Sir: New Zealand Prime Minister was highly appreciated for showing her compassion, condolences with the victims’ families and changing gun laws. New Zealand has a relatively low profile regarding terrorism that allows politicians like her to present the country before the world as a peaceful that values diversity. But yet, the ground realities tell another story.
We keep hearing such statements in a ritualistic fashion, always praising the values of multicultural society and self-congratulatory statements in Australia and New Zealand — or rather in entire West. But, racism still determines who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ must be. It is what produces statements like ‘this is not us’ that seek to absolve and reject responsibility, replace them with fragile innocence and even pride. It is what preserves the comforting conviction that ‘extremism’ and violence are only features of ‘backward’ societies; ‘our’ civilised societies in New Zealand, Australia and the West do not espouse such barbarism and the few of ‘us’ who do this, do not represent ‘us’ and are not a product of ‘our’ cultures.
Despite Islam being a century-long religion in New Zealand, Muslims continue to be portrayed and treated as immigrants and refugees — ie inherently ‘foreign’ or more harshly ‘invaders’.
This oscillation of ‘they’ (the barbarians) and ‘us’ (the fully civilized human) reveals the precarious nature of a Muslim’s life and its place in the nation.
Schizophrenias like Islamophobia and xenophobia do not come from a vacuum, rather entrenched deeply into brains by antagonistic rhetoric against Islam: Far right-wing politicians like Pauline Hanson, Fraser Anning, Cory Bernardi and Jacqui Lambie have repeatedly verbally attacked the Muslim community and incessantly talked about the threatening ‘spread of’ Islam. The left has been equally preoccupied with imagined Muslim threats whereas, adding fuel to the fire, this rampant Islamophobia in the political scene has been amplified by equally racist and bigoted media which has systematically portrayed Muslims as inherently violent, extremists, backward and fundamentalists, and Islam as an ideology justifying violence, war and subjugation of women.
The recent attack was not a spontaneous individual’s mad act as a lone-wolf, it was a dint of this long-embedded contempt against Islam and nefarious white-supremacy that seem to be harvesting the crops in form of Muslim massacre.
ZAHID ALI ZOHRI
Gilgit-Baltistan