To prevent another Christchurch we must confront the right’s hate preachers

The Guardian

Opinion

To prevent another Christchurch we must confront the right’s hate preachers

Jonathan Freedland

This attack was inspired by the populist politicians and their cheerleaders who claim the west is under threat from Islam
 @Freedland
Fri 15 Mar 2019 18.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 15 Mar 2019 18.10 GMT
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There are coping strategies for dealing with terrorism and the feeling it is meant to induce, namely terror. One is to tell yourself, it won’t happen to me. Following the massacre of 49 people at prayer in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, many non-Muslims might be saying to themselves, if only in a guilty whisper, “I am not Muslim, I’ll be OK.” Another strategy is to tell yourself, it won’t happen here. That’s hard, though, for if it can happen in a country that has long seen itself as a serene haven, distant from a turbulent world, then it can surely happen anywhere. And still others may fall back on that perennial reassurance: this was just one deranged individual.

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The trouble is, that last solace is becoming impossible to sustain. The terrorists of the white supremacist right are telling us as loudly and clearly as they can that we are dealing here not with a handful of sad loners, oddballs or psychopaths, though they may be all of those things, but a global, if diffuse, movement with a core ideology – one that draws strength and succour from political leaders, including those at the very highest level.

The man suspected of the Christchurch killings could not have been clearer. He literally spelled out his meaning in words and slogans daubed over the murder weapon itself, to say nothing of his supposed manifesto, published online. Through the jumble of incoherent ramblings, the motifs keep leaping out, the nods to those he imagines to be his comrades around the world and throughout history. He is telling us that he is no faraway one-off, but one of many in Europe and the US who have a world-view – and mean to see it implemented.

The title of his 74-page document is The Great Replacement. That’s the doctrine long advanced by the pan-European Generation Identity movement, which holds that the white, Christian population is under threat from a deliberate effort to replace it through Muslim immigration. It’s the same idea that echoed around the pageant of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 – the one praised by Donald Trump as including “some very fine people” – where marchers chanted “White lives matter”, and “Jews will not replace us”.

Those men carrying torches in the Virginia summer do not believe that the US is about to become a majority Jewish country: rather they imagine a Jewish plot to replace the white population with a black, brown or Muslim one. Note how the Christchurch suspect referred to Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees from some of the world’s most appalling violence, as “invaders” – the same word used to describe Muslims by Robert Bowers, who shot dead 11 Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last October. Bowers seems to have targeted that specific community because it was deeply committed to voluntary work resettling refugees, many of them Muslims. To Bowers, that looked like evidence of “the great replacement” in action.

The Christchurch su .......for more go to https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/prevent-another-christchurch-confront-right-hate-preachers?CMP=fb_gu&fbclid=IwAR084cGkc0qBV2o5ZDDO_ahHvlL4jgLVwbv4TvNJIhTjuhwQYZkpDyFTbTw