Christchurch and Double Standards Around Terrorism

TEHRAN (FNA)- The double-standard approach by media and western governments' approach towards the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, has raised serious questions across the world.

News that shooting was ongoing in two mosques in New Zealand was met with a flurry of curiosity on social media, and just as quickly saw much of that shut down, with wholesale censorship of the topic and any specifics or videos related to it blocked out of hand.

For instance, Facebook removed or blocked 1.5 million videos related to the rampage in just the first 24 hours. 80% of the videos were blocked at the point of upload, never to be seen by anyone.

That said, the white supremacist, anti-Muslim and ideologically driven attack on mosques have tangential links to social media, and it is obvious that part of the blame should go to the social media which never bother to censor objectionable views against Muslims.

While other attacks of historical import took place in different eras with different context, this is one of the first such attacks that come in the middle of the censorship-happy social media era. During the attack, social media imposed what was almost a total media blackout, and in the aftermath, tried to vindicate their past censorship by keeping a careful lid on anything too revealing. Although this seems to be a justifiable approach to avoid promotion of violence, still some are questioning why does the same rule not apply to those attacks whose perpetrator is a Muslim.

The same happened regarding the way Western governments reacted to the horrible attacks. Except for some condemnations, they did nothing much at all. This must raise questions about how they are going to handle and prevent similar attacks against Muslim communities in the future. They won’t.

The US government is also pushing a position of collective guilt that will only bode ill for Muslims and is completely unlike its reaction from similar terror attacks, say against a Jewish Synagogue last year. That particular incident prompted the White House and its European allies to term it as terrorism attack and condemn it in the strongest terms. But the Christchurch terror attack, which was carried out by a white supremacist or “villain” only got reactions like “we are going to change the gun laws”.

Here again, a gross double-standard stares us squarely in the face, as Western governments exhibit no such restraint when it comes to white supremacists murdering peaceful Muslim worshipers. No doubt, there are double standards and far-right/white supremacist links here. White supremacists tend to attack locally, which makes this one somewhat unusual. The “villain” was obviously out to kill as many Muslims as possible and said he had been planning the attack for two years – and the authorities did nothing to stop him; and still it is hard for them to call him a TERRORIST. The Christchurch incident has been a well-planned and organized TERRORIST ATTACK ON THE MUSLIMS requiring anti-terrorism policies in New Zealand and across the globe.

Naturally, when 50 people peacefully observing their religious practices are killed, some things must change. New Zealand’s government has a fundamental obligation to protect the Muslim community, and if white supremacists as a group are considered a threat after a thorough assessment of the circumstances surrounding this attack has been conducted, then there has to be a sharper focus on such groups under a plan that envisages national policies against anti-Muslim terrorism.

More so, one recent study found that terrorist attacks by Muslim perpetrators receive more media coverage than those by non-Muslim perpetrators, leading Western governments to have an exaggerated sense of that threat.

In Western culture today, terrorist attacks by Muslims are still reflexively seen as the expression of a problem shared by all Muslims worldwide, hence the demands that Muslims everywhere denounce all attacks by individual Muslims anywhere. Terrorist attacks by white supremacists like the one in Christchurch, by contrast, continue to be seen as individual “psychological” puzzles that are begging to be solved with sympathy and care – and gun law reforms.

This feeds the notion that Muslims, who are nearly a quarter of the world’s population, are a unique threat who require their own special set of security measures. To adopt such measures would be to abandon the very principles of equality that Western governments claim they hold dear.

Let’s acknowledge that even when their attempted crimes are similar in scale, Muslims receive longer sentences than their White Supremacist counterparts - partly because they are Muslims and more likely to be charged with having weapons of mass destruction. Now the question is Why the bogus War On Terrorism only applies to attacks by Muslims? Where are the roots of such a worldview? Does it mean that the Western states see Muslims as potential terrorists, or pursuing and promoting Islamophobia sets the stage for their colonial policies?

Terrorism Has No Religion

by SCOTT POYNTING

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

‘… and death shall have no dominion’

– Dylan Thomas

The only way to begin is by joining in sorrow with those bereaved in Christchurch on 15 March and remembering and respecting the fellow humanity of those who, so painfully recently, were also living. Of course, we must find a way to comfort those made fearful by this terror: especially since such fear-making was its major purpose.

