Ashok Dhillon
Mar 21, 20197 min
We live in a time when individuals and groups take it upon themselves to ‘avenge’ the killings and/or injustices, perceived or real, perpetrated on ‘their kind’ - be it racial commonality or religious, or political, or national, or some other kind - but regardless, it is enough for them to pick up arms and kill someone on the ‘other’ side. The problem is that these self-appointed ‘avengers’ almost always pick as their target defenceless and innocent people who are just going about their daily business, with little or nothing to do with the injustices committed, somewhere, at sometime, which had so fired-up the self-anointed avengers that they picked up their guns and went on a murdering spree themselves, changing nothing but simply adding their murders to the forever growing list of human atrocities.
The New Zealand killer, Brenton Tarrant, identified himself as a ‘White Supremacist’ who felt personally aggrieved by non-white ‘immigrants’ to Europe, years of Islamic and Christian wars during the Ottoman Empire days, and the general threat to the supremacy of his ‘white’ race and for whom Donald Trump, President of the United States, symbolically was the much awaited messiah that would not only rescue the ‘white races’ from the onslaught of ‘Muslim’ and other ‘non-white’ people, but was a long-awaited leader and rallying cry for the rise of the ‘White Supremacists’ that had long been suppressed around the World after World War II, and the defeat of Nazism and Fascism.
This particular killer, who was from Australia, was apparently interested in and studied the wars between the Christians and the great Ottoman Empire, which had originated in one of the States in Turkey in the early 14th Century.
At its height, between 16th and 17th Centuries, and under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire had ruled most of South-eastern Europe, parts of Central and Eastern Europe, West Asia, the South-eastern, Eastern and Northern coastlines of the Mediterranean (including the ‘Holy Lands’), and controlled most of North Africa, and the Horn of Africa (modern day Saudi Arabia). Today, the former Ottoman Empire is known as Turkey.
Fall of Constantinople, 1453; artist, Theofilos
Between 2016 and 2017, Brenton Tarrant had travelled through Turkey to some of the countries formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire, including Israel, apparently without raising any suspicions or red flags, studying the battlefields on which the wars between European Christians and the Ottoman Empire took place.
In carrying out his attacks at two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday March 15, 2019, during prayers hours, he killed 50 ordinary innocent Muslim people between the ages of 2 years – 71 years old, and injured another 50. What these people had to do with the days of the Ottoman Empire, or today’s Islamic terrorists, or even the migration problems created by Western led wars, even he would not be able to explain, because there is no logical explanation except they were Muslims and defenceless. Which is the same reason other killers of innocent civilians have regardless of causes. The defenceless cannot hurt them.
Tarrant’s rifle had the Greek words on it that meant roughly the ‘Turk Slayer’. Most of the victims were probably not Turkish Muslims but in his fanciful delusions it would seem Tarrant fancied himself as some sort of a ‘Crusader’ ridding the ‘white’ lands of non-white Muslim immigrants, while avenging Ottoman and Christian wars centuries later. Cowardly, twisted and delusional.
As it always seems to be the case with such defenders of the ‘white race’ and their intense resentment of non-white ‘immigrants’ to ‘white lands’, like the Americas (North-Central, Latin and South America), Australia and New Zealand, they ironically and dim wittedly do not consider the ‘settlement’ of these originally ‘non-white lands’, and the massacring and subjugation of almost all the indigenous people by ‘whites’ as conquests, or taking by force, but some kind of benign ‘right’ where the ‘settling’ of all the ‘New World’ land was a ‘white’ duty.
A few days after Tarrant went on his shooting spree in New Zealand, in the Dutch city of Utrecht, a 37 year old man, Gokmen Tanis, born in Turkey, randomly shot and killed 3 people and wounded 5 more on a tram. It is not clear what the motivation of this man was, and if the attack was in any way related as a revenge killing of the New Zealand killings, but the one commonality between the two disparate murderers was the targeting of the innocent public just going about their business, with nothing to do with whatever was so bothering both of them.
The random killing of innocent people seems to satisfy the twisted logic of all these types of people seeking some form of revenge for some slight or injustice, past or present, that they feel must be avenged. The fact that the killing of innocent people is simply cold-blooded murder and not heroic in the least, regardless of who the people are, white or non-white, does not seem to register in their fevered brain, and the quest to be a ‘hero’ or martyr to their kind, whoever their kind may be, seems to be one of the biggest motivating factors.
