This evenimg, as the Gentleman Friend was on a call with a Kiwi colleague, I sat nearby working on a report. I half-heard him say something about how New Zealand feels so far away from the world and its ills and I stared down at the news window I had open, about an ongoing shooting at a mosque in Christchurch. It was a strange sort of experience; I thought maybe I should show him the breaking news but he was on a work call and besides, she clearly had no idea and it felt like a strange thing to interrupt with.
Anyhow, 49 are dead at the last count and it turns out New Zealand is in the world after all.
It is all peculiarly of this time. The Al Qaeda attacks and the ISIS attacks feel like the past now, and it is strange to start getting used to not holding breath in fear that an atrocity has been committed by a Muslim. This is a white supremacist of some sort, who posted on 4Chan or 8Chan or whatever and had a Facebook Live stream of the attack that by all accounts is horrific, which he opened by referring to online white nationalism and urging viewers to follow PewdiePie on Youtube. What a strange, inexplicable world we live in.
It has become increasingly usual when these things happen – at least when it is white nationalists who do the deed – that the killer should not be named, his manifesto not read, his video not watched, let him be forgotten.
My corner of Pakistani twitter (the left leaning one) has by contrast erupted, saying that yes say his name, put up his picture, see that this white face and this European name is the face of terrorism today, as was done with darker bearded faces for so many years. I don’t think Western folks, the right thinking ones, realise how hurtful those long years were for those of us who were fed up of explaining, contextualising, deprecating, dissociating, and finally just staying silent and cowering with hands over ears at what people with Muslim names did.