Haters play into jihadist hands
WHEN something like the horrific attack outside the Palace of Westminster in London last week unfolds, responses from world leaders, authorities, other politicians, media commentators, experts, and the general public reveal a great deal.
After all, how people behave during a crisis is what defines them as human beings.
Despite the fact that 52-year-old Khalid Masood, the man behind the wheel of the car that mowed down innocent pedestrians and who wielded the knives that killed police officer Keith Palmer, was, like the majority of terrorists, “homegrown” – a local born in Kent – people like Donald Trump Jnr, Pauline Hanson, Nigel Farage and others have seen fit to use this tragedy to not only score political mileage but once again point the finger at all Muslims, stoking fear, hatred, and dividing communities.
Not long after news of the attack broke, Trump Jnr took a quote made by London’s first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, last year completely out of context, claiming he was brushing off terrorism as a fact of urban living.
On the contrary, Khan was reflecting on the dangers facing major Western cities and how the public must be both vigilant and support security services – perfectly valid and reasonable points. Hanson took it further. In a brief video, she not only said sympathising with #PrayForLondon was pointless, but suggested we’d be better off supporting her new movement: #Pray4MuslimBan.
Farage went on record blaming multiculturalism for the attack and used it as an opportunity to praise Trump’s stance on extreme vetting of immigrants.
What he conveniently overlooked, apart from Masood’s British nationality, was the fact the victims of his cowardly rampage were mostly foreign.
Then there was the photo of a young Muslim woman, to my eyes clearly distressed, moving swiftly past a victim being tended by professionals, which was uploaded on Twitter to highlight her “indifference” towards the dead and injured.
Photos showing Anglo-looking men and women doing exactly the same thing attracted no condemnation.
The breathtaking recklessness and callousness of these responses in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the apportioning of blame, attempts to further political agendas and demonising of Muslims while stirring hatred speaks volumes. Not about the attack or perpetrator, but about the people making them. Who are the real monsters? Masood didn’t drive the vehicle with the intention to only kill Christians or Anglos. His purpose was to literally drive fear and division into the community, rend the social fabric and have us regarding each other with fear and suspicion. Which is exactly what we’re doing. In looking at responses to this latest appalling incident, I sometimes wonder why those who spout hate, suspicion of and encourage violence towards all Muslims aren’t treated by the authorities in the same way as suspected terrorists. Aren’t they also fuelling terror and social discord?
Malcolm Turnbull went so far as to claim Hanson was inciting hatred and “doing what ISIS wants” and called for a halt to her relentless demonisation of the entire Muslim community.
Cries to “ban Muslims” or the burka, or any other symbol of a religion that’s inextricably entwined with terrorism, fails to understand this kind of exclusionary politics and social partition will achieve nothing but fuel further conflict and alienation.
Now more than ever, we need to unite to defeat evil, be part of the solution, not exacerbate the problem.
Just to put it in perspective, in the US out of a total of 230,000 killings since September 11, 123 people have been killed by Muslim terrorists. The rest were murdered by angry spouses, white supremacists, psychopaths, drunks, gang members, drug dealers etc.
British columnist Sir Simon Jenkins told the BBC what’s now being ascribed to this specific crime is “this tremendous clutter of politics, Islam and religion. It’s quite wrong and it’s a new phenomenon, not on the part of the terrorists’’. In other words – that’s our doing. As long as there are those who persist in ignoring all the other human and social attributes we share with our Muslim friends, neighbours and citizens, whether it’s to profit politically, publicly, or for justifying divisive and abusive commentary and practices – then the jihadists’ work is being done for them.