The path that led to Christchurch

After two decades of ruthless political demonisation of Islam, none of us should be shocked that the Christchurch terrorist was a white Australian

THERE is not much left to say about the horror of Christchurch that has not already been said.

You could write about the pain you feel for the city you were born in, a city that has already suffered so much from two earthquakes. What has Christchurch done to deserve this, you ask? Why Christchurch?

Or you could dwell on the type of warped thinking that would lead a man to gun down 50 defenceless people, including a three year old child, in the place where they should have felt most safe, at the time of the week that is most holy to them.

Or one could admire the decency and dignity of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden in one of her nation’s greatest moments of crisis. It is not so long ago that critics were saying she was too young and that, as a woman she was too emotional, for the job. And when she announced she was pregnant, they called for her to step aside, arguing it would be impossible for her to balance her job with the responsibilities of bringing up a child.

Yet here she is, still breastfeeding her nine-month-old daughter, and she has been able to display more gravitas and empathy and leadership in the past few days than Donald Trump has been able to muster in more than two years as US President in response to the Parklands school massacre or any other of dozens of violent incidents.

Or you could express your unity and solidarity with the Muslim community, both here and in New Zealand, and around the world — a community that has been demonised for more than two decades for political gain. A community that can no longer feel safe and must be wondering where the next attack will come from, but which somehow manages not to give in to violence and hatred.

One thing you will not talk about is the man who did this, if he can be called a man. And you will never name him.

So much has been said and written since the two mosques were attacked, so many millions of words, but after a few days it seems there is still a lot to say after all.

THE question everyone is asking is how did we get here?

The Islamic-Australian [why is that prefix even necessary? Andrew Bolt is never referred to as a “Christian-Australian”] writer, broadcaster and academic Waleed Aly spoke for many of us in his emotional piece to camera for The Project on Friday night:

The most dishonest thing would be to say that I’m shocked . . . There’s nothing about what happened in Christchurch today that shocks me . . . If we’re honest, we all know this has been coming.

Like Aly, I was not surprised that a white Australian man would walk into a mosque and gun down dozens of people. Sad but not surprised.

The only surprise was where it took place, in quiet, peaceful, conservative, and subdued Christchurch.

Twenty years of Australian politics got us to the Christchurch massacre. Twenty years of dog whistling, 20 years of using Muslims as political bogeymen, 20 years of creating hysteria and scaremongering, of exploiting xenophobia and bigotry for political ends.

Jacinda Ardern rightly says the killer is “not one of us”. She is right that he does not represent the values the Kiwi PM represents. Largely, New Zealand has remained a tolerant, accepting country which has resisted the tug of right wing extremism.

But the same can’t be said for Australia, where racism and bigotry has become mainstream over the past two decades. Sadly, he is one of us.

You could say the seeds for Christchurch were sown with the Tampa affair in 2001. But you need to go back even further. Back to 1996, when a woman called Pauline Hanson was endorsed by the Liberal Party as its candidate for the federal electorate of Oxley.

Keep going back even further to 1988, when the then-Leader of the Opposition, John Howard, spoke publicly against Asian immigration.

This seam of virulent racism has been running through white Australia since the first European settlement in 1788. Since then the victims have included the Irish, Chinese, Jews, southern Europeans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and today, Africans and Muslims. There is always a fresh group to be vilified and abused.

It has been a slippery slope for a long time. Howard begat Hanson and Abbott; Abbott begat Dutton and Morrison; and Hanson begat Fraser Anning; and Anning and his lynch mob begat the Christchurch terrorist.

It was inevitable that killer was always going to be Australian, raised in an Australia where Islamophobia is no longer shameful, but a part of everyday political discourse. Recall that this man was 10-years-old when Tampa happened. Throughout his adolescence and adult life, the dominant threads of Australian political and public discourse have been racism and bigotry, and a demonisation of other cultures and races, whether Muslims from the sub-continent, Arabs, Asians, or Africans.

He came of age in an era when Muslims are defamed on an almost daily basis in the Australian media, most commonly be drawing links between their religion and terrorism. According to research by the One Path Network, an Islamic-Australian media organisation, 2891 negative articles about Islam were published in News Corporation newspapers alone in 2017.

Scott Morrison is now desperately trying to backtrack, but he is haunted by his own past words and actions, particularly during his time as Shadow Immigration spokesman and as Immigration Minister. It is a more than happy coincidence for Morrison that the asylum seekers he has imprisoned for half a decade on Manus and Nauru are also Muslim. Two for the price of one.

