‘Christchurch’ is an act of white supremacist terrorism, not a mass shooting
Karim Bettache
Recently, forty-nine people were slaughtered in two Christchurch mosques in New Zealand, inspired by an extremist White-supremacist ideology. Forty-nine innocent Muslim New Zealanders have been killed by a despicable human being who feels that White people are better than other groups of human beings and therefore should have the right to murder, colonize, rape and exterminate them. This attack, driven by an extremist ideology, is nothing less of a full-blown terrorist attack. Whether an attack is driven by an extremist religious or racist ideology, the result is exactly the same: unfathomable human suffering.
Yet, our mainstream media, yes, even The Guardian, have the audacity to call this terrorist attack a mass shooting. As usual when a White man kills a large amount of people, driven by a racist extremist ideology, our mainstream media (mostly run by White people) will refrain from calling it a terrorist attack. We saw the same thing happening when a White man in the United States killed innocent Jews in a synagogue, or innocent black people in a church. Yes, also in Europe, when Anders Breivik murdered 77 innocent children in Norway, he was framed as a mass-shooter. In all these instances our mainstream media refrains from calling the event a terrorist attack and protects the racist extremist by providing him with a special treatment. A treatment that is never provided to any other group, mind you, such as Muslim extremists.
White terrorists
This immorally disgusting and incomprehensible tendency of our mainstream media to stick to a racist division between murderers who have white skin and murderers who have dark skin is extremely telling. It says something about the inherent and deep-rooted racism that is ingrained in all who speak of these acts in such a manner.
Each of you who speaks about a White terrorist in those terms, calling him a mass-shooter or somebody who is mentally disturbed, should ask yourself: why do I do this? Why do I refer to White terrorists in a different way than to those who are nonwhite? I am dead serious, ask yourself that question, where does this come from? Does it mean that you are racist? If not, then why refer to White terrorists in terms that separate them from darker-skinned or non-western terrorists?
White terrorists
And here we have the core of the problem: We are still living in a White supremacist world, whether we want to admit it or not. Even the most progressive left-wing media, such as The Guardian, refuse to call a White man, who murders forty-nine innocent human beings, motivated by an extremist ideology, a terrorist. Apparently, our unconscious racism is so powerful that we more strongly protect the humanity of light skinned monsters who cause death and destruction than their darker skinned counterparts.
Dr. Karim Bettache is a assistant professor and researcher in the field of social and political psychology.
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