Fear of a Muslim Planet

Global Islamophobia in the New World Order

Arsalan Iftikhar

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781510763630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Human rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar takes on Islamophobia through the lens of the brutal Christchurch slaughter. In March 2019, a heavily-armed white supremacist walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and slaughtered fifty-oneinnocent Muslim worshippers while broadcasting on Facebook Live for the world to see. After the Christchurch mosque massacre, authorities found the white supremacist's seventy-four-page racist manifesto called "The Great Replacement, " which railed against Muslims and the idea that brown Muslim folks were ultimately going to "replace" white people in his irrational "Fear of Muslim Planet." Fear of a Muslim Planet begins with the treacherous legacy of the white supremacist "Great Replacement" theory in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre. One of the heroes for the Christchurch shooter was the infamous Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist named Anders Breivik, who brutally murdered seventy-sevenpeople in 2011 in Norway's worst terrorist attack ever andwhose own 1, 500-page fascist manifesto promoted thr "Great Replacement" worldview that Muslim immigrants posed a danger to Western societies.As the book further illustrates, minority victims of the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory are not limited to Muslims alone. In October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was devastated when a white supremacist brutally executed eleveninnocent Jewish congregants in a horrific act of anti-Semitic terrorism (it was the single deadliest attack exclusively targeting Jews ever to happen in the United States).The shooter later told police that he was inspired to commit these murders because Donald Trump was not doing enough to stop immigration. "Open your Eyes!" the shooter posted on social media in a disjointed anti-Semitic and Islamophobic manifesto. "It's the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!