As Bernard Keane wrote this week, “the Coalition is desperate to pretend it hasn’t been engaged in race-baiting and Islamophobia for two decades — but it is now deeply embedded in the way its MPs communicate”.

Crying crocodile tears, Morrison decries the politicisation of the Christchurch massacre, and deplores the tribalism of Australian public debate. He says now is not the time for blame games.

But he’s wrong. Now is absolutely the time for blame, and the blame rests totally with his side of politics.

Of course it’s political, when politicians from the right have spent years attacking Muslims with hateful words, and normalising the evil that swirled around in the Christchurch killer’s mind. It’s political when parts of the killer’s 72-page “manifesto” read like a transcript of a Peter Dutton press conference. Words really do have consequences.

Don’t blame the excreble Fraser Anning as if he is the sole perpetrator of this hate speech in Parliament. Anning is a fringe dweller who will be booted out of parliament as soon as the election is held. But the same things are said by mainstream politicians from the major parties on the centre right almost every day. When government ministers talk of “African gangs” or “Islamic terrorists in our midst”, they are sowing the seeds that eventually legitimises the Fraser Annings of the world.

And divisive tribalism is a political strategy perfected by the Liberals — a tactic of which is the polarising culture wars. All middle ground has been lost since the Abbott-Dutton tribe drove Malcolm Turnbull and the few remaining moderates from the Liberal Party.

If we are to now apply the same standard to leaders in the white Australian community that bred this sick individual, then Morrison and Dutton need to own the Christchurch terrorist as much as they have demanded Muslim clerics take responsibility for individuals like Man Haron Monis, the perpetrator of the Martin Place siege.

EQUALLY sickening is the hypocrisy of media companies that are now blaming Facebook, YouTube and Google for allowing the spread of hate speech, but fail to own up to the fact that some of their columnists, commentators and broadcasters have been spreading toxic Islamophboia and racism for years, giving it a platform well before social media came along.

Without a doubt, social media has helped to breed the twisted ideology that led to Christchurch and there need to be tighter restrictions on the amplification of hate speech by social media, but the campaign to curb digital platforms is a case of blameshifting of the highest level.

But what ends up on Facebook or Twitter almost always begins in columns or broadcasts on commercial media. This hasn’t happened in a vacuum. You would not have to search very hard to find similar words to those used in the killer’s “manifesto” in an Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine column.

If the killer was not directly radicalised by the writing of people like Bolt or the screeching of Alan Jones (whose call to arms against Sydney Muslims sparked the worst race riot in Australian history), he still would have found inspiration from them that he was not alone.

But even our beloved ABC has not been immune from providing a platform to the promoters of white supremacy, most notoriously when Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon was given an hour on 4 Corners last year to promote his warped agenda.

It’s not good enough for the host of a breakfast TV show to give Pauline Hanson a hard time following the Christchurch massacre, when the same show has given her a weekly platform for years with puff piece interviews for her to spout her agenda.

“Someone at Sunrise made a decision years ago that a person who has called Islam “a disease”, that has said we were being “swamped by Muslims”, called for a ban on Muslim immigration (now “modified” to extreme vetting) and a royal commission into Islam, has said there was no way to tell the difference between a “good” or “bad” Muslim and that Islam was “not compatible” with Australia, was suitable to be a regular guest to talk about whatever was in her head,” Gay Alcorn wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday.

Sunrise host David Koch and other guilt ridden media identities can now try to mop up the mess they’ve created but the reality is they will never have to wear the consequences of the Islamophobia they have given a platform to in the same way the Muslim community does. They will never have to walk into their place of worship fearing an attack like Christchurch or be abused or spat on when they walk down the street in a religious head covering.

But when someone like the Guardian writer Owen Jones suggests that the British media was institutionally racist, they are howled down by an industry that is incapable of self-reflection.

Scott Morrison’s cowardly threat to sue Waleed Aly for defamation following his editorial on The Project is an almost text book response by the right to any criticism of the language it uses to marginalise a whole range of groups in our society. It is as if the act of criticising white supremacists is a bigger crime than the violence inflicted in the name of white supremacy. And even while Morrison issues legal threats to challenge Aly’s right to free speech, barrackers on the right claim their own freedom of speech is at risk from those who want to curb hate speech.

And all of this sideshow diminishes what happened in Christchurch.