There are some crimes of such moment that we always remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is one such that is often named; September 11^th is another. The latter was a terrorist attack that was made for showing on television; I heard it on the radio and obstinately refused to watch TV for two days. The Christchurch massacres were made for propagating the terror and ideology via the internet. I am not yet clear about what this means, but it is obvious that it is significant, and that the jumbled ravings of the killer were put together with gleanings from the Web. He says so, in his pre-murder ‘manifesto’. Police and politicians cautioned us not to watch the video footage. Indeed I had no stomach to do so. Yet I spent the night reading the weird manifesto, which was easy enough to get hold of early on.

When I heard the appalling news — somewhat late — I was sitting at my desk, trying to write about Islamophobia. Ironically, the last sentence that I had written, was: ‘There is nothing intrinsically Islamic about these ‘old enemies’ vanquished (eventually, for a time) by the empire; Islam was just part of the package of the otherness, along with non-Whiteness / non-Europeanness, of these brown or black non-Christians who stood in opposition to the empire.’ I was harking back to how the crazed jingoists of the white settlement colony of New South Wales had sent troops to Sudan in 1885 to avenge General Gordon’s ill fate in Khartoum — and it was an immensely popular gesture — invoking, in their recruitment and fundraising campaign, ‘England’s and all Christendom’s old enemies, the Saracens’. The anti-Muslim racism was bound up in empire, I was arguing.

It is a sort of white (European) supremacism, anti-immigration and ethnic cleansing that pervade the 74 incoherent pages of Christchurch murderer’s diatribe. Islam is almost incidental to him, though a mish-mash of obsessions alludes to Saracens, crusader imagery, Knights Templar, ‘the Turk’, the siege of Vienna and so on and on. Yet also Valhalla, just to emphasise that it’s about ‘race’: the killer proudly owns to fascism and racism and does not baulk at neo-nazism, though he regrets that there are no real nazis any more. The ‘vipers’ nests’ must be burned, and non-European children who are in ‘our lands’ must be killed, without hindrance of sentiment. The killer is fixated upon the non-white others out-breeding ‘us’, and effecting ‘white genocide’ — a by now standard Islamophobic trope and one similarly colouring the ‘manifesto’ of that other mass killer, Anders Breivik, to whose motivations and crimes the Christchurch mass murderer’s have already been widely compared.

The nonsense of this irruption of irrationality should not lead us to the error of believing that individual madness is the cause, or that the motivations are unshared. In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Oslo massacres, when ‘we were all Norwegians’, George Morgan and I wrote (in Global Islamophobia, 2012: 1) that the mass murder displayed ‘the clear imprint of a revanchist nationalist politics that has gained popularity in many parts of the contemporary West. … While rightwing political organisations have scurried to denounce Breivik and the murders … it is clear that he drew on their (tortured) political logic to rationalise his actions’. Australia’s right-wing racist Senator, Fraser Anning, who has remarked that migration was behind the Christchurch massacre, and recently called even more despicably for a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Muslim Question’, is in the same camp. Breivik credited the likes of Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders and the English Defence Leaguefor his inspiration. This perpetrator’s ‘manifesto’ played on exactly the same sorts of themes: mass immigration, Muslim birth rates, ‘white genocide’, and all the rest. It is not only his insignias that are fascist. It is exterminist, and we have seen it before.

New Zealand rightwing extremist blogger Cameron Slater, having in 2015 just quoted Golda Meir as condemning Arabs as not loving their children, wrote of Islam: ‘… religion of peace? No way, it is a death cult and we should kill them before they kill us’. Well, the message got across on 15 Marchin Christchurch. Slater,Fraser Anning and their ilk all sell the samesort ofproduct. Will they own it now?

What hate crime and terrorism have in common — and this crime was both — is that they victimise communities beyond those directly targeted, in order to ‘send a message’. A bright young academic, and our recent co-author on Islamophobia, exclaimed to our collaborator in her grief, ‘They keep killing us!’. The perpetrator’s warped and wicked testimonial, The Great Replacement, with its obsession about ethnic cleansing, makes clear that the armies of his allies (yes, he sees himself as a courageous ‘soldier’, repelling ‘invaders’ by killing unarmed civilians including children) will keep doing so until ‘they’ go back to ‘their own lands’. He wants to reinforce a ‘they’ and ‘us’ — and we must not let him.

