by ROBERT FISK
Mucad Ibrahim Three-year-old Mucad Ibrahim, the youngest known victim of the mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019.
Akhtar Khokhur – Akhtar Khokhur, 58, shows a picture of her missing husband Mehaboobbhai Khokhar, 65.
She fought from the start like a real politician, scorning the killer, attacking racism and slapping back at Erdogan’s revolting election propaganda
Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. Jacinda Ardern won her spurs last week with her response to the Christchurch atrocity. But the world’s praise for her eloquence and compassion missed the point.
Ardern was different. She fought from the start like a real politician, scorning the killer, attacking racism and slapping back at Turkish president Erdogan’s revolting election propaganda – which used the murderer’s own video – then hitting out at US president Trump. And insisting that New Zealand’s gun laws would change forever.
That was the measure of her. Humanity came armed with political leadership. And what a sorry lot Ardern showed our own hapless “leaders” to be.
Most of them have reacted to mass murders with instant cliches of sorrow and endless waffle about “terror”, and then operatic – and often inappropriate – praise for security forces who have in most cases failed to prevent the crime from taking place. In Christchurch, the cops appear to have driven the murderer off the road before he moved to a third mosque.
“They are us,” Ardern said of the Muslims slaughtered in her country. It’s the sort of remark we might have expected from a Trudeau, or even a Macron – but we shouldn’t get caught in the comparison game. Ardern was on her own. And she talked in global terms. If the rest of the world is happier talking about “global jihadism”, she talked of global white supremacism.
When Australia’s own racist senator Fraser Anning – he who once spoke of a “final solution” to immigration – blamed the Christchurch bloodbath on “the immigration programme that allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate”, Ardern simply called his remark “a disgrace”.
In any case, the Christchurch crime against humanity was clearly the work of an Australian immigrant fanatic. And Australia’s own recent history of brutality towards Muslims and immigrants – a sinister characteristic often obscured by our own affection for the rough edges of our “cobbers” down under – is now being studied rather more seriously.
Much of the journalistic response to this epic drama, of course, was pitiful. Several in the New Zealand media as well as British newspapers used the murderer’s own video, along with his crazed manifesto, to promote their stories. It was an utter failure. The Daily Mirror editor tried to explain that his paper ended up removing the footage because “it is not in line with our policy relating to terrorist propaganda videos.” Who on earth needs a “policy” to tell them not to publish material in a way that has the effect of abetting an act of murder?
And in Australia itself, the moment Anning punched a young man who slapped an egg on his head, this – not his obscene remarks about Muslims – became the “story”. Reporters naturally visited the hometown of the mass killer – and discovered that he was once an “angelic” child. But what did this mean?
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