The day that changed the world should be film

IThe events can be seen as the end of an epoch that needs some reflection while it remains fresh in the memory.

f I could write a screenplay for a movie on the Christchurch mosque massacres, Jacinda Ardern would be its heroine. It is hard to see how she could not be. There were many heroes that day in and around the mosques — and in the police car that stopped the killer — but Ardern’s response had a profound effect on the world.

Two years on, it’s even possible to say she changed history that day. The religious fanaticism and the precautions taken against it that made the first decades of a new millennium feel like a replay of the first centuries of the old one, no longer dominate the public mind.

Part of the reason, of course, is that exactly a year after that terrible day, March 15, 2019, the world was closing its borders to a virus that has inhibited our movement much more drastically than airport baggage checks and bollards in public places ever did.

So, with respect to the objections expressed this week by survivors and relatives of victims of the mosque attacks, it is not too soon for a movie to be made that reflects what happened that day. The events can be seen as the end of an epoch that needs some reflection while it remains fresh in the memory.

It is also hard to see how the story could fail to do justice to the victims and the survivors, as they fear. Thanks largely to our Prime Minister, it can truthfully be the kind of story Hollywood does — a heart-warming triumph of good over evil, humanity over hate, a new recognition of people previously regarded with mystery and suspicion.

Being Hollywood, the producers will invest the movie with needless sentimentality and they will no doubt contrive some scenes that conceivably could have happened but didn’t, just to give the story more dramatic shape and clarity but, in essence, the story will be true.

At least it will be true for Western audiences. I think most of us can attest that our awareness of Muslims in our midst underwent a profound change that day. Until this week I thought New Zealand’s Islamic leaders saw the outcome the same way. They spoke in those terms in the immediate aftermath, and they call the victims martyrs, which they were.

But this week they told a conference they have suffered more antagonism on social media since the massacres than they received before it. If that causes the movie-makers to revise their theme it will be a pity. Idiots on Twitter should not be mistaken for public opinion.

The survivors and families are still grieving, still angry that threats they received were not taken more seriously by the New Zealand police and they have heard the directors of the nation’s security admit the spy agencies paid too little attention to white racist fanatics on the far right.

The movie-makers will probably lay those facts on very thick as they build up the drama. New Zealand will be portrayed as a typical Western society where women and girls in burqa and hijab venture on to streets to be met with obvious disapproval that does not always remain silent.

Muslim men will be seen in working environments where they keep their religion quiet as they listen to their workmates blame it for all the terrorism in the world.

The movie will have to show what they are talking about. Footage of bombings in European cities will be spliced in. The twin towers will fall again. Isis will stand over captives in orange jumpsuits to execute them on cellphones.

And Donald Trump will rage. The film-makers will have a field day with video from his campaign rallies as he ran for President in 2016. He will be seen frequently, vehemently, resolving to stop immigration from Muslim countries, “until we figure out what the hell is going on”.

But there would also be a place in my screenplay for liberal politicians and cartoonists who sided with the Charlie Hebdo victims, defending gratuitous provocation in the name of free speech. “Je suis Charlie” would become an admission of complicity in the tension of the times.

The movie’s main offender should not be Trump but another US President, George W. Bush, whose need of vengeance for 9/11 and ignorance of Middle Eastern politics produced the unprovoked invasion of Iraq and all that followed.

History might date the 21st century’s epoch of terrorism from 9/11/2001 to 3/15/2019, the day New Zealand’s beautiful young Prime Minister went to Christchurch, put on a headscarf, embraced the relatives and declared the killer was “not us”.

Social critics did not agree. Their blame brought it home to me that Muslims had never deserved blame either. That day changed me, changed New Zealand.

I think it changed the world.