Callous Christchurch opportunism is reprehensible
Rather than seeing last week’s terror attack in Christchurch for what it was, some people chose score political points over the death of 50 innocent people. It doesn’t get much uglier than that, writes Miranda Devine.
The hypocrisy and callous opportunism of the Left is there for all to see in the wake of last week’s terrorist attack in Christchurch.
The bodies were barely cold when blame started being laid on any conservative who has ever expressed an opinion about Islamist terrorism or border security. The same people who know exactly who is to blame for the white supremacist killing of 50 Muslims at Friday prayers are those who have sought to downplay Islamist terror attacks in the past.
We had eight confirmed Islamist terrorist attacks in four years in Australia, including the ISIS-inspired Bourke Street attack in Melbourne just six months ago.
But always the jihad apologists downplay the “incidents”.
It’s mental illness, they say.
Just a coincidence, they say.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Fight the right-wing terror hate with love for Muslims
But now in Christchurch comes the mirror image of the fascist ideology of Islamism, the fascist ideology of white supremacy, and it’s the fault of conservative commentators, News Corp, the Prime Minister, Peter Dutton, Tony Abbott, not to mention professional bigots like Senator Fraser Anning.
It really doesn’t get uglier than scoring political points on the death of 50 people.
ABC employee Osman Faruqi was probably the worst in saying: “I feel so sad,” he tweeted. “We begged you to stop amplifying and normalising hatred and racism.”
This is the guy whose stock in trade is hatred and racism on Twitter against “white people”.
For example: “I love debates about sunscreen. Just more evidence that white people don’t belong in Australia”.
“What if every episode of #qanda had no white people.”
“Mediocre white people: they should be in the bin but instead they own everything and are every f*cking where”.
“The white people are getting f*cked Yas, it’s happening”.
But worse than the hypocrisy was Faruqi’s decision to turn Christchurch into a victimhood contest.
He claimed Christchurch was, “one of the worst massacres ever to occur in the west and one of the worst massacres targeting a minority group since WW2 (maybe the worst since then in the west?)”
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What about al Qaeda’s 2001 terrorist attack on the US, with 2,966 victims? What about the 192 victims of the Madrid train bombings in 2004, or the 137 victims of the Paris attacks in 2015, or the 87 people mowed down by a truck in Nice in 2016? All perpetrated by Islamists.
Don’t those victims count?
Faruqi deleted his Twitter account yesterday, but the evidence remains. So he’s in no position to be lecturing anyone on racism.
The hypocrisy of the left knows no bounds. Every time there has been an Islamist terrorist attack they downplay it and try to deny any ideological motivation.
Take Waleed Aly, chief narcissist of Channel 10, who in the wake of Christchurch, fingered the Prime Minister and Immigration minister as Islamophobic hypocrites. He didn’t name them, but he didn’t have to.
“Don’t change your tune now because the terrorism seems to be coming from a white supremacist,” he said.
This is the same Waleed Aly who once told us after the Boston marathon bombing that terrorism is just a “perpetual irritant” which “kills relatively few people.”
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Perhaps the most intellectually dishonourable line came from Sydney University academic Nick Reimer who used the Christchurch dead to ramp up his attacks on the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which he smeared in an article in the Nine press as “the intellectual face of a Western supremacist politics [whose] curriculum validates the worldview behind Friday’s massacre.”
“If Australian universities really want to combat Islamophobia after Christchurch, only one course is possible: abandon Ramsay immediately.”
Richard Di Natale also used the tragedy to score political points against Dutton: “your hateful rhetoric has consequences and we will hold you to account.”
Tony Windsor blamed Morrison: “Your dog whistling of race, religion and division has borne fruit”.
Marcia Langton claimed Morrison and various commentators were “complicit in murder”.
As per usual, those who scream the loudest about bigotry are projecting their own attitudes on to others.
By using Christchurch as an excuse to shut down voices they don’t like, these people are playing into the hands of the terrorist whose stated aim was to create division. What they don’t admit is that if you drive ideas out of the public marketplace they go underground and fester.
Bad ideas should be out in the open where the rest of us can demolish them with good arguments.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Anning pile on is rank Left hypocrisy
Those of us who criticise identity politics see the victims in the Christchurch mosques as every bit as deserving of our sympathy as the victims in Martin Place or Paris or London. It is the practitioners of identity politics who ascribe to the rest of us their own hateful attitudes. Perhaps they can’t sympathise with victims of Islamist atrocities so they project their dehumanising sentiments on us.
But most Australians are as horrified by the white supremacist murders in Christchurch as we are by the Islamist murders in churches in Egypt or nightclubs in Bali. They are two sides of the same evil coin.
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