David Penberthy: Scoreboard ideologues will try to win at any cost
When it comes to acts of terror, there are so many people who would rather cheer for their chosen side than engage in a fact-based discussion. As we saw following the death of Michaela Dunn this week, writes David Penberthy.
One of the more depressing features of these continuing acts of social violence — be they acts of Islamist terror, white extremism, or the apolitical actions of the criminally insane — is how quickly politically-obsessed ideologues will go to work crafting a narrative that best suits their prejudices.
While the violence on Sydney’s King Street was still underway this week, a brawl was starting on social media and in the comment sections of news sites about the motivations of knife-wielding attacker Mert Ney as he went on his alleged murderous spree.
It wasn’t a local debate, it was actually more of a global debate. Most Australians were simply relieved that Ney had been disabled, and devastated for his alleged victims. We were also stunned by and proud of the heroism and resourcefulness of those everyday Aussies who shut him down with nothing more than a milk crate and a cafe chair.
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Overseas though, the discussion around the attack went straight to its motivations and political context. Thousands and thousands of people, not one with any insight into what had just happened on King Street, were out there stating as fact what had occurred. This came hours before the NSW Police had even given any kind of detailed explanation as to the nature of Mert Ney’s alleged crimes. And these people have overwhelmingly concluded, and are still insisting today, that this was an act of Islamic terror, when it was nothing of the sort.
To any reasonable person — and most importantly, to the NSW Police — it became very obvious very quickly that Mert Ney is someone who had lost complete control of his faculties. In a sad way, his known obsessions are an incoherent blancmange of the most hideous aspects of life in 2019.
The USB he was carrying showed that Ney had been reading incessantly about mass shootings in the US and the Christchurch mosque massacre. As he was waving his knife, and as he was trundled into the paddy wagon, he chanted the words “Allahu Akbar” for good measure. There was no overarching thesis or agenda behind any of this. To borrow a line from Paul Keating, Mert Ney has a mind like a bird’s nest, full of shit and twigs, and if his conduct on King Street says anything about society, I can’t see how it goes beyond the difficult question as to how we treat and manage those people who are suffering from the most acute forms of mental illness.
Others disagreed. They include people such as the British newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins, who has almost 1 million social media followers, who was in no doubt as to what happened.
“Islamist terrorist screams #AllahuAkbar while stabbing innocents in central Sydney,” she tweeted.
After the NSW Police had given their detailed explanation about Ney’s long history of mental illness and confirmed he had no links to any terror groups, Hopkins wrote this tweet:
“Police confirm #Sydneystabbing terrorist was a Muslim convert with terrorist ideologies. To those determined to make this ANYTHING BUT Islamic terror YOU are part of the problem.”
There is a word for Katie Hopkins’ statement. The word is a lie. It is a complete and utter fabrication, and one which probably has the undesired opposite effect of emboldening Islamic conservatives who feel they will never be given the benefit of the doubt by westerners, when they are being wrongly blamed for incidents that have nothing to do with them.
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My colleague Will Goodings coined an excellent term this week to describe people like Hopkins and their obsessive followers. Scoreboard ideologues. These are the same people who, epitomised by the former Senator Fraser Anning, were out there while the Christchurch massacre was still underway, saying that while it was all kind of regrettable, the Muslims should take it on the chin as they’d done more of this kind of thing themselves anyway.
It has been pitiable and depressing to see the determination of followers of Hopkins as they shoehorn their own bigotry into an event that is wholly unrelated to the subject of their obsessions. Indeed, you can almost hear regret in the voices of those who learn that Islam wasn’t actually the cause of all this, yet people like Hopkins simply decide to plough on anyway.
The action of these anti-Islamists and anti-multiculturalisms this past few days is the Right’s own version of the denial shown by the Left during that other atrocity on the streets of Sydney, the 2014 Lindt cafe hostage crisis.
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In the same way that it was obvious to a reasonable person that Mert Ney wasn’t a terrorist, it was glaringly obvious that the Lindt siege perpetrator Man Haron Monis most definitely was a terrorist. Monis had a documented history of hounding the widows of ADF personnel, of preaching hate, he had a keen online interest in Islamic radicalism, and when the siege started, like any self-respecting ISIS franchisee, the first thing he did was hang up his Islamic State flag, properly branding his squalid operation as an act of lone wolf Islamist terror. To this day there are still progressives in Australia who struggle to accept that as fact, and would rather throw out red herrings such as his mental state, which most definitely apply to Ney but have no bearing on Monis’s desire to hurt and kill in the name of Islam.
With all this mindless barracking, the ability to describe events accurately and dispassionately has become one of the greatest casualties of the age of terror. There are so many people who would rather cheer for their chosen side than engage in a fact-based discussion. The result is not a world that can talk to itself but one that is in a permanent state of war, with people like Katie Hopkins being the best thing the radical Islamists have got going for them, as she uses the sick actions of a sad man to underpin her bilious beliefs.