Unfortunately, currently, and historically, unscrupulous political and religious leaders have played a big part in the ‘radicalization’ of these types of killers (white and non-white) who target innocent defenceless people for their various twisted causes, usually connected to personal political, religious or racial power.
In the 73 page ‘Manifesto’ that the New Zealand shooter made public minutes before the attacks, he cited US President Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose”.
Trump of course denied having any influence on the New Zealand shooter and the recent rise of ‘White Supremacy’ movement in the US and Western countries, including Australia and New Zealand. This denial comes in the face of ample documented and videotaped proof where Trump has been saying things, and acting in a manner, which has demonstrably enthused and emboldened ‘White Supremacists’ all over the World, as Tarrant from Australia has so tragically and graphically demonstrated.
Additionally, Trump’s election and subsequent behaviour has inspired other political leaders, globally, like PM Viktor Orban of Hungary, Italian Deputy PM Mateo Salvini, French Right-Wing Opposition Leader Marine Le Pen, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan and more recently President Jay Bolsonaro in Brazil, to more openly and boldly state religious, racial and nationalist agendas that are isolationist, populist, and hostile to migrants and refugees, and promote policies and nationalist ideas in speeches designed to stoke fear and resentment, if not outright hatred in their populations for ‘outsiders’.
Now Conservative, Right-Wing leaders all over the World take inspiration from Trump’s open hostility and negative labelling of non-white Americans (Mexicans as rapists and murderers) refugees and migrants, and Muslims as terrorists, and fear mongering as an effective political tool to bludgeon political opponents with, while winning bigoted support from their like-minded countrymen and allies.
Perversely, the live video that Tarrant made and posted on social media of his Mosque shootings was purposely used as a political tool by Turkey’s Muslim President Erdogan, and shown over and over again at his election rallies to fan distrust, hatred and fear of Westerners, who he portrayed as Islam and Muslim hating. The incredibly callus and divisive President Erdogan portrays himself to be so Muslim, and yet is so incredibly faux Christian Trump-like in his hypocrisy.
In this despicable use of a white terrorist’s hateful act against innocent Muslim’s, the Muslim President of Turkey, President Erdogan fanned more hatred and distrust among his supporters, and the Turkish people in general, for his own selfish political purposes, by using the video to label the leader of the Turkish opposition, Kemal Kilicadaroglu as anti-Islamic, and somehow a Western terror sympathizer. The extent of the lies and deception perpetrated on the Turkish people by President Erdogan, to create hatred and division, is truly despicable.
Such blatant hate and fear incitement by political leaders like Erdogan and Trump, at their most favourite forums, their political rallies, have at times most terrible consequences. [It was not established yet, but the politically motivated hate mongering of Erdogan may have played a part in the tram attack in Utrecht by the Turkish born Gokmen Tanis.]
Instead of showing wisdom, restraint, fairness and empathy towards the victims, as New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has so admirably done, Erdogan and Trump’s type of hateful, shallow irresponsible leadership is quick to exploit the awful human tragedies to further their own personal political agendas, of political power through division and fear.
In the entire history of humans, it is clearly demonstrated, violence has begotten violence, hatred has spawned more hatred, and narrow minded bigotry based on ignorance has been exploited by so called ‘leaders’ to justify the gain of personal religious and political power, to the detriment of innocent people of all races, religions and political persuasions.
In the current times, as political and religious leaders point fingers at ‘others’ as the causes of our current miseries and fears, it is timely to understand that to come under the sway of such leaders is to ignore reality that all people have the same strengths, aspirations and weaknesses, and that conquests and exploitation is not exclusive to any one or two races in particular, but historically has been practiced by all races, to a greater and lesser extent.
But one thing remains true; generally, most ordinary people are innocent of most of the evils prescribed to them by other races, or of different political, religious, ideological persuasions, because they have in fact the same traits their accusers themselves are in possession of. In the most recent hateful generalized theme that Muslims are hateful and murderous towards white westerners, nothing can be further from the truth, because it is the ‘white westerner’ led wars in the ‘Far East’ and ‘Middle East’ that have killed and injured millions of non-white innocent people more recently. Yet, in history, at some time, the opposite may have been true. It is not true now, and only the hateful on both sides would like us to think so - while they slaughter innocents, either as individuals, or group terrorists, or as ‘armies’; regardless of who does it and for which ‘righteous’ cause, the result is always the same, the cowardly slaughter of the innocents.