Imagine you were passionate in your belief that all British Muslims were responsible for the 7/7 bombings on the Tube, the Manchester concert hall massacre, or the car-ramming on Westminster bridge. Imagine that you cranked out 1000 words on your highly emotive and emotional reasons for coming to this conclusion. Who would publish it? Certainly no respectable newspaper, magazine or journal – printed or online – would give you the space. No, you’d most certainly have to send it to some crank-conspiracy site.
Additionally, you would most likely would attract the attention of the police if it left that eco-system and found its way onto Facebook or Twitter, and they might have a reasonable chance of making the charge of “incitement to racial hatred” stick.
What you most certainly would not get is a feature in Slate magazine.
That is, unless you come from an oblique angle and declare that the entire white race is responsible for the terrorist attack in New Zealand… in which case, go mad! Oh wait, you already are:
I’m a white Australian. I know that blaming myself and my cohort is illogical, but I can’t escape the feeling that all of white Australia is implicated in the deaths—a white majority that has fomented and let foment hate.
Regardless, the blame game is lurching full tilt towards its fuzzy goal, whatever that is. I’m not sure if it is about settling political scores, or merely some millennial catharsis. It’s hard to say.
One voice of reason is radio personality and a founder of Quilliam, Maajid Nawaz who tweets:
READ & RT: after jihadist attacks, we rightly hear from the left that we mustn’t blame all Muslims. So why after New Zealand have these same voices blamed media, the right wing & those who critique Islam. We must stop exploiting the dead for our politics.
There is not much to add to his piece for the Daily Beast. Let sanity prevail.
Since we are talking about ‘blame’, a footnote: A New Zealand Australian senator has rightly been criticised after his statement – which amounted to victim-blaming – left him with egg on his face. But how many people joining in the chorus of condemnation are hypocrites? How often we hear after an Islamist-inspired terror attack mutterings about “Bush/Blair, Iraq, Syria, Israel, foreign policy, social exclusion, Mohammed cartoons, and even climate change!” Anything but blaming violent, ideologically-driven murderers for their own actions.
