{"id":185348,"date":"2019-03-17T11:43:37","date_gmt":"2019-03-17T11:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=185348"},"modified":"2019-03-19T06:32:54","modified_gmt":"2019-03-19T06:32:54","slug":"the-christchurch-shooting-and-the-normalization-of-anti-muslim-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=185348","title":{"rendered":"The Christchurch Shooting and the Normalization of Anti-Muslim Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"
The real forces responsible for the destruction of many Muslim-majority countries and the current chaos present in many Western countries are not generated by civilian populations or religions but instead by the global oligarchy that engineers and profits from this chaos.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
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Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Whitney Webb \u2013 Strategic Culture March 16, 2019<\/h1>\n

What is without question the worst mass shooting in New Zealand\u2019s history took place on Friday when shooters, 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant among them, opened fire at two Christchurch mosques. Four, including Tarrant, have been arrested for the heinous act, which claimed at least 49 innocent lives. Tarrant was responsible for killing more than 40 victims, among them several children, in a rampage he live-streamed on Facebook, sending chills throughout the Muslim community, particularly Muslims living in Western countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tarrant\u2019s motives and ideology, laid bare in a\u00a074-page manifesto<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, show a concern over the fertility rates of non-white groups as well as the immigration of non-whites to countries like New Zealand and Australia, which he likened to an \u201cinvasion\u201d that threatened the white majority in those countries. However, Tarrant \u2014 in his ignorance \u2014 failed to grasp that many of the Muslim immigrants he targeted had come to New Zealand after fleeing Western-backed invasions, occupations, or persecution in their home countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Notable among Tarrant\u2019s views is the fact that he is a clear ethno-nationalist, promoting his view that different ethnic groups must be kept \u201cseparate, unique, undiluted in [sic] unrestrained in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy.\u201d Tarrant also claimed that he doesn\u2019t necessarily hate Muslims and only targeted those Muslims {i.e., immigrants) that chose \u201cto invade our lands, live on our soil and replace our people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He also stated that he chose to target Muslims because \u201cIslamic nations, in particular, have high birth rates, regardless of race or ethnicity\u201d and to satiate \u201ca want for revenge against Islam for the 1,300 years of war and devastation that it has brought upon the people of the West and other peoples of the world.\u201d His views are remarkably similar to those of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, which is unsurprising given that Tarrant named him as an inspiration for the shooting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though many \u2014 in the hours after the shooting \u2014 have sought to place blame and point fingers at notable demagogues like\u00a0President Donald Trump<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0or\u00a0\u201ccounter-jihad\u201d alt-right figures<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>like Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl, it is important to place Tarrant\u2019s motivations in context.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, while Trump\u2019s rise to political power has brought Islamophobic rhetoric into the public sphere in an undeniable way, it is a symptom of a much broader effort aimed at propagandizing the people of the United States and other Western countries to support wars in and military occupations of Muslim-majority countries. This manufactured Islamophobia, largely a product of Western governments and a compliant mass media, has sought to vilify all Muslims by maligning the religion itself as terrorism, in order to justify the plunder of their countries and deflect attention from their suffering.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a classic \u201cdivide and conquer\u201d scam aimed at keeping Westerners divided from Muslims in their own countries and abroad. The horrific shooting in Christchurch is a testament to its unfortunate success and pervasiveness, as well as a potent reminder that it must be stopped. Indeed, this manufactured Islamophobia has made it so that Muslims in their home countries are in danger of dying from Western-backed wars and, if they flee to the \u201csafer\u201d West, they have targets on their backs painted by the very war propaganda used to justify Western military adventurism in Muslim-majority nations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Islam, the media and \u201cForever Wars\u201d: Who\u2019s the \u201creal\u201d terrorist?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Since September 11th and the advent of the \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d mass media reporting increasingly began to conflate Muslims and Muslim-majority nations with war, terrorism and violence in general. Indeed,\u00a09 out of 10<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0mainstream news reports on Muslims, Islam, and Islamic organizations are related to violence and Muslims who are named on mainstream media are all-too-frequently warlords or terrorist leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n

This near-constant association of Islam and violence has created the false perception that the religion of Islam, by its very nature, is violent and that Muslims too must then be violent and thus dangerous. This media-driven association has had very real and troubling consequences. For instance,\u00a0a 2010 study<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0by the University of Exeter found \u201cempirical evidence to demonstrate that assailants of Muslims are invariably motivated by a negative view of Muslims they have acquired from either mainstream or extremist nationalist reports or commentaries in the media.\u201d In other words, Islamophobic media reports are directly related to hate crimes targeting Muslims.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is no accident, as such biased reporting on Muslim-majority nations also began as Western-backed wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan sought to put these countries\u2019 natural resources, namely their oil and mineral wealth, into the hands of American corporations. It should be no surprise then that top funders of media outlets that have routinely promoted Islamophobic narratives are also those who\u00a0have profited<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0considerably from the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d and Western-backed regime-change wars in other countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