Others will have commented more than enough about the irony of this (white Australian) immigrant railing against immigration and appointing himself as the defender of ‘our land’ — which he conceives of as a little finger of Europe. While obsessed with ‘race’, he does not mention, in 74 pages, Indigenous people in either the land of his birth or the land of his recent residence. His white supremacism harks ‘back’ mythically to a racially pure/purified Europe. It is different from the US white supremacism excused (embraced!) by Trump, which disparages Black Americans or Hispanic peoples; rather it regards the United States (and indeed Brazil) as hopelessly degenerate and irredeemable. (The manifesto looks forward to guns and war sorting all that decadence out, with the white race emerging victorious.) This racist gunman is no more concerned with the ‘race’ legacy in the Americas of chattel slavery than he is with that of settler colonialism and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. It’s a strangely Europe-centred racism, cobbled together with memes from the internet: no less effective, for all that.

I feel strangely soiled, having immersed myself in this excrement. And deeply disturbed. But I am committed to the methodological principle of taking this sort of testimonial seriously, for explanations of the crime. Also, to finding ways of countering this sort of ideology. There are many such violent racists out there on the internet, and recruiting and proselytising in our communities — and he boasts of this. He addresses them, instructs them.

One of the first public comments that I read about the massacre was Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s observation that terrorism does not belong to any religion. He has a global political point to make, and he is correct in doing so. Before his election to political office, when people in Pakistan’s north-west were systematically terrorised by murderous US-alliance drones in the name of western counter-terrorism, Imran Khan campaigned in a principled way against this. He has to deal with Indian nationalist terrorism on the other side, along with plenty of the ‘home-grown’ terrorism. Empire and nationalism may be inflected by religion, but they are by no means reducible to it.

I later watched with unexpected admiration as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke, movingly and with dignity, of compassion and indeed the duty to give shelter to those in need of it, as crucial, unifying New Zealand values. How different from bullying ‘mateship’ purveyed as ‘national values’ on the other (my) side of the Tasman. She did seem to have trouble mentioning the M-word, but then the murderer declared that he selected his victims as immigrants and non-‘Europeans’ rather than as Muslims. In two mosques, at Friday prayer time, mind you.

Some of the media commentary noted the Kiwi ‘black humour’ bandied for comfort among the traumatised people anxiously gathering outside the mosques (these ‘others’ are capable of such Kiwiness!). In that vein, and as we will all be New Zealanders for the while, I might observe that the killer began his legacy rant with a complete rendition of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’. One dear literature-loving Muslim colleague of mine commented that the man had added one more (minor) crime — of plagiarism — to his record. Yes, the rant is pretentious and pseudo-erudite, with sprinklings from literature and worldly-travelled posturing as well as potty-mouthed locker room macho menace.

In laying claim to inheriting — and safeguarding — all of European civilisation, Tarrant declares his English, Scots and Irish heritage. No Welsh: some small comfort for Dylan Thomas. As the epigraph at the top of this present piece suggests, perhaps ‘we’ should take Dylan Thomas back.

Scott Poynting is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation, Charles Sturt University. He is Adjunct Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology and in Criminology at Western Sydney University. He co-edited, with George Morgan, Global Islamophobia (Routledge 2016) and, with Monish Bhatia and Waqas Tufail, Media, Crime and Racism (Palgrave, 2018).

Ignorance is not bliss: How to empower communities through these tough times

ZAI MIZTIQ

The recent mass-shooting is not the first in the world, and anyone would be ignorantly foolish to believe that it would be the last.

But why? Why would a person be led to the ideology of thinking that what he is doing is the best thing to do and what kind of emotions are filled in the heart and head for one to voluntarily and heartlessly be convicted to take such massive actions to harm another living being?

As a life coach and motivational speaker, I am always helping clients or audiences I speak to take the first step to diagnose their strengths and identity. Through this first step, it helps a person identify with their values, their beliefs, and their norms as to why they think, feel and behave a certain way.

The next step is to have clarity of understanding in what they truly want in life. When one can pin down their goals and fill up their bucket list, they are able to align their purpose with meaning and take actions in life much easier.

Only then do we advise to take the next step in deciding how they intend to move forward. There is a popular saying that says, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” As a matter of fact, this old but golden statement stands true to its fame. If you can’t make the initial commitment to pinning down your plan, what makes you think you are able to move forward and accomplish it?  

At the very root of all of the above, there is one powerful tip that would help anyone succeed in life in all that you do. The best of you are those who learn from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). Investing in knowledge is a life skill that you can acquire and retain for a lifetime. When you learn, you can better apply, and then you can move forward and teach it to others.

Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is the cause of why innocent lives have been taken for many, many centuries. Ignorance is the cause why divorces take place and families break up, causing further destruction to the society and leading to a fractured community. Ignorance is why we humans who are made by the One hand and One soul refuse to come together as one. Ignorance is why we fail to cultivate compassion towards each other and are moving away from real conversations. We need to enhance communication to avoid crises, or this will be a permanent disease, a vicious cycle of a generational curse.

