Shared hatred of fanatics

Jihadis and white supremacists are mirror images of violent bigotry.

A grieving New Zealander pauses next to flowers outside Al Noor mosque in Christchurch yesterday. Picture: Getty Images

When a terrorist incident or mass killing occurs, emotions boil over and our social media erupts in anguished or indignant commentary. Even much of the mainstream media settles for the sensational or the emotive.

But the great need is to get a clear sense of perspective. In the case of Christchurch this means three things: grappling with the question of white supremacist terrorism, seeing it in global perspective, and heading off irrational responses to it. Let’s look at these one by one.

Brenton Tarrant is an unhinged white supremacist with bigoted and racist opinions. He has made that clear himself. His objective in going into two mosques in Christchurch and mowing down innocent civilians while live-streaming the mayhem was to sow anger, hatred and civil strife.

Our task, as citizens of liberal democracies, is not simply to ensure that the weight of the law is brought down on him, but to curtail all the effects he sought to generate. It is also to get to the root of the nasty and incoherent ideology that he espouses, in order to head off further such violence.

The gnawing anxiety that stands at the forefront of Tarrant’s manifesto is that there is “white genocide” going on, because white Westerners are not having enough children and non-white immigrants are pouring into Western countries and outbreeding the white populations. He calls this “the great replacement” — ethnic, cultural and racial. He asks why we are allowing this to happen and answers that it is due to “hedonistic, nihilistic individualism” — among the same white Westerners, be it noted.

His manifesto might be described as a petty version of Mein Kampf, except that he targets Muslims, not Jews. But “racial purity”, anxiety about an “alien” presence that is seen as taking over, and the matter of living room for the “white race” are at the centre of his concerns.

By his own account, growing up in Australia of British stock, Tarrant had little schooling and, at the age of 28, has ended up “working part-time as a kebab removalist”, which is to say a racist and terrorist. In short, he is a homegrown variation on the kind of individual who joined Mussolini’s or Hitler’s political movements.

The psychological type is familiar enough and can be found in all countries and cultures at different times. Such individuals may become terrorists, or fascist thugs, jihadist maniacs, common criminals or secret policemen and torturers. James Fallon’s book The Psychopath Inside is worth reading in this regard.

But psychopathology aside, Tarrant’s worldview is of a particular kind and he himself attempts to put his actions into a global perspective — as we should.

In his half-baked manifesto, written before the Christchurch assault, he spelled out not simply a concern about Western birthrates but a sweeping vision of historical grievance that is the mirror image of ­jihadist diatribes against Western colonialism and “crusaders”. The mirroring is very striking and it clearly has at least rhetorical linkages to saner expressions of concern about the “suicide of the West” published by individuals such as Douglas Murray or Michel Houellebecq, who are clearly not psychopaths and do not advocate violence or terror. It’s worth unpacking for that reason.

Tarrant wrote that he wished to “take revenge on the invaders for the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by invaders of European lands throughout history, for the enslavement of millions of Europeans taken from their lands by the Islamic slavers, for the thousands of lives lost to terror attacks throughout European lands” and “to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves”. Anyone even vaguely familiar with jihadist rhetoric about the invasion of Muslim lands and the West’s war on Islam will, I think, recognise the somewhat eerie parallels. They are worth spelling out briefly.

The Sydney Opera House demonstrates its solidarity with New Zealand.

Though the jihadists neglect to recall it, Islam did expand by force of arms between the seventh century and the 17th. Half of what had once been the Roman Empire, including most of what we now call the Middle East, all of North Africa, most of Spain and Portugal and, from the 15th century, the Balkans, as well as the entire Persian Empire from the seventh century, Central Asia and large parts of India were overrun not by ­Muslim missionaries but by Muslim armies.

There were Muslim slave traders from the seventh century all the way to the 19th and they did enslave millions of Europeans, as well as millions of Africans. Until the 16th century at the earliest, in short, it was Muslim imperialism that threatened the European world, not the other way around. The crusades were a sideshow and a largely unsuccessful pushback against the Muslim conquest of Palestine and the “holy places” of the Christian religion. This isn’t angry rhetoric, it is basic history.

Equally, there were crusades against the Muslim world and they were very bloody. There was European colonialism and it did lead to the subordination and exploitation of most of the Muslim world in modern times.

The West’s hunger for oil — and its uncertainty about how to deal with the Muslim world — did lead to support often being given to reactionary monarchies (notably the one in Saudi Arabia), high-handed autocrats or repressive dictators.

It did lead to various imperialist interventions and much meddling in Arab and more broadly Muslim affairs. And this does have a lot to do with the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of what is diplomatically called “political Islam” in the 20th century. This, too, is basic history.

Our problem, however, is not the history itself. It is the use of such history to drive brutal and irrational agendas. We need to contain and dissolve those agendas. Panic or politically correct pieties, anger or self-righteous indignation don’t help. We are in need of a mature discourse about the relationship between the complexities and tragedies of history and the goal of a cosmopolitan world in which human beings of every colour and creed can enjoy civil liberties, tolerable prosperity and personal dignity.

That’s a long-term project and it demands resilience and purposefulness in the face of outbreaks of the kind we have just seen in Christchurch.

Without succumbing to what the fearful and aggrieved see as politically correct platitudes, or the pious illusions of the so-called “latte-sipping inner-city elites”, we need a resilient sense of historical perspective. At their best, the Muslim world, both Arab and Ottoman, the old Roman and Persian empires, the modern European empires and the Chinese dynastic empires at their height were all, in varying degrees and at different times, relatively cosmopolitan. They generally fostered peace, trade, cross-cultural discourse and religious tolerance.

We should all be seeking those things in our time. But if they are to become more widely and deeply established in the 21st century, we need to find ways to extend these public goods that are consistent with the end we have in view. The debates we have had since 9/11 about war, pre-emptive strikes and the use of drones have all circled around this problem of ends and means.

The terrorists, bigots and psychopaths who, fearing the tide of affairs is running against them, want to throw up walls and drive out difference and variety are our common enemy, not the heroic vanguard of any kind of civilisation we should want to defend.

As a striking example of how too many of us react to outrages of the Christchurch kind, Muslim Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah wrote angrily, on a news site called The New Arab, on March 16: “We told you the threat is white supremacy. You ignored us.”

Muslim Australians spent the 1990s going out of their way to demonstrate that they were not pro-Saddam, not pro-al-Qa’ida, not terrorists or jihadists, but to no avail — and now this, she asserted. Her outrage is understandable, but she projects it on to the whole of Australian society and even the Western world more generally.

She writes: “We were told that the price for conditional belonging was the sacrifice of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and every other broken, exploited Third World body and soul that paid the price for the West’s wealth and ‘freedom’. We were expected to forgive Abu Ghraib, forget Guantanamo Bay, be silent about Gaza. We were told the borders would be patrolled by whiteness, not the indigenous owners of this land. Our mosques were vandalised, our hijabs ripped off our heads, our leaders seduced into accepting we needed to be spied on, racialised and marked as a suspect community at risk of ‘radicalisation’ via countering violent extremism programs.”

Such a reaction is profoundly counterproductive and all over the map in terms of blame and accuracy. It’s an example of what we do not need and should not indulge right now. The word freedom being placed in inverted commas and the accusation thrown at “whiteness” are a betrayal of the cause Abdel-Fattah espouses. Once and for all, when an incident of this nature occurs, we need to avoid sweeping claims about “race” or religion and focus on both the actual perpetrators and the liberal and moral principles required to curtail such violence. That’s the path to a sane and equitable society.

The New Arab, launched in September 2014, bills itself as “a fast-growing news and current affairs website … with journalists on the ground in over 20 countries”. It claims to be non-partisan, independent and objective, and to encourage “positive debate”.

In writing what she did, this particular Arab-Australian author does both the news website and herself a disservice. I single her out not because she is Arab or Muslim, but because her outburst is a very good illustration of how anger and grievance spiral into furious rhetorical exchanges that inflame the situation, confuse or infuriate others and sow further harm.

Difficult though it is when an incident such as this occurs, all those who see themselves as contributors to public debate need to take a deep breath and consider how to get perspective, not incite anger and upheaval.

White supremacism is certainly not the only problem, even if it was at the source of this particular atrocity. Rather, “the problem” is that there are various fanatical and bigoted ideological movements abroad in the world using 21st-century technologies to propagate their beliefs and mobilise their brownshirts and assassins — of which radical white supremacism is one. That is a serious problem, but it’s one all of us in civil society have in common.

The freedom that Abdel-Fattah appears to deride is what she and all of us depend on in fact, and should be seeking to extend and defend, not mock or dismiss. If she finds “whiteness” objectionable, she is objectively racist. We clearly have our work cut out for us here, but we must, in the name of all that is liberal and tolerant, discipline ourselves to think in terms of principles and humanity, not skin colour, sectarian allegiance or historical grievance.

In short, just as so many good and gracious people, wherever atrocities occur, rally around the afflicted and bereaved and mourn the violation of peace and humanity, so those scanning the horizon and pondering how to head off such violence need to contain rather than maintain their rage.

“Politics,” Max Weber declared in 1920, “is the slow boring of hard wood.” It is the same in spades with geopolitics and counter-terrorism. The most useful lesson we can all draw from this massacre of innocents in Christchurch is that this act of an unhinged and irrational white male demonstrates such behaviours are not the consequence of skin colour but of ideological fixation and psychopathology.

Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst, long-time consultant in applied cognitive science and author of 10 books, of which the most recent is Dictators and Dangerous Ideas: Uncensored Reflections in an Era of Turmoil (Echo Books, 2018).