Picture: Mick Tsikas/AAP
If the dreadful attacks on Christchurch taught us anything, it is that there is a global pandemic of destructive narcissism, anti-social personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder.
The first normal human response to events such as Friday’s attacks on Muslims going peacefully about their business, many shot dead while kneeling in prayer, is empathy and a deep sense of grief and sorrow.
This was callously interrupted by a wave of YouTube ersatz celebrities, self-serving internet warriors and egomaniacs dripping with conceit and intellectual vanity.
In the wake of the attacks on the Masjid Al-Noor and the Linwood Masjid in Christchurch, there has been a lot of blame apportionment that doesn’t pass muster by any sense of logic.
Presently, the attacker’s motives are not fully understood. While he prepared a 78-page manifesto and posted it online, it is an unreliable guide to his conduct without further forensic investigation of his life.
What we can conclude at this stage is the gunman was a terrorist, an ultra-nationalist, right-wing extremist. But even this obvious and self-evident truth is subject to bizarre scrutiny.
I have been writing about the risk right wing extremism poses to the community for some time. Australia has a long and unhappy history with right wing extremism from the paramilitary New Guard in the 1930s, the vicious anti-Semitism and exclusionism of the Australian League of Rights post-war, through to its bastard children fanning off into various extreme and ultra-nationalist groups like the United Patriots’ Front.
It never pays to take your eye off these people. To regard them as amusing clods who dwell on the fringes of society as well as on the extreme right of the political spectrum may hold some truth, but we should not underestimate the menace they pose to our communities.
It is not so much what they say and do in their eternal struggle for the spotlight and a whiff of legitimacy, but who is quietly listening and fervently clinging to very appalling word they utter in the background.
Rather than acknowledge and attempt to quantify the risk, we wasted our time and energy on dismal polemics about whether Nazism is from the right or the left.
We largely ignored the hate speech in our federal parliament after the 2016 double dissolution election foisted some of the worst people on the country into red chairs and gave them a platform.
It’s not just Anning’s disgraceful clawing for publicity. There have been many others. Back in March 2016, the ineligible One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, got to his feet and railed:
“If your Muslim Sudanese neighbour is engaging in female genital mutilation or your Syrian Muslim cafe owner is a terrorist building a bomb or maybe just the Afghan Muslims in the public housing flat next to you are molesting small children, chances are that you are afraid to speak out.”
The fact this garbage was largely allowed to go through to the keeper shows our political institutions are sick and our media too cynical to condemn. Rather, it was situation normal.
The hate speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If we really want to understand how events such as terrorist massacres occur but how they trigger our communities to resort to vitriol and ugliness in their wake, we need only look at the narcissists with their YouTube accounts who sit about drooling over bloody events so they can tell a world that seems to have lost its capacity for reason, what we should think.
Social media becomes a cesspit at times like this. It was the same after the Islamic State inspired Paris attacks in November 2015, the Islamist outrages in Brussels in March 2016 and the Manchester bombing in May of 2017.
Ambulances were still ferrying the wounded across Hagley Park to Christchurch Hospital when Melbourne-based YouTuber, Sydney Watson decided to pipe up on Twitter. She has 160,000 subscribers on YouTube.
“What is happening in Christchurch is SO wrong,” she tweeted. “But before I see anyone else say this is the result of “anti-immigration” sentiments – I’ll counter that this is the result of politicians making people feel unheard & marginalized. You push some people far enough, they snap.”
The massacre was less than two hours old when Watson decided she had the answer. In her twisted world, feeling “unheard and marginalised” is a precursor to shooting dead a three-year-old child and 49 others.
As night fell in Christchurch, up popped Gemma O’Doherty, an Irish ‘journalist’ and 9-11 ‘truther’, who decided she could sniff another one world order conspiracy from 19,000 kilometres away.
“Has all the hallmarks of a classic false flag operation,” she tweeted. “To incite fresh #IS attacks, create chaos and fear, allow the globalists take more control over people and remove freedoms a la 9/11. A professional job. The public are no longer fooled.”
O’Doherty went on to babble and continues to do so that calls for people not to view the shooter’s helmet cam footage of his attacks on the mosques were not due to the appalling nature of the mayhem and death he wrought, but because some fictitious One World government had descended from the grassy knoll to clean up the crime scene.
By then, the finger pointing on social media had well and truly started. Canadian ultra nationalist, Lauren Southern, was beset with angry tweets calling her complicit in the Christchurch massacre. She fired off a response early Saturday morning.
“I am utterly disgusted by those sending tweets along the lines of “Are you happy?” to right wingers. Would you send this to a Muslim that has never advocated violence on the day of an Islamic terror attack?”
I’d be happy to agree with her except for one thing. A quick flip through her twitter account showed she had done exactly the same thing albeit in another scenario.
