Fear and Falsehood - The Fallacy of Global War

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. 

Nobody is responsible for the deaths in Christchurch other than the terrorist who held the gun. But he was inspired by the exact rhetoric and sabre rattling that Breitbart and others have co-opted for their own ends. The attacker explicitly stated that his reasoning for killing 50 innocent people was because of the existential threat that Islam supposedly poses to Christian/Western values. This is the exact same rhetoric used by Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and other Jihadi groups the world over. Deflecting from a terror attack committed in the name of white nationalism and Christianity by highlighting attacks on Christians reinforces the exact thinking that led to this brutality in the first place. Not only is this thinking wrong, it is incredibly dangerous. He killed them because they kill us.

He killed them because they kill us.

Where does this kind of thinking end?