This concerted effort to vilify Muslims has had the potent effect, likely by design, of reducing empathy among Westerners for the largely Muslim victims of Western military adventurism in Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, while mainstream news outlets often trumpet the imminent dangers Americans face from \u201cradical Islamic terror,\u201d the death toll of innocent people \u2014 most of them Muslim \u2014 that have been killed by the U.S.-led \u201cWar on Terror\u201d is several orders of magnitude greater than the number of Americans who have died from all terror attacks over that same period.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Residents carry the body of several people killed during fights between Iraq security forces and Islamic State on the western side of Mosul, Iraq, Friday, March 24, 2017. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

For instance, from 2001 to 2013, an estimated\u00a03,380 Americans died<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0from domestic and foreign terrorism, including the September 11 attacks as well as acts of domestic terrorism carried out by white nationalists and supremacists. If one excludes the September 11 death toll, the number of American deaths over that same period stands at around 400,\u00a0most<\/a>\u00a0of them victims of mass-killers who were not Muslim.<\/span><\/p>\n

By comparison, an estimated\u00a08 million innocent people<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>in Muslim-majority nations died as a result of U.S. policies and wars in the Middle East and North Africa from 2001 to 2015. Yet, the magnitude of this loss of life of these \u201cunworthy victims\u201d is minimized by media and government silence, and the creation of a climate of Islamophobia in the West has only served to deepen the ease with which mass murder is accepted by the aggressor countries\u2019 populations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond the staggering disparity in the death tolls caused by terror groups and Western-backed imperialist wars is the fact that many of these very Western governments that purport to be so concerned with \u201cradical Islamic terror\u201d have often created and funded the most notorious terror groups of all. Indeed, the U.S. government helped to create Al Qaeda and\u00a0continues to protect <\/span><\/a><\/strong>its Syrian branch \u2014 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham \u2014 in Syria\u2019s Idlib province to this day. In addition, the CIA was just\u00a0recently revealed<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0to be helping the Islamic State regroup in Syrian refugee camps. Furthermore, the U.S. has long turned a blind eye to the\u00a0funding of terror groups<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0by allied states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.<\/span><\/p>\n

The role of Western money, arms and policy in the creation and maintenance of radical Wahhabi terrorist groups is often entirely ignored by Western media portrayals of Muslim-majority nations, thereby creating a false image that such violence is endemic to these nations when, in fact, it is often imported state-sponsored terror.<\/span><\/p>\n

These nuances of the situation are rarely heard in the narratives parroted out on mainstream media and those who regularly consume mainstream news sources are more likely than not to support those narratives. For that reason, it is easy to see how someone like Donald Trump \u2014 who is said to watch television for\u00a0eight hours every day<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, much of it\u00a0Fox News\u00a0\u2014 has espoused the views that he has. Thanks to the manufacturing of Islamophobia of mainstream media, racist policies like the so-called \u201cMuslim ban\u201d have found wide support, as this false narrative has conflated Islam with violence so often that many have come to believe that only by banning Islam can violence and terrorism in the U.S. be reduced.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the recent shooting in Christchurch, as well as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting and other recent acts of domestic terrorism, should alert us to the fact that it is the hate manufactured\u00a0by\u00a0this false narrative that is itself endangering American lives while also covering up the mass murder that has been perpetrated by the U.S. and other governments around the world for decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s leading role in stoking ethnonationalism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

While the realities of post-9\/11 America, as well as the rise in visibility of white ethnonationalism during the Trump Era, have done much to normalize attacks on immigrants, the country that has done the most to normalize anti-Muslim terrorism over this same time frame has been the state of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Israel, from its founding days, has long been steeped in neocolonialist ideology that is remarkably similar to the ideological basis behind other settler states like the United States, Australia and New Zealand. This system of beliefs holds that the native inhabitants of the land \u2014 whether the Palestinians, the Sioux or the Maori \u2014 are \u201cprimitive\u201d and incompetent and that the land would have remained \u201cwild\u201d and undeveloped were it not for the \u201cfortunate\u201d appearance of European settlers. As\u00a0MintPressnoted in\u00a0a previous report<\/a>\u00a0on the subject, such narratives cast these settlers as both superior and normal while the natives become inferior and abnormal, thus obfuscating the settler\u2019s status as foreigner and conqueror.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Israel\u2019s case, this ideology has promoted the idea that all Arabs are \u201csons of the desert\u201d while the desert simultaneously represents a barbaric obstacle to \u201cprogress\u201d and development. However, the state of Israel, under the lengthy tenure of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has seen these long-standing and somewhat hidden underpinnings of the Zionist state burst out into the open.<\/span><\/p>\n

The result has been the overt expression of ethnonationalism in such a way that Israel has become an inspiration to white nationalists in the United States, like Richard Spencer, and far-right ethno-fascist leaders like Brazil\u2019s Jair Bolsonaro and India\u2019s Narendra Modi. The inspiration has been mutual, according to\u00a0reports and testimonials<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0published by Jewish newspaper\u00a0The Forward.<\/span><\/p>\n

For years, through its military occupation of Palestine, Israel\u2019s government and military have sought to paint all Palestinians, including children, as \u201cterrorists\u201d or \u201cterrorist sympathizers.\u201d Take, for example, current Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked,\u00a0who wrote<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0<\/a>in 2014, \u201cThis is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A more recent example came from former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who asserted\u00a0just last year<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0that \u201cno innocent people\u201d live in the Gaza Strip and that every inhabitant in the enclave is somehow connected to Hamas, even though nearly half of Gaza\u2019s population are children and teenagers. Such rhetoric has become par for the course and numerous examples show that Shaked and Lieberman\u2019s views are increasingly accepted and \u201cnormal\u201d in today\u2019s Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, the clearest indication of anti-Muslim terror\u2019s normalization in Israel is the recent rise of Otzma Yehudit, or the \u201cJewish Power\u201d Party. This party, founded by devotees of radical American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane,\u00a0has now merged<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0\u2014 at Netanyahu\u2019s urging \u2014 with the Jewish Home Party and stands to become part of Israel\u2019s ruling coalition if Netanyahu manages to win in the country\u2019s upcoming elections.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the office of Itamar Ben Gvir, one of Otzma Yehudit\u2019s leaders, is\u00a0a framed picture<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0of Baruch Goldstein. In an act that bears a striking similarity to the events in Christchurch, Goldstein \u2014 a long-time devotee of Kahane \u2014 entered a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1994 and opened fire, killing 29 and injuring more than 125 worshippers. After the act, Kahane\u2019s Kach party \u2014 the predecessor of Otzma Yehudit \u2014 was labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite official condemnation, Goldstein\u2019s atrocious act has been the subject of praise and inspiration for subsequent extremists who, under Netanyahu\u2019s government, have become increasingly normalized. Goldstein\u2019s gravestone reads \u201cHe gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land\u201d and continues to be used as a site of pilgrimage and homage by the very extremists that Netanyahu is openly courting for political gain.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the followers of Kahane are making a comeback in Israel, several notable Arab political parties\u00a0have been banned<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0from participating Israel\u2019s upcoming elections, with some being accused of \u201csupporting terrorism\u201d owing to their opposition to Israel\u2019s decades-long military occupation of Palestine. Yet, by elevating clear terror supporters among the ranks of the Jewish Power Party, it has become increasingly clear that openly supporting and advocating anti-Muslim terrorism is no bar to legitimacy and political power in today\u2019s Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

No \u2018clash of civilizations,\u2019 only manipulation and exploitation of differences<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The tragic and barbaric shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand is yet another horrific and glaring reminder that the \u201cdivide and conquer\u201d war propaganda that has sought to promote the so-called \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d between Christianity and Islam, West and East, has not only been monstrously effective but continues to be monstrously destructive to people on both sides.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, the media\u2019s manufacture of Islamophobia, in seeking to Wite-out Muslim suffering and reduce Western empathy for innocent Muslim civilians, has increasingly placed targets on the back of Muslims everywhere \u2014 in the West and the East \u2014 making it increasingly difficult for practitioners of the Islamic faith to feel safe regardless of where they live.<\/span><\/p>\n

With most Muslim-majority countries now killing fields in Western-backed wars, ruled by oppressive, Western-backed dictatorships, or under threat of Western-backed regime change, even those Muslims who have sought a safer, quieter life in the \u201ccivilized\u201d West have now found themselves targets thanks to the very war propaganda used to justify the destruction of their home countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the murderer Tarrant had stated that he hoped his horrific crime would help stoke \u201ccivil war\u201d in Western countries, this tragedy should and must serve as a wake up call for people everywhere that the real forces responsible for the destruction of many Muslim-majority countries and the current chaos present in many Western countries are not generated by civilian populations or religions but instead by the global oligarchy that engineers and profits from this chaos. These oligarchs loot from the people of the West just as they do from the people of the East and it is time to recognize that they are the real threats to a more peaceful world \u2014 not regular people praying, whether it be in a church, a synagogue or a mosque.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This tragedy should is a wake up call that such events are orchestrated by the global oligarchy that engineers and profits from this chaos<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185348"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185353,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185348\/revisions\/185353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}