As Paddy Manning wrote this week, it is pointless to expect those columnists and broadcasters to change their tune. “The solution,” he concluded, “is to usher new talent into mainstream media, from a more diverse background, as fast as humanly possible.”

More voices like Waleed Aly’s would be a good start.

THE Christchurch killer is not an isolated case when mosques and synogogues around Australia are regularly attacked and vandalised with impunity.

It is not an isolated case when an elected member of Parliament, who happens to be a non-practising Muslim, is abused and harassed while going about his business as a private citizen in a pub.

It is not an isolated case when another politician can walk into the Senate dressed, as a joke, in religious clothing as part of a campaign to have the burqa banned.

It’s not an isolated case when yet another Senator gives a speech calling for a “final solution” to the Islamic population in Australia, and Senators from the government side rush to shake his hand afterwards. Or when a parliamentary motion that “it’s okay to be white” (a well-known racist trope) is passed with the support of the government benches.

Or when a regular guest on a morning TV show openly calls for a ban on Muslim immigrants “because I want to feel safe”.

Or when a young Muslim writer who questions the Anzac myth is forced to flee the country because of a campaign against her fuelled by the national daily newspaper.

And it is definitely not an isolated case when another young Muslim woman hoping for a career in the media feels she can no longer work for a 24-hour news service that regularly gives a soap box to those preaching hate against her own community.

“Over the past few years, I was playing a role – no matter how small – in a network whose tone I knew would help legitimise radical views present in the fringes of our society,” says 19-year-old Rashna Farrukh.

BUT what do we expect when the president of the most powerful nation in the world is a man who openly courts white supremacists and promotes white nationalism?

Donald Trump has enacted Islamophobia through his travel ban preventing entry into the US of people from five majority Muslim nations. He has given succor to neo-nazis by refusing to condemn participants in the 2017 Charlottesville rallies, during which an anti-nazi protester was killed.

Through his words, Trump is pushing people towards violence so it was no surprise to read that Trump was praised in the Christchurch killer’s “manifesto” as “a symbol of renewed white identity”.

Trump’s reaction to the massacre was a subdued “so what?” shrug of his shoulders, but within 24 hours of the Christchurch massacre, he was railing on Twitter against “political correctness” and for the reinstatement on Fox News of Janine Pirro, who was suspended by the TV network for repeated Islamophobic statements.

Repeatedly, Trump has downplayed acts of terrorism by white, right-wing extremists but shown no compunction at calling out violent acts by non-white, non-Christians, even though research by the US Anti-Defamation League shows murderous violence by right-wing extremists is on the rise.

The ADL reports that over the last decade, a total of 73.3 per cent of all extremist-related fatalities can be linked to domestic right-wing extremists, while 23.4 per cent can be attributed to Islamic extremists. The ADL also found that right-wing extremists were involved in 50 murders in the US in 2018 — the highest number since Timothy McVeigh bombed an Oklahoma City federal government building in 1995, and a 35 per cent increase on 2017.

Back in Australia, until last week, the Coalition was gearing up to run another race-baiting election campaign, one based on fear and hatred. The Press Gallery commentariat was openly salivating at the idea of a ‘Tampa redux’ election — so much more fun for a political reporter than an election about real issues, such as insecure jobs or wage stagnation.

If there is any silver lining at all to be gained from the Christchurch killings, it is that a race election is now virtually impossible. Surely, no credible political party would dare associate itself with the kind of language that can spawn a mass murderer — although Peter Dutton has given it his best shot by attempting to draw some false equivalence between right wing extremism and the Greens.

The Coalition will have to find another way to scare the punters into voting for them, another group to demonise. Unions perhaps?

IF the Christchurch killer’s warped mind thought his senseless act would help to advance his anti-Islamic agenda, then he was utterly wrong. Instead, it has united decent people against Islamophobia.

He sought to further marginalise Muslims. But when the New Zealand Prime Minister says an Islamic prayer — in Arabic — in her national parliament, and an Imam leads another prayer of healing in the same place, then he has failed.

But while he may have failed to divide us this time, there will be more like him to come. Many more angry, sick, violent young white men, turned into monsters by the hate speech of politicians and media identities.

The Holocaust was the result of good people doing nothing while Hitler’s Nazis went about their evil ways.

It is too late to prevent the murder of those 50 innocent people in Christchurch, but we must use that tragedy to take stock and act decisively to stop the spread of hate any further.