It is hard to find words to do justice to events as tragic as what happened in Christchurch last week, but there are some words that we should insist on using: “far-right terrorism”, “white supremacy”, “Islamophobia” and “racism” among them. And we should call out those who neglect to use such words when they express their shock and sympathy, especially when they venture to explain how something like this could have happened, or when they try to shift the blame onto Muslim communities themselves.
When Theresa May and Donald Trump express their sympathy, for example, we should pause to question why they finally seem capable of referring to ‘Muslims’ as ‘people’, yet can’t quite bring themselves to refer to such people as Muslims in this particular instance. Referring to “#Christchurch” in such tweets of solidarity is self-explanatory and uncontroversial, but the place name is both aptly religious and simultaneously ‘erasing’ of Islamic connotations, and thus ‘othering’ of the victims who were not just people in this instance; they were Muslims at prayer in a mosque, and they were killed for being so. Their Muslimness is hardly irrelevant.
When national broadcasters respond to the attack by giving a platform to far-right Islamophobes, by questioning Muslim representatives on whether their communities have done enough to distance themselves from Islamist terrorism, and by inviting right-wing journalists to keep score on the number of victims of terror attacks against ‘them’ and those against ‘us’, we should be rightly outraged.
