The brutal
massacre of 50 people as they attended Friday afternoon prayers in Christchurch
by a white nationalist terrorist last week has dominated headlines across the
world. Understandably, the worst terror incident in
New Zealand’s history, which the attacker livestreamed on
Facebook, has been impossible to ignore. For a peaceful nation, this was a
tragedy of almost unprecedented scale.
As world leaders praise Jacinda Ardern’s leadership
in response to the terror attack, and investigators pour over the killer’s “rambling,
strangely written” and vehemently anti-Muslim manifesto, debate continues
to rage over what this latest extreme act of violence means for the increasingly
polarised global political and religious landscape. Just two days after the
Christchurch shooting, there was another mass shooting, this time claiming the
lives of three people and seriously injuring three more in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Although there is currently little hard evidence
that this attack was motivated by terror, the police announcement that this
is an ongoing line of enquiry was quickly co-opted by various media outlets and
prominent figures to highlight the “threat”
of Muslim immigration to Europe (a threat that the Christchurch attacker
also claimed as a motive).
It seems the violent terrorist attack by an “angelic
boy” has led to a crisis of conscience in some western media outlets. In
response to the extensive media coverage around Christchurch, Breitbart, the far-right American news
website, bemoaned the supposed media silence of a massacre
of Christians in Nigeria in the weeks running up to Christchurch. Citing
sources from other right-wing outlets such as Christian Militant, the article highlights what it sees as hypocrisy
in the mainstream media in its uneven coverage of the attacks in New Zealand
and Nigeria: “The New York Times did
not place this story on the front page; in fact, they did not cover it at all.
Apparently, when assessing “all the news that’s fit to print,” the massacre of
African Christians did not measure up”.
It is true that the deaths of up to 120 Christians in
Nigeria in February and March 2019 did not get the same headline coverage as
the Christchurch massacre. I have not found one western media outlet that has reported
on any one of the attacks against Christian farmers in northern or central
Nigeria this year, by predominantly Muslim Fulani herdsmen. However, this is
the extent of the accuracy in the Breitbart
article.
The article goes on to incorrectly describe the attackers as
“Fulani Jihadists”, when in fact the main
motive for the prolonged violence between these groups is not a religious one.
Nor is it a one-off terrorist act. Violence between Fulani Muslim herdsman and
Christian farmer groups of various ethnicities in these areas of Nigeria is a
result of a prolonged and increasingly desperate struggle for land ownership.
International NGOs, such as International Crisis Group, have
been reporting on the tit-for-tat violence since fighting escalated last
year. In the same way that no western media outlets reported the attacks on
Christian farmers by the Fulani in the last few months, the ICG report in
summer of last year was largely ignored in the Western mainstream.
Unfortunately, such violence between groups that are in
direct competition over increasingly sparse resources is becoming routine in
Nigeria, and, as I argued in my
Future of Climate Conflict post, will likely be exacerbated
globally as climate change stretches the limits of our natural resources. As ICG
noted in their analysis of the herdsman/pastoralist conflict in Nigeria, ethnic
and religious differences between the disparate groups are easily exploited in
a context of increasing uncertainty and economic fear, making violence more
likely.
The Christian victims of the Fulani attacks were not killed
because of their religion, and it is wrong to claim otherwise. An excellent Snopes fact-checking article adds that “while
Breitbart’s article provided details of several reported attacks by Fulani
herders on farmers in Kaduna State in February and March 2019, it did not
mention the attack on the mainly Muslim Fula ethnic group, which was the single
largest reported atrocity during the time period in question”. These attacks are
part of a larger conflict, one that the western media has made no effort to
report on since its very beginning. This in itself is a demonstration of the
failings of the media to report on African conflict, but it is not an example
of an agenda that somehow “favours” Muslim victimhood and silences violence
against Christians, as Breitbart implies.
In fact, the extensive coverage of the “bring
back our girls” campaign that followed the abduction of 200 school girls in
Nigeria by the terror group Boko Haram demonstrates that Jihadist violence
features heavily in the global discourse on terrorism.
Religion- and ethnicity-based identity politics are the
weapons used to encourage intergroup hostility and violence. What happened at
Christchurch was a tragedy and a disgrace. Any deaths as a result of intergroup
violence in Nigeria or Utrecht are equally horrifying. This is not a time for
comparison, or finger pointing. The attack in New Zealand shook the world
because of the visceral nature of an attack on such a scale in an otherwise
peaceful country, that was livestreamed online for viewers around the world to
watch. The attacks on Christian farmers in Nigeria have left thousands to
struggle with the loss of a father, mother, partner, or child. Families across
Utrecht now have to come to terms with lives that have been permanently damaged.
No good has come of any of this violence. All that has been
left behind is sorrow, anguish, and in some cases likely a desire for revenge.
People have been killed simply for being who they are. The motivation behind the
act in no way justifies the consequences in any of these instances, but the
context and nuance of each situation should not be ignored. If you are looking
for evidence to suggest that Christianity and Islam are incompatible, then you
will find it. But that does not mean it is actually there. This is not a point
scoring exercise. This is not some apocalyptic endgame between Christians and
Muslims. This is not a war. This is madness.
We are people. We live and work together. We stand side by
side and help each other out and laugh together and muddle through and try to make
something in the years we have here. For some of us, those years ran out too
soon.
He killed them
because they kill us.
Where does this kind of thinking end?
