Poisonous New Zealand blame game

It’s not often that I find myself in the same boat as Chelsea Clinton.

At a vigil in New York for the 50 Muslims slaughtered by a gunman at two New Zealand mosques, Clinton was accused by students of being a cause of the massacre.

The reason for this ludicrous charge was staggering: It was that she had criticized the anti-Semitic tweet by Rep. Ilhan Omar suggesting that Jews use their money to suborn American politicians in the interests of Israel.

“Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there,” Clinton was told by Muslim student Leen Dweik.

Clinton was not alone. In the United States, the mosque attacks were blamed on TV personality Bill Maher, philosopher Sam Harris, anti-jihadi ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and US President Donald Trump (of course).

And in Britain, along with various other high-profile conservative and anti-jihadi writers, they were blamed on me.

When I wrote a blog post expressing horror at the attacks, I was engulfed by a Twitter storm. After all, I’d written the 2006 book Londonistan warning that Britain was sleepwalking into Islamization, and much that was similar since.

I’ve always stressed that all Muslims must not be tarred with the extremist brush, that most victims of Islamist terror are Muslims, and that we should support courageous Muslim reformers. But that was ignored. I was accused of inspiring the massacre by promoting hatred of Muslims. And I was accused of hypocrisy for having said that Islamophobia wasn’t a real prejudice at all.

Media commentators and politicians joined in. In the House of Commons, Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi accused me and other journalists of encouraging “anti-migrant sentiment, anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-black and minority ethnic community sentiment.”

Much of this Orwellian frenzy is part of a campaign to silence all criticism of the Islamic world through character assassination of its critics. Anyone who calls attention to Muslim anti-Semitism, for example, is promptly tarred by “intersectionality” ideologues as a hate criminal. Thus, the New York students ranted: “Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of anti-Semitism.”

Certainly, there are people who are truly bigoted against Muslims, as against Jews or other minorities. Bigotry is based on falsehoods or irrational feelings.

But much “Islamophobia” consists of a rational fear of terrorism that is inspired by Islam and validated by authoritative religious leaders in the Islamic world; or a rational fear of the Islamization of the West, which the Muslim Brotherhood has declared its aim.

The New Zealand mosque atrocity was the result of fanatical hatred of Muslims; the campaign to outlaw “Islamophobia” is intended to stifle acknowledgement of fanatical hatred by Muslims.

Those accusing anti-Islamists of promoting hatred have form in this regard. In 2014, my Commons accuser, Yasmin Qureshi, was forced to apologize for vile comments in which she drew parallels between the Holocaust and Israel’s activities in Gaza. The NYU students who barracked Chelsea Clinton referred to Ilhan Omar “speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country.”

This mob onslaught constitutes an opportunistic weaponizing of tragedy. Opposing the jihad is said to be a “far-right position.” But there may be nothing “right-wing” about murderous racists or anti-Semites.

The New Zealand terror suspect is said to be “far-right” because he hates Muslims. But among his influences listed in his “manifesto” are not only the deceased British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, but also the People’s Republic of China and a video game called Spyro the Dragon. He claims to be anti-conservative, may or may not be a Christian, and may or may not be a Communist. What he is, he says, is an “eco-fascist” who wants to reduce the world’s population to save the environment.

This is hardly a “right-wing” individual. A racist, certainly; maybe a nutcase, or someone who looks for any for outlet for his unfathomable sources of hatred; a nihilist, perhaps. His “manifesto” suggests his main aim was to incite social conflagration. He hoped his massacre would spark further attempts at gun control, which he believed would lead to civil war and the best opportunity to destroy the American “melting pot.”

And he claimed that his “true inspiration” was Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who in 2011 detonated a van bomb in Oslo, killing eight, and then shot dead 69 young people at a summer camp on the island of Utøya.

After Breivik’s atrocity, I was the victim of an identical witch hunt. In his incoherent 1,500-page “manifesto,” in which Breivik quoted hundreds of thinkers and commentators going back hundreds of years, he twice mentioned my work. Also among his citations were Thomas Jefferson, the US Constitution, Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro and Al-Qaeda, but I, and others who write about the progressive disintegration of Europe and Western civilization, were singled out as having caused the massacre — a charge recycled after the mosque attacks.

Yet the mainstream media never reported that at his trial, Breivik said he wanted to provoke a witch hunt against moderate conservatives to increase repression, polarization and radicalization; and that this had worked very well in the light of how many conservatives and Islam critics were then treated. Like me.

In other words, those who weaponize such atrocities against “the right” — that is, against those who don’t think like them — are doing these terrorists’ dirty work.

They are also morally twisted. While white racist attacks are on the rise, they are still greatly outnumbered by Islamist outrages. Last month alone, there were at least 150 deadly Islamist terror attacks in 22 different countries. Yet these received scant attention.

When such attacks do provoke comment, there are instant attempts to excuse the perpetrators, who are variously described as mentally disturbed, under the influence of drugs or the victims of online brainwashing. They are never apparently influenced by their Islamic culture.

Yet when white racists commit atrocities, they are said to be wholly motivated by their culture, and their actions blamed on conservatives and anti-Islamists who are said to be, like the white terrorists, motivated by “Islamophobia.”

This, in turn, provides cover and encouragement for Islamists to ramp up verbal and physical attacks on the West. Thus Turkish Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan leapt on the bandwagon after the mosque attacks to claim that “Western media” had actually prepared the suspected terrorist’s “manifesto” and “handed it to him.”

Years ago, disturbed by the West’s failure properly to address Islamist extremism, I observed there was a risk of a lethal spiral of interconnected violence. Islamist extremism and attacks would be ignored and excused by the authorities, while those calling them out would be blamed instead; this failure to act against Islamist extremism would result in fringe groups becoming violent against Muslims; such violence would increase the witch-hunt against anti-Islamists, which would, in turn, embolden and encourage more Islamist attacks, provoking in turn more white racist violence.

So, alas, it may now be proving.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author.