I pray that this message gets out to one and all. I am truly sick and tired of all the mass shootings and hurting of humanity at large. It is about time we stand together to step up our game and never give up. The end is near but the last thing we need is for our people to live in fear. This life is so precious and dear, may we in solidarity come together as one to turn dreams into reality with confidence and clarity. Only then can we can collectively live in peace, unity, and harmony.

ZAI MIZTIQ

Zai Miztiq is an international speaker, celebrity author and travelling trainer. She is now accredited with Gallup Inc as a Strengths Coach and she is also a certified trainer cum assessor under WSQ’s ACTA and People’s Association. A 2x Amazon Best Selling Author of 'Turn Your Passion into Profits' & '5 Things I Love About Being a Woman', her Step Up! training and workshops aims to facilitate her clients rediscover their strengths & identity, realign their purpose with meaning, gain confidence and clarity and be happy.

Muslims urge fight on Islamaphobia, slam West after carnage

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says certain countries in the West must be held accountable for an attack on two mosques in New Zealand, which left at least 50 worshipers dead.

"The terrorist attack in New Zealand represents a very dangerous tide in the West that is Islamaphobia," he said in Istanbul where the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held an emergency meeting Friday. 

Certain Western officials and institutions, he said, are aiding and abetting crimes against Muslims with their silence.

Zarif criticized "those who prevent citizens of Muslim countries from entering their countries," referring to US President Donald Trump and "those who prevent the use of Islamic symbols in their countries," meaning Europeans.

"Unfortunately those who claim to be promoting freedom of speech are both suppressing the freedom of expression of Muslims and allowing all forms of insult against Muslims in the name of the freedom of expression," he said. 

"And we are seeing the consequences of this in various parts of the West," Zarif added.

The minister said the OIC emergency meeting in Istanbul came on Iran's request during his phone conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu last week after the New Zealand massacre. 

"Our Turkish friends, given the sensitivity they have toward the issue, announced holding this ministerial meeting within a couple of hours after our conversation. This was a very good step taken by the Turkish government," Zarif said. 

"At this meeting, we plan to try to establish a consensus not only to condemn this (terrorist attack in New Zealand), but also to take necessary measures for the Islamic countries to prevent the repetition of such events," he said.

"With OIC ministers in Turkey; all condemn barbaric Christchurch terror against Muslims & seek to unite against dangerous tide of racism & Islamophobia in the West," Zarif tweeted later.

In his speech to the OIC meeting, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for a global fight against rising Islamophobia, saying Muslim nations cannot allow "this brutal terror attack to be forgotten."

"Just as humanity fought against anti-Semitism after the Holocaust disaster, it should fight against rising Islamophobia in the same determined fashion," Erdogan said. 

"Right now we are facing Islamophobia and Muslim hatred," he said, adding far-right neo-Nazi groups should be treated as terrorists in the same way as Daesh extremists.

The Turkish president also said the reaction and empathy shown by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern following the attack should be an example to world leaders.

New Zealand’s foreign minister arrived in Turkey early Friday for “substantial” talks after comments made by Erdogan over the killing sparked a diplomatic spat between the nations.

Representatives from the UN, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also participated in the event.

The growing threat from white supremacist terrorism

As New Zealand’s Muslims offer their first Friday prayers today after last Friday’s massacre in Christchurch, the sad reality is that racism is very much alive today.  It was only yesterday that the world observed International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the fact that such a day exists is a damning indictment on humanity. Fascist racists are among us. 

Their existence is proof that human beings as a whole have still not reached the peak of civilization. The savagery is still with us. Confirming its existence is the Christchurch carnage. That was not the beginning. It was seen in slavery colonialism, in the South African apartheid, the continuing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian lands, attacks on churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. The barbarism is also seen in the increasing popularity of the white nationalism or supremacist political ideology in the West.

Guilty, yes, we are. Last Friday’s terror attack happened because our education systems have failed to inculcate universal fraternity. It failed to teach the 28-year-old terrorist that all human beings are equal. Our value systems have been denigrated by the cancer of ‘us versus them’ – us superior, them inferior.  As a result of this warped value system, we rush to defend attacks on racial and religious communities as freedom of expression.
For instance, Dante’s Divine Comedy depicts the Muslim prophet and Islam’s fourth Caliph as undergoing punishment in hell.  Paintings based on the poem portray the prophet as a man split in half, with his entrails hanging out. Such despicable works promoting hatred are defended as freedom of expression. Even today insulting Islam and its prophet draws little condemnation in the so-called enlightened West. Despite worldwide protests in 2012, YouTube still defends the hosting of a movie depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the worst possible manner that a wicked and slanderous mind could imagine. YouTube claims that the movie falls within 
its guidelines.

