Name this hate for what it is
POLITICIANS of the Left had no trouble saying last month’s attack on two Christchurch mosques was an attack on Muslims.
But they have lots of trouble saying the attack on three Sri Lankan churches on Easter Sunday was an attack on Christians.
Is there clearer evidence of the Left’s fear of offending Muslims and its dishonest refusal to admit there’s a war against Christians?
When a lone white racist killed 50 Muslims in Christchurch, Greens leader Richard Di Natale tweeted: “We stand with the Muslim community.”
But when Muslim terrorists murdered 321 people at three churches and several hotels on Christianity’s holiest day, Di Natale refused to even acknowledge Christians were the target.
“We are deeply saddened by the targeting of people gathered in peace,” he tweeted. People generally.
No mention of Di Natale standing with the Christian community. No sign, either, of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wearing a crucifix in sympathy, the way she wore a headscarf after Christchurch.
These are not isolated examples.
Labor leader Bill Shorten in responding to Christchurch
initially called it an attack on “innocent worshippers of the Muslim faith”.
But when it came to Sri Lanka, Shorten mourned the “innocent people killed or injured at prayer”, without noting they were Christian.
There was the same evasion from former US president Barack Obama. After Christchurch, he said he grieved with “the Muslim community”, but he’s now described the Sri Lanka dead as just “tourists and Easter worshippers”. No mention of Christians.
Same with fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, the former presidential candidate.
“My heart breaks for New Zealand and the global Muslim community,” she said after Christchurch, condemning “Islamophobia”.
But Clinton responded to the Easter Sunday attacks by minimising the significance of the day chosen by the terrorists, calling it a “holy weekend for many faiths”, and describing the victims as “Easter worshippers”.
There was no condemnation of “Christophobia”.
Journalists of the Left were no better. After Christchurch, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons tweeted repeatedly in condemnation. He tweeted nothing about the Sri Lanka attacks, which killed an Australian mother and child.
After Christchurch, Waleed Aly filmed an emotional fourminute video for The Project saying he wasn’t surprised by the massacre because Muslims going to mosques felt like “fish in a barrel”. He later hugged Ardern, who’d done so much to identify with Muslims.
But after Sri Lanka, Aly took two days before he briefly acknowledged Islamic terrorists were blamed, but then damned their “ideology” without acknowledging their religious motivation.
Nor did he say that such Islamist attacks felt inevitable, or that Christians in churches felt like fish in a barrel.
And I guarantee that the Slate online magazine, owned by the publishers of the Washington Post, will not match the headline it ran after Christchurch, “Shootings Should Implicate All White Australians”, with an updated version after Sri Lanka: “Bombings Should Implicate All Muslims.”
Most readers would sense in their bones this double standards of the media and political elite when describing attacks on Muslims and on Christians. So what is driving this?
I suspect many of the Left were reluctant to declare Christians were the target because that would also suggest who wanted them dead and why.
The answer — Muslim terrorists, because they hate Christians — is too awkward. Australians, most still Christians, might get even more nervous about our fastgrowing Islamic minority.
What’s more, the religious motivation of the terrorists would be harder to deny and that will not do.
See, ideologues of the Left want Muslims for allies in attacking the West and its traditions. They need those allies to have similar political grievances, not religious ones.
Second, to admit that Christians are the target of terrorism cuts across the Left’s popular narrative that Christianity is oppressive.
To have Christians seen instead as the oppressed would undercut the crusade — driven hard by the Greens — to drive Christianity from the public space.
That explains not just why Christians blown up by Muslims in church at Easter are merely “people at prayer”, but why the media now eagerly repeats the lie that the Sri Lankan attack was a reprisal for Christchurch.
That is obviously false. A highly co-ordinated attack on seven targets, using so many suicide bombers and so much explosives, all with foreign backing, is not something whipped up in a month.
But how useful that lie is. How useful to blame some white anti-Islam bigot, after all, for the original sin. That does finally fit the preferred story. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights