Double-Standards and the Blame Game

How many times after a terror attack by a jihadist have you been told to not blame Islam, or all Muslims, for the attack; or have been told that Islam is a religion of peace; or perhaps even heard others suggest that the fault really lies with the West because of a history of colonialism, exploitation, racism, or what not?

      Perhaps the most famous example of this was George W. Bush’s “Islam is peace” speech following the attacks of 9/11. Bush asserted that "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.  That’s not what Islam is all about.  Islam is peace.  These terrorists don’t represent peace.  They represent evil and war."

     You may remember the November 13-14, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people and wounded 494. ISIS took credit for the attacks. Within a few days, Time Magazine published an essay written by Serene Jones pleading that we "Don’t Blame Islam for the Paris Terrorist Attacks." Jones wrote:

        Rather than identifying the group as the gang of thugs they are, when members of our media and politicians label ISIS attacks as religious, it misattributes to their actions a well-conceived moral frame, rooted in scriptures and anchored in tradition. If we believe they have these—which they do not—we give them more “religious” power than they deserve. 

       This oversimplification also masks the hard truth that this violence stems from problems much deeper and broader than any particular religion or ideology. Its myriad political and social sources must be analyzed if we seek to stem the violence.

      Following the October 31, 2017, terror attack in New York City that left 8 dead, Mehreen Kasana, pleaded, "[b]ut no matter what information comes out about the attacker who killed eight people on Oct. 31, it's important not to blame Islam for the terror in NYC." She also wrote:

       So real is this danger of being singled out after such a terror attack that Simran Jeet Singh, a professor of religion at Texas' Trinity University, urged people to keep minorities in their thoughts. On Tuesday, Singh tweeted, "New Yorkers, remember that in times of crisis, marginalized communities are vulnerable to violent backlash. Please take care of one another."

But as you continue reading Kasana's op-ed, something funny happens: the author that was only just pleading not to blame a particular ideology for terrorism suddenly begins to blame a particular ideology.

      Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Islamophobia in the United States that people often forget is that the most heinous and grisly incidents of terrorism and mass violence weren't carried out by Muslims — they were carried out by domestic right-wing extremists.

      According to a comprehensive study conducted by the nonpartisan think-tank New America, more American lives were lost to domestic right-wing terrorism than to Islamic terrorism from 2001 to 2015. That's over a decade of data, and yet the focus often seems to singularly fall on Muslims.

Apparently, September 11, 2001, was not, in the author's mind, a "heinous and grisly incident of terrorism and mass violence." She also does not include the Pulse Night Club shooting that left 49 dead and another 53 injured or the 2015 San Bernardino attack that left 14 dead and 24 injured.

      But this dichotomy shows up elsewhere. For instance, in response to the Christchurch attack, the Washington Post published an op-ed entitled, "In New Zealand, a soul-searching question: Are we as open minded as we think we are?" The author, Anna Fifield, goes on to write:

        ... the refrain that has been repeated constantly since the attacks, by everyone from the prime minister down, is: “This is not us.”  

        Some New Zealanders are now standing up to say, er, it kind of is us. 

       We are deluding ourselves, they say, to try to distance ourselves from the suspected shooter just because he’s Australian. He lived here, he trained at a rifle club here, he was supported here. 

       “We can’t pretend this was an aberration from overseas. The truth is it happened here, and it began with hate speech allowed to grow online,” Golriz Ghahraman, a Green MP who came to New Zealand from Iran as a refugee when she was 9 years old, said in parliament Wednesday.

      Sahar Ghumkhor writes at Al Jazeera about "The hypocrisy of New Zealand's 'this is not us' claim." She complains:

          As a Muslim who grew up in New Zealand, this statement [by the NZ prime minister] didn't sit well with me. Over the years, I've heard it repeated by Kiwis in a ritualistic fashion, always praising the values of multicultural society. I also hear similar self-congratulatory statements in Australia, where I'm now based. 

          This same narcissistic self-view has often prompted New Zealanders and Australians to declare that I must be "glad" to be in their respective countries. After all, they see Afghanistan, where I come from, as the land of "burqas", intolerance and fundamentalist violence. 

          In our "post"-colonial reality, racism still determines who "we" are and who "they" must be. It is what produces statements like "this is not us" that seek to absolve and reject responsibility and shame, and replace them with fragile innocence and even pride.
It is what preserves the comforting conviction that "extremism" and violence are only features of "backward" societies; "our" civilised societies in New Zealand, Australia and the West do not espouse such barbarism and the few of "us" who do, do not represent "us" and are not a product of "our" cultures.  

         What struck me about Ardern's statement - and the many others like it praising diversity, the welcoming nature of Kiwis, and the provincial shire with a small tight-knit community - is how dishonest it is.

She concludes that "Tarrant is not an aberration, he's not an exception; he is an integral part of the collective 'we' in New Zealand, Australia, and the 'West' - just like the followers of Trumpism are part and parcel of modern-day America."

       Latifa Akay expressed her outrage at The Guardian, wondering "Why was I asked to condemn Islamist violence days after Christchurch?"on a day that saw an Islamic terrorist attack in Utrecht, Netherlands. She bitterly complained that "Muslims are well used to being held collectively responsible for the violent acts of anyone identifying as Muslim, or indeed with any semblance of Muslim heritage," but then goes on to condemn Whites, generally, for what occurred at Christchurch:

         It is not useful to only associate white supremacy with the far right. White supremacy appears on our television screens with brutal acts such as the Christchurch massacre, but it is fed and nurtured in the fabric of our societies. 

         Hatred of Muslims was a central part of the white supremacist ideology that appears to have in part motivated the Christchurch terrorist. The less overt “liberal” Islamophobia that we see daily in media and politics may look very different – but the two cannot be divorced. The pattern is clear. If you purposefully cultivate the idea that a massively diverse group of people are violent, undeserving and “incompatible” with society, you dehumanise them. Dehumanisation allows for disposability, whether that is a terrorist gunning down 50 people in their place of worship, or states – including the UK – failing to intervene to save 45 people who died in the Mediterranean on the very same day trying to cross from Morocco to Spain.

       Similarly, Rachel Withers, writing at Slate, contends that "The Christchurch Shootings Should Implicate All White Australians."

I’m a white Australian. I know that blaming myself and my cohort is illogical, but I can’t escape the feeling that all of white Australia is implicated in the deaths—a white majority that has fomented and let foment hate. Though he may have labeled himself a European, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant was an Aussie through and through, growing up in a country town north of Sydney, steeped in mainstream Australian racism and our particular national brand of Islamophobia. He grew up in the same Murdoch-controlled mass media environment that the rest of us did—one that recently trashed Islam 2,891 times in a single year—and under the same governments, with prime ministers who have repeatedly stoked anti-Muslim sentiment for votes, with one major party making it central to their electoral strategy.

She continues:

White Australians must no longer tolerate those mainstream voices who give white supremacy a platform and megaphone. Instead of brushing aside the racism in our homeland, or pointing instead toward Trump and the United States, we must call out dog whistles in our own government, in our own backyard, every chance we get. We must condemn hate speech not just when someone like Anning goes “too far,” and we must deny visas to alt-right figures who come to our shores expecting a friendly welcome not just in the wake of right-wing terror attacks, but always. We must fight the normalization of Islamophobia. And above all we must accept responsibility for the hatred we have normalized. Rather than go easy on ourselves, we must go hard. 

     My take away from all of this is that it is not acceptable to blame an ideology--Islam--for Islamic terrorism, but it is perfectly okay to condemn a different ideology, or just white Westerners generally, for an attack against Muslims. I guess, as one commentary I recently read put it, "Any religion can be criticised – except Islam." And, I would add, no people or race can be criticized -- except whites.

      It is an interesting position for people to take since there clearly is a link between Islam and Islamic terrorism. As one analyst explained concerning the 9/11 attacks:

In the many discussions of the “root causes” of Islamist terrorism, Islam itself is rarely mentioned. But if you were to ask Bin Laden, he would say that his war is about the defence of Islam. We need not believe him but we should nevertheless listen to what our enemies are saying. Bin Laden bases justification of his war on a corpus of Muslim beliefs and he finds ammunition in the Koran to give his war Islamic legitimacy. He often invokes the “sword” verses of the Koran, which urge unprovoked attacks on infidels. Of course, that is a selective reading of the Koran and does not mean Islam is an inherently violent faith, but to believers the book is the word of God.

Yet, unlike China which has dealt harshly with its Muslim population, the West has not sought to ban Islam, shut down its Mosques, or prohibit Muslim speech, even when aimed against the West or Western institutions. Nevertheless, because of this one attack, we must now shut down any and all speech that argues for the  preservation of national identities, questions the mantra that open borders and unlimited immigration is good for us ... or that is, more generally, critical of the policies of the Left. And, in addition, we must flagellate ourselves because of our skin color.

      It is curious.