Hate-based attack is never spontaneous because hate is something constructed, learnt, and normalised.
Today’s news from New Zealand is gut-wrenchingly sad. Our hearts break not only for those murdered and for their loved ones, but also for our Muslim brothers and sisters everywhere who will today feel even more frightened and unsafe than they did yesterday.
Our sadness today should be matched only by our rage. A pox on all our houses. We have allowed anti-Muslim prejudice to grow across western democracies to a level where this attack was inevitable. How dare the politicians and media whose rhetoric has enabled anti-Muslim prejudice to become mainstream cry their crocodile tears over the bodies that their self-interested words helped to slay. How dare we not be doing more to hold those who spread prejudice and fear to account.
Earlier this week I was part of a delegation to Srebrenica organised by UK NGO Remembering Srebrenica. We visited the graves of the more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were rounded up and murdered by Serb forces while the world did everything in its power to look the other way. The failure to protect Bosnia’s Muslims should be at the heart of our collective memory, a constant reminder that when left unchecked, the manipulation of division and fear has catastrophic results.