On 24 March 2016, and in the wake of the Islamist terror attacks in Brussels, she tweeted, “I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday (in Canada). Asked her to explain Brussels. She said, ‘Nothing to do with me.’ A mealy-mouthed reply.”
These are just examples but all three have large social media followings. They are not peddling ideas or opinions, they are self-promoting for some grim lunge at fame. If shunned, they and others like them would wither into anonymity where frankly, they belong.
While most of us struggled to comprehend what had happened and why, we were being trolled by narcissists and look-at-me wannabes, pushing opinions that were driven by a desperate grab for publicity.
They can have their forums and their free speech. The rest of us need to develop the capacity to turn our backs on them.
This article was first published on 21 March 2019.
gee I just watched some of the Waleed and shouty PM sit down. the shouty PM just does not get it. His back tracking excuse for raising islamaphobia was pure adrenaline induced misinformation and obfuscation . I would be surprised if he won any votes with that effort.
Can you refrain from epithets, please. Morriscum and so forth. Next time they go in the bin.
Loud and clear. Even Recessionberg? Ok . But gee it takes the old Front bar fun nature out of it? Thanks again for all the years of your time and great content. It has been and education for me.
Ugh… where did all that come from. Self analysis. I spent half an hour watching Waleed Ally grilling Scomo over what Ally perceived as an anti-muslim sentiment, all dark faced and accusing.
I know I have seen sick examples of someone making the most out of a tragedy, but this was too much. Out and out politicising something that in all honesty probably left most Australians open mouthed in horror. He kept on bringing up shyte Dutton may or may not have said. Gossip from this meeting, whispers from that, and the whole time Scomo is trying to deal with a shocking crime and the gravity of it all, and trying to keep this shit show together…. and Waleed is just in there kicking at the sides for all its worth.
What he wanted was so obvious, he wants all Australians to be held responsible for this crime, and he didnt care who he started blaming first. Apparently, the Lib/Coalition.
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Now, we all know I wouldnt pee on the Libs to put them out if they were on fire, but to try and hang this atrocity on them…
and then I got angry. See, that’s how its done by someone like Ally just looking to hate, his hate spreads, infects me and on it goes. We will never be a united people. Not now, not ever.
I must admit I know next to nothing about the history of right wing extremism so this article is a learning curve but so is the net for some unfortunately.
The real worry is, as you say, “not so much what they say and do” but “who is quietly listening”.
Nobody is born a white supremacist, they are taught to be one.
How bizarre is it that the KKK had member name titles like ‘Grand or Imperial Wizard’? Disturbing stuff.
Had?
Oh, and there was the other thing I forgot to mention that Australians really hated seeing, was when a muslim man or woman is charged with anything, how they disrespect our justice systems.
They refuse to stand for judges, refuse to look at them or respond. Its just beyond it! That is our legal system, one of our most precious institutions. And they look at it like shit. Wont even respect a judge.
Then…………… of course there are the outside the court scenes where the little darlings give the finger to everyone around while growling more abuse.
Noice.
And what do the rest of Australians get told by way of explanation, well, their (also muslim) lawyer says, thats just the way they are, and we should learn to accept it. We should, should we? Is that what they do in Saudi Arabia, just suck it up and accept us? Like hell they do.
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Like I said, the biggest problem we have today is humans have long memories, they take offense, and once taken, its rare you will see a backdown. I will say it outright, Im over the muslim. Never knew how good it is we dont have them here.
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ps Islam is a religion, not a race. Never cared less what colour you are, just dont shove your god in my face!
Its all too late Jack. Very sad. Well, not really, par for the course with humans really. We dont get along well, any differences, we never have, history, omg history, doesnt lie.
And this ship has sailed my friends. Unless there is some massive change in perception on both sides, there is no hope of reconciliation. I dont see the muslims changing, I dont see the west changing either.
It all went south too long ago, there has been too much insult, too many people killed now.
I still havent forgotten Bali, and Im not about to. Why did those beautiful Australian boys and girls have to die. Is the reason the same hate that killed again in Christchurch?
My son came back from Bali a few months ago, says there is a guy riding around on a bike with “Australian girls are rape meat” written in huge letters on a flag he has hanging off the back of his cycle. Do the cops do anything? No, not a bloody thing. Apparently, its okay to say stuff like that about Australian girls. Like the gang rapes in Sydney, remember them? All the nasty muslims saying the girls deserve it, and their poor sons that did the raping are saints? You see, the problem is people dont forget. I havent forgotten and I dont even live in Sydney and I never see anyone in a scarf. But I still heard those insults, and when we dont see any come back for this sort of heinous endless insult, hatreds fester.
Sound familiar? All those Imans that are crying now that Aussies hate them. Well of course we do! Are you all blind fools?