Then, there was a video game named ‘Muslim Massacre: The Game of Modern Religious Genocide’.  The aim of the popular game marketed in 2008 -- against the backdrop of 9/11 -- was to kill all the Muslims who appear on the screen with an arsenal of the most destructive weapons. The winner was hailed as the American hero.  Protests failed to take the game off the shelf, as, in the name of entertainment, the game promoted racism and poisoned young minds. 
Then there is a continuous supply of Hollywood movies and tele-series, with the Islamophobic message that Muslims are bad and, therefore, killing them is not only fair but must be done to cleanse society. All in the name of freedom of expression.

Such tolerance of hate expressions makes white supremacist terrorists into believing that there is wider acceptance in societies they grow up for racial attacks on Muslims. The terrorist who carried out the carnage last Friday believed that he was doing it on behalf of an international network of Islamophobe Fascists, with whom he had openly collaborated for years. 

His 74-page manifesto which he uploaded on social media is a ‘Mein Kampf’ written for like-minded Fascists. Investigations showed that he had contacts with the so-called Knight Templars, a self-style supremacist group linked to the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, whose victims were largely university students who had a liberal and progressive outlook towards accommodating the ‘other’.

Just as the Christchurch terrorist was prompted to violence by the white supremacists, the Islamic terrorists are motivated by war-mongering preachers while extremists in this country, India, Myanmar, Israel, the US and elsewhere are incited by racist rabble-rousers into committing violence against the ‘other”. 

It is in this context that yesterday’s UN day theme assumes significance.  The theme ‘Mitigating and countering rising nationalist populism and extreme supremacist ideologies’ was adopted following concerns about the worldwide rise of extreme political ideology, euphemistically called populism. 
Today, in Europe and the US, anti-immigrant politicians’ views are not far from those espoused by the Christchurch terrorist. Nuke Mecca is a popular refrain of some of these extremists. In Australia, of which the Christchurch killer is a citizen, politician publicly expressing Islamophobic ideas or demonizing Muslims is not unusual.  Australia’s One-Nation Party leader Pauline Hanson told Parliament that her country was in danger of being swamped by Muslims. In New Zealand, progressive Prime Minister Jacinda Ardener, who won worldwide accolades for her humanistic handling of the post-carnage crisis, is unfortunately tainted by her coalition with the New Zealand First Party, which has called for measures to stop migrants from Asia and the Middle East.
American historian, writer, and commentator Daniel Pipes is an open Islamophobe. He recommends increased profiling of American Muslims and Arabs to cope with the threat of “militant” Islam. 

He had repeated the false claim that then President Barack Obama was a former Muslim who “practiced Islam.” Piples campaigned against the construction of an Islamic centre near the ground zero in New York, warning that the proposed centre would spread Islamist jihadi ideology.  President Donald Trump, who is as anti-immigrant as Pipes, courted controversy in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks for saying that ‘white nationalism is good’ and that ‘they are not a growing threat’. Critics say his statements or tweets avoided any condemnation of the white supremacist ideology of the terrorist; neither did he express explicit sympathy with the grieving relatives of the victims. 

Though a White House spokesman later said the president was not a white supremacist, what is found between the lines in his statement only encourages more white supremacists to carry out heinous crimes. In the US, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish non-profit group campaigning against racism, notes that white supremacist attacks have seen an alarming rise in the past two years during the Trump Presidency. Some of the high profile incidents were the attack on the Unite the Right march at Charlottesville in Virginia, in August 2017 and last year’s synagogue attack that claimed the lives of 11 people in Pittsburgh. 

The League said it found white supremacist murders in the US “more than doubled in 2017. 

“This attack (in New Zealand) underscores a trend that ADL has been tracking: that modern white supremacy is an international threat that knows no borders, being exported and globalised like never before,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. The League’s statistics and statement are a serious indictment on the Trump’s presidency.  No wonder the Christchurch killer had described Trump, as “a symbol of renewed white identity.” 

New Zealand’s Premier Ardener this week called for international effort to confront extremism in all its forms. The need of the hour, in keeping with the UN’s anti-racial discrimination day theme, is the convening of an international conference to discuss and adopt measures to stop Christchurch-like massacres.