Six on Mosque Massacre in NZ: The Roots of the Christchurch Massacre; NZ Mosque Shooting Footage in Turkey Campaign; A Beginn
panaritisp
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In light of the terrible murders in New Zealand a few hours ago, perhaps we teachers should consider what we can do to combat Islamophobia here.
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"Another famous mosque attack—as Mondoweiss (3/15/19) pointed out in a post on the NPR interview—occurred in Hebron in the Occupied West Bank on February 25, 1994, in the Cave of the Patriarchs (Extra!, 5–6/94). Baruch Goldstein, a member of the Israeli army reserves, entered the site sacred to both Judaism and Islam and opened fire while Muslims were praying there, killing 29 before he himself was killed. This act of terrorism still casts a shadow over Israeli politics, as Haaretz (2/26/19) recently reported in an article about a Knesset debate over Goldstein’s burial place: The killer’s grave has become over the years a pilgrimage site for extremist Jews who support him, and a shrine to his memory was set up next to his tomb.
Perhaps the biggest mosque-related mass murder occurred in the Philippines on September 24, 1974, when some 1,500 members of the Moro people were rounded up by the Philippine army and killed in a mosque in the village of Malisbong.
Other anti-Muslim mosque attacks include the 25 worshipers killed on October 11, 2017, at a mosque in Kembe, Central African Republic; the 20 people slaughtered at the Han Tha mosque in Taungoo, Myanmar, in May 2001; and the 147 victims of the Kattankudy mosque massacre in Sri Lanka on August 3, 1990.
Mosques have also been frequent targets of Islamic extremists, particularly Salafist militants such as ISIS attacking Shia and Sufi religious centers. The deadliest terrorist attack in Egyptian history took place on November 24, 2017, at the al-Rawda mosque in the Sinai Peninsula, when some 40 attackers, suspected of being affiliated with ISIS, killed 311 Sufi worshipers (New York Times, 12/1/17).
That none of this was recalled, either by the host of Morning Edition or the director of a group that presents itself as a “global leader in exposing extremism” with a mission “to secure justice and fair treatment for all,” is a testament to the failure of our information systems to give due weight to violence against Muslims—and the consequent dangerous impoverishment of our collective memory."
"The Muslims at the two New Zealand mosques were liquidated not just by a man filled with hatred, but by the ideas that he clung to, ideas about racial superiority and who his country belonged to. This was true in Quebec, when Muslims were gunned down in their mosque in 2017. It was true in Pittsburgh, when Jews who had been helping Muslim refugees were murdered in their synagogue in 2018. It was true in Norway, when 77 people were killed by a white bigot. It was true in Charleston, when black churchgoers were mowed down by another radicalized white man. A pathology of hatred has spread around the world, and it has put all our lives at risk.
Islamophobia is not a fringe problem: It is embedded in much of Western society. For over two decades now — the span of an entire generation — the whole Muslim community has been forced to accept collective guilt and punishment for every act of terror or violence committed by one of its members. Never would, or should, this standard be applied to white people, who seem to have kept the privilege of individual differentiation for themselves.
"I still go to mosques. What my mother doesn’t realize is that what scares me is that those who condemn this most recent act of cowardly, hateful violence will, when the bodies are buried and the headlines disappear, go back to normalizing the very foundation that got us to this point.As the news cycle develops over the next few days, there will be a very simple part of the story that will not be discussed: how accepted the Islamophobia that underpinned the attack actually is.
Islamophobia is not just a slur or a pull of a hijab; it is not just a ban on who can come into this country and it is not just a massacre that is livestreamed. All of that is a heinous expression of anti-Muslim bigotry, but it is explicit expression; it is an expression of Islamophobia that is easy to categorize. What we have yet to really confront and discuss is the everyday, acceptable Islamophobia that relies on the same basic assumptions that propel violence against Muslims both in the United States and abroad.
Take, for example, language that is used to describe Muslims. In the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, there were descriptions of the mosque and its worshipers as “peaceful” — by the media as well as by well-intentioned, horrified onlookers around the world.
The use of the term “peaceful” seems, at face value, benign, but it is a term that insinuates that Muslims and mosques, by near default, are violent unless we categorize and prove them to be otherwise. Muslims, themselves, have adopted the language of “Islam means peace” as a means of protection against violence and accusations of dual loyalty. The choice that is given to Muslims is one that defaults violence: We are either violent or we are against violence.
The 11 worshipers killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018 were not called “peaceful worshipers.” The Sutherland Springs Church, which saw 26 of its congregants killed in 2017, wasn’t called a “peaceful church.”
But the acceptability and normalization of Islamophobia goes beyond that: It’s when a black, visibly Muslim woman in Congress has her own party partake in an Islamophobic campaign against her, a campaign that hinged on the assumption that Muslims, by default, are anti-Semitic.
It’s when those who have spent a large part or the entirety of their careers fear-mongering about Muslims are rewarded by prestigious institutions with Ivy League fellowships or columns in the New York Times.
It’s when a former U.S. President gets up in front of tens of thousands of fellow party members and demands a loyalty test from Muslim Americans whose vote he is trying to collect for his candidate wife.
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