You dont come into another culture and sling so much filth at the existing population, without some of it hitting home. Well it hit home idiots, and it was hurtful and rude. MY god if any people from the west behaved against the culture in a muslim country, they’d crucify them. (Dont you dare kiss that girl!)……
And yet here, we have demands for polygamy against our culture, child marriage against our culture, child genital mutilation, subjugation of women, enforced dress codes, demands for separate everything, demands for prayer rooms to be put in everywhere, oh and dont forget they now want the dogs off the beaches, or anywhere they muslims go for that matter, because, they dont like doggies..
Jesus Christ.
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No. Its probably for the best if we all grow up a bit and admit this was a bad marriage. Not all cultures and peoples are meant to mix. Perhaps this was all just a bridge to far, a lovely dream where we would all get along. Maybe its time for the muslims here who dont really love Australia, and more importantly Australians, to shove off somewhere else. The truth is, we dont love you either.
Not even you Waleed, not even you.
Have you been drinking Wraith…..my God you’re spruiking garbage
In your humble opinion Penny.
I honestly expected more blow back from being so honest about how I feel, but nope. Only you. Its a shitty mess Penny, and I dont see why we should always be the ones blamed. Discord always goes two ways.
Now, either we get serious and honest about how we feel and say the things we are truly thinking, or not, if not, how is anything ever going to be resolved? Truly, negative thoughts and feelings that are not dealt with only fester. Perhaps since the days of ‘uncovered meat’ I have been so offended but I didnt want to admit it (even to myself) because being offended somehow makes me an arsehole. A racist. Had nothing to do with race. Religion isnt a race.
Rather than have a shot at me, because I have lost all faith and have taken the hatred thrown at us to heart, why dont you have a go at some reassurance.
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Im sick of the liars and people who fein that they like us, Im tired of being told what’s wrong with my country and my people by religious types. You know full well what I think about religion, all religions, and what it does to people. How am I ever to think anything else? Fix it Penny. And if you cant fix it maybe you shouldnt judge?
Wraith, I am going to do you a favour. I am deleting all your comments and I won’t publish another one. You need to get off the internet, specifically the YouTube grifters and hate merchants you seem obsessively listening to. It is a common form of dealing with an event such as the Christchurch mosque massacres but it is absolutely destructive to you personally. Let law enforcement and intelligence agencies do their work. Stay off the internet and talk to people face to face. You will be better for it.
I read that the press in the US are commenting favourably, and comparing unfavourably, Adern’s response in banning certain weapons. Will that make a difference over there? I doubt it. It appears that the US constitution is an article of faith and not to be tampered with, regardless of overwhelming contemporaneous evidence to its fallibility. As a result the horrors in NZ or similar will be repeated and police or military resources will be spent, by the taxpayer, for patrolling mosques, synagogues, churches etc.
The fear is, and I think it’s correct, that if you start amending the Bill of Rights, the slippery slope will start subtracting most of them. We know that the left currently want a “hate speech” exemption to the First Amendment even after Brandenburg v. Ohio and the four following precedents.
B Bishop wouldn’t have looked out of place with the eels. Pity we can’t see if her left foot is airborne, or was it just a perfectly executed kick for the wing to score from. Any pics of Barnaby in a similar genre circulating?
There’s the odd shot of Barny at the annual Polies vs Press touch rugby game (or is it tackle – don’t remember). Beetroot on steroids.
Please refrain, Trivalve from putting the name Barnaby and tackle in the same sentence. I’ve lost my appetite for the Vietnamese meatballs and my version of pho stock that I was planning for dinner.
Yeah, well, ‘touch’ is a worry there too. And touch it was.
I noticed yesterday on the other side that some folks thought the timing ripe to rehash the old left/right nazi chestnut. I’m confident the warring parties will end up agreeing to disagree.
The only social media I engage in or read is here and the twitters of JtI and James Jeffrey. I find that dangerous and extreme enough to sate my issues and agenda.
As far as trolls go I happily get my fill with just the one persistently virulent garden variety type that resides on here. It’s patently an idiot who is best ignored (it would hate that), therefore it saddens me that it could see off good and reasoned contributors like Boa, Voltaire and possibly Dwight, amongst possibly others.
I noticed on the other side yesterday that some folks had thought it worthwhile to get back to that left/right nazi chestnut. I’m confident it will end up with the warring parties agreeing to disagree.
An excellent and timely read, Mr. Insider and very sobering to take stock of post-Christchurch while it’s still fresh in our minds.
Let us hope our Security Services, ASIO and the like step up their efforts to try and thwart further shocking atrocities as we have just seen in peaceful NZ.
People like Fraser Anning and Malcolm Roberts surely do not represent the honest hard working decent People of Australia.
Social Media has given the Masses a voice but sadly it has also given Nutjobs and Extremists the same voice.
I note the very astute NZ PM Ms. Ardern said she will never utter the name of the Australian Shooter, EVER! A step in the right direction imho to consigning these Scumbags to be “nonpersons”.