JS: As the shooter in New Zealand mowed down 50 adults and children at two separate Mosques in Christchurch last week, he live-streamed his massacre on Facebook. He also published a harrowing and rambling 74-page statement to further publicize his attack and to advocate his white supremacist ideology. The statement describes Donald Trump as a “symbol of white supremacy” and its author echoes the language of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that we’ve heard over and over from Trump and other right-wing leaders across the world.
DJT: It’s an invasion like you’ve never seen before…
We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it’s unacceptable.
DJT [at rally]: No nation can allow its borders to be over-run and that’s an invasion. I don’t care what they say. I don’t care what the fake media says. That’s an invasion of our country.
[Crowd chants “Get them out!”]
JS: The Christchurch shooter admitted to being radicalized on the internet, he seemed kind of proud of it, and he said he acted in this way to “show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homeland is our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.”
My colleague at The Intercept, reporter Murtaza Hussein pored over the shooter’s so-called manifesto and he has a piece now at The Intercept called, “New Zealand suspect’s actions are logical conclusion of calling immigrants ‘invaders.’”
Murtaza writes that as a non-white Western Muslim, he felt compelled to analyze the words of the shooter. He concludes that his writings “reflect a worldview that is not just confined to the dark corners of the internet, but is openly expressed in media and politics.”
Jacinda Ardern: It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack. From what we know, it does appear to have been well planned. Two explosive devices attached to suspects’ vehicles —
Murtaza Hussein: So you know, when this happened a lot of people asked me “are you going to write about it?” And I was like, no, I’m not going to write about it because when something is very disturbing, you don’t want to confront it, actually. You want to just say “OK, something happened. He was crazy. Let’s move on” which is a normal human inclination. But I think it’s very important to engage deeply with what these people are saying whether it’s ISIS or individuals such as the New Zealand shooter to not just dismiss this as some crazy talk and put it aside. We have to take it very seriously. This is what a significant number of people believe and those who have the willpower to do it are going to act on it. And every mass killing in history has started with talk. So, we can’t just dismiss talk and say that that’s the end of it. We need to address it very forthrightly.
So I got a copy of his manifesto and I read it and I watched the video of the shooting and you know, it very clearly struck me that this guy is not crazy. This is not the words of somebody who’s a maniac. It’s somebody with a very coherent and well-thought-out ideology who thought through the aftermath of the attack. Thought about the context of it and he made a very calculated decision and he was counting on the support of a lot of people either now or in the future because he expects to at some point be viewed as a liberator. And as I said, they’re not crazy beliefs. They’re evil beliefs that he’s taken to a radical conclusion, but it’s something that I hear all the time in more polite form from other people in the news and in politics.
DJT: I think Islam hates us and we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred.
Bill Maher: Because it’s the only religion that acts like the mafia that will fucking kill you.
Ben Shapiro: The myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority is just that, it’s a myth.
MH: This individual was not inspired to do this in a vacuum. He had influences and when you read his manifesto, it’s very clear what those influences are, in the sense that they have the same preoccupations and the same tone of racial paranoia and racial threat. In the United States, for instance, there’s this guy Steve King, the congressman, he openly is using, without even any coding, the rhetoric of this manifesto, of the “great replacement.”
Steven King: We have to do something to increase our birth rate or the vacuum that’s created will be filled by people that don’t believe in our values here in western civilization, and we’re seeing it happen.
MH: The debate over immigration in western countries has become so fevered in the last several years that people openly discuss this as a militarized problem. If you look in the United States, the talk is about deploying the military to the southern border, building a giant wall evocative of the Great Wall of China to keep out invaders. That’s not something you do for an immigration problem, bureaucratic issue to deal with. This is the language of war and it by extension, it’s the language of ethnic cleansing and potentially genocide.
DJT: We’re on track for a million illegal aliens to rush our borders. People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is. It’s an invasion of drugs and criminals and people. We have no idea who they are, but we capture them because border security is so good, but they’re put in a very bad position.
MH: You’re telling people that your country is being invaded by hordes of foreigners who are here to rape and pillage them if not confronted. The shooter, his actions are a rational response to that. You know, reading his manifesto, I didn’t find it to be full of original thought. I found it to be very derivative of the thought of people that we see in here all the time in the public.
Anderson Cooper: So you trust Muslims in America?
DJT: Do I what?
Anderson Cooper: Trust Muslims in America?
DJT: Many of them, I do. Many of them, I do. And some, I guess we don’t. Some I guess, we don’t. We have a problem and we can try and be very politically correct and pretend we don’t have a problem. But Anderson, we have a major, major problem. This is, in a sense, this is a war —
[Crosstalk.]
AC: So, special patrols in Muslim neighborhoods?
DJT: Excuse me. Nobody wants to call it a war. It’s a war.
[Music interlude.]
MH: In his manifesto, he picks data points or certain events from history and stitches them into a narrative which makes sense to him in the present moment. And this is not something that you do if you learn history from, you know, studying published books or going to school. He mentions himself that he never did well in school and he left at quite a young age. But it is the sort of history that you get from polemicists and a lot of these polemics you see on web sites like Reddit and 4chan and they’re sort of, ad hoc histories, which are meant to make a racial case for violent action in the present day. You know, it’s not a history that you learn in school. It’s a history that people are making up on their own and sharing on the internet. But the fact is when people don’t study history in a systemic way, they still need a way to make sense of the world and they’re going to pick it up from wherever they can get it from and they’re getting it from very vile sources.
The moment that Tarrant snapped, as per his manifesto, is during a trip to France where he was mortified by seeing the faces of people he called invaders which presumably refers to minority populations of France, Sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans. Now, the thing is Tarrant is not from France. He’s from Australia.
He’s from an entirely different part of the planet and the people he sees in France, he sees them as invaders based on his own racially, exclusive-ist way of looking at the world. But if you know the history of France, these people have been there for generations. And he mentions a very key emotional moment in his manifesto where he drives past a cemetery full of people who perished in the world wars that France fought over the past century and he sees these rows of graves and he breaks down in tears. What he doesn’t know is that the free French army, which liberated France under de Gaulle’s command during World War II was comprised mostly of colonial soldiers, people who were black or brown.
So, you know for him, his understanding of history of just a pure white homeland which was besmirched in recent years by the new phenomenon of people of color arriving there is completely ahistorical. And France wouldn’t have been liberated without the people he considers to be invaders that he drives around today seeing.
The very key to Tarrant’s worldview is that people are not in the right places. So, if you are the wrong skin color or if you are brown skin or black skin and you’re living in the United States or living in France, you somehow have gotten separated from your true home. What he wants is to sort people back into where they belong and using violence absolutely, if necessary. But the idea that we any of us have a real home to go back to is — other than the place that we live or grew up — is completely spurious. So, what he’s asking for can only be genocidal. It doesn’t make sense to anyone who’s engaged with the world more deeply than he has.
Maybe 20 years ago, the whole idea of any of this happening, it wouldn’t even make sense, like livestream, post on social media a massacre. The words wouldn’t have even existed to describe this. But now, you know, people are very impressionable and there’s something called mimetic behavior, so, the vast majority of us will be mortified and horrified by what we saw. Regardless of our politics, it’s something that’s deeply offensive. But in every case, there’s a small number of people who see this and has similarly nihilistic feelings and thinks that this is excellent. And you can see their comments online. Not everybody’s alienated by this, many people are gratified by what they saw. At this point, it would be a mistake to dismiss that as idle talk.
— source theintercept.com | Mar 20 2019