Defusing tribal tensions our most urgent mission
THE massacre of 50 Muslims in Christchurch last Friday has set off a savage witch hunt in Australia for politicians “complicit” in this horror.
But the shooting of three people in Utrecht on Monday should help us to better understand why our world now seems to crackle with danger.
We already have some clues to what motivated the Christchurch killer – beyond the screamingly obvious fact that he hated Muslims.
We know he was an overweight loner who was bullied at school. And we know he’s described himself not as a “Right-winger”, as the media insists, but an “ecofascist” and a communist “depending on the definition” who most admired China.
The Left’s hunt for scapegoats in Australia who allegedly helped make his murderous rampage more possible – Pauline Hanson, far Right Senator Fraser Anning, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton – is just a nasty get square that sheds light on nothing but the rank opportunism of their accusers.
The killer spent only 45 days of the past three years in Australia and credits no Australian for turning his mind to white supremacism.
He blames most of all things he saw while travelling in Europe – not just Muslim immigration but terrorist attacks, citing specifically the murder-by-truck in Stockholm by an Islamic State supporter who’d lost his job.
He is a loser who in his sick mind preferred to think of
himself as an avenger of his tribe or “race” – the white race – which he considered under attack from another tribe.
And all around we see more of this dangerous tribalism, with its xenophobia, touchone-touch-all mentality and savage eye-for-an-eye brutality.
Already the Islamic State has pledged revenge. Already Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is showing video footage of the Christchurch mosque attacks at election rallies and shouting that the gunman had others behind him in an “organised” attack.
Christian visitors trying to make the region Christian again would be “returned in caskets” like “your grandfathers” – a reference to the Anzacs at Gallipoli.
Tribalists on both sides are feeding excitedly off each other and we who want to peacefully talk through our differences seem increasingly isolated and threatened.
What helps to make those clashes seem more common and dangerously close is that Western nations are increasingly multi-tribal and less united. The vulnerable and wounded who are always with us have much more opportunity to take offence at other tribes and to feel besieged.
Take Gokmen Tanis, the Utrecht shooter and a Turkish immigrant from a devout family.
Tanis took his gun – thank God he couldn’t buy a semiautomatic in Holland, as the Christchurch killer could in New Zealand – and shot dead teenage waitress Roos Verschuur at a tram stop. Two men who rushed to help her were also murdered and five others wounded.
Details are still scarce. At first police wrongly thought Gokmen had shot a relative, but then said they’d found what seemed to be a jihadist note he’d left behind.
Neighbours, though, say he was just a drug user and “scum”.
But there’s already evidence that Tanis, too, was a deadly spark created by the friction of two cultures scraping hard against each other.
In 2011, he was walking down street in Utrecht with a Muslim friend when a blonde model, Chantal Hanse, wearing a tight top and low cut jeans, stopped them for a “vox pop” question for a television station.
Here was a real culture clash – libertarian Holland meets an immigrant from repressive Turkey.
Tanis: Half your a--e is open.
Friend: Yes, everyone is looking at you. Everyone is looking at your backside … What a slut … What a filthy station that is, say. Always rotten comments about Islam and about Moroccans … Whore.
Tanis: That are democrats. You are democrats, hey? Backside high. (Breasts) open …
Friend: And I haven’t yet said anything about your boss.
Tanis: Is a Jew? Do you know what a Jew is?
Hanse: You say I’m a democrat but you don’t know that.
Tanis: Of course you’re a democrat. Check how you look, mate. What are you then? Sharia? … Give me that. (Grabs microphone.) This is a real cancer Mongol, this … Close your backside … Friend: Goodbye, slut.
Is it such a surprise that this loser and petty criminal – torn between disgust and fascination for a beautiful “foreign” woman dressed to attract – was six years later charged with rape?
Or that now, still free on bail, he should even kill Dutch people, claiming, perhaps, he’s actually also a warrior for his tribe, or faith?
Scapegoating our politicians gets us nowhere. Understanding our tribal tensions – and making one people from this uneasy whole – is our most urgent work. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights