday, I was in White Chapel, London. Early morning, my son Yasir shook me vigorously, awakening me from sleep, to deliver the horrific, breaking news of the Christchurch tragedy. It had happened at a mosque. At least fifty worshippers who had congregated at the local masjid, for Friday prayers, fell victim to an assassin’s bullets, as he ruthlessly used his high-powered, assault weapon. Away from home, in a foreign land, news of racism and human brutality hits you hard, and also, where it hurts the most!
The global media has already released the details of this ghastly tragedy, along with the universal shock and condemnation it evoked. It was the worst attack of its kind in New Zealand’s history, virtually destroying a nation’s collective innocence.
In the aftermath of this tragedy, men and women rose up across the land, to condemn this individual action, and join hands to share the grief of survivors.
As we all move through the stages of our bereavement, I like to share my thoughts on this man made catastrophe.
Ongoing discussions have continued to remind us of our collective failures. Global media has apparently focused on the controversies of labeling a person, as a ‘terrorist’. Whenever an attack like this is perpetrated by a ‘Muslim’, I see right wingers screaming at every media outlet, which does not label them as terrorists. And, when a white person commits the same dastardly act, I happen to perceive those on the left, screaming at every media outlet that doesn’t label him a terrorist.
I understand that it is unfair to see white people labelled as ‘gunmen’, and ‘shooters’, while, a Muslim is unlikely to receive the same label, and treatment from media outlets.
It is also important to recall that the threat of domestic terrorism is used by governments, to justify their taking away civil liberties, on the pretense of protecting their citizens. This results in people in power demanding more surveillance, torture, arbitrary detention, and the erosion of legal and constitutional protections for everyone. It is important to be aware of the potential propagandistic leverage in the language, including the causes, which we have continued to advocate.
There is definitely a correlation between war propaganda and mass murder. I do not wish to cite any studies as evidence supporting that claim, because nobody has preferred to do it. And, there is no way to avoid being told, that mass murder is acceptable, day in and day out, by highly adept manipulators. And, it does not make a civilian more prone to committing acts of mass murder.
Australians have habitually, always got sucked into the western empire’s wars, and thus received the same kinds of war propaganda through this mainstream, mass media. There is only so far you can twist a mind, into accepting the unacceptable before it breaks you.
Islamophobia appears to have been exponentially inflamed by the mass media since the tragic 9/11 incident , to justify that the vested interests must keep slaughtering human beings, who happen to be living on top of oil and geostrategic locations.
In his manifesto, the attacker had explicitly stated that he chose Muslims as the group of immigrants, to target with his ‘racist’ vendetta because ‘they are the most despised group of invaders in the West, and attacking them receives the greatest level of support.’ The reason Muslims are so despised is because the flames of Islamophobia have been fanned by propagandists who need the west, not caring about the cold-blooded murder of a million Iraqis.
The Christchurch attack was indeed evil and horrific.
And, also, it was no more evil or horrific than the violence routinely inflicted upon Muslims in the Middle East by the US war machine.
The manifesto was really dumb, with the final three-quarters containing nothing but sermonizing on the need to start killing brown-skinned people, to ignite a western racial and ideological war which would likely lead to balkanize the region into separate ‘ethnic states’.
The guy babbled on and on about the need to protect ‘European’, nations (which for him included the majority-white nations like Australia and the USA) and ‘European’ heritage, without ever admitting the fact that Europeans were all constantly killing each other until a few decades ago.
Did all of them really hate each other? In many cases, they still continue to do so, because nothing had united them besides the relative absence of melanin on their skin.
They are a bunch of completely different nations with completely different cultures.
The following three beliefs about ‘white culture’ are irrelevant: that it exists, and that it is under attack, and further, that it is worth saving. There is no such thing as ‘white culture’, the absence of melanin is not a culture.
There is the Irish culture, Italian culture, Spanish culture, German culture, but there is no such thing as ‘white culture’. I feel no special kinship with anyone who shares my skin pigmentation in the way that two Black Americans or Aboriginal tribesmen might, and neither does any other white person, who has not gone out of their way to make a moronic, artificial construct out of ‘white identity’!
Two ancestors of American slaves have a shared collective history and experience unifying them, two Australian Aboriginals have tribal culture and tradition, but two white people have nothing beyond ‘Yes, we both need to put on sun screen at the beach, or we’ll get cancer.’
White culture isn’t a tangible thing, and if it was it wouldn’t be anywhere remotely close to being under attack, and even if it were it wouldn’t be worth saving, anyway.
White people have succeeded in murdering, raping, pillaging and bulldozing their way across the planet, and now the entire species sits on the brink of extinction...thanks to the ‘advancements’, of the so-called, white society. We truly have got nothing to be proud of, and it would be just fine, if we faded softly into obscurity...
The manifesto has griped about miscegenation (interracial reproduction) and dwindling birth rates constantly. Which shows you why white supremacists are also reliably awful, misogynists. The reason birth rates are down in the west is because that is what happens when you give women money, education and legal equality.
When women get those things, we tend to take full ownership of our reproductive systems, and guess what happens? We don’t feel like having ten kids anymore. High birth rates are the results of desperate, powerless under-educated women being forced to pound out children at a high rate, by men who regard them as property in a hyper patriarchal society that does not care how draining it is, having a lot of kids is for a mother.
Exactly, that is what white supremacists want to see the western women reduced to. The fact that they also want to stop the white women from engaging with brown-skinned men, is just another symptom of this slave-owner mentality.
Chicago-based Nazarul Islam works with institutions providing assistance to Special Children Needs. He had worked as an educator in the UK and Australia also headed a British charity’s focus in Bangladesh and Nepal towards organizing skill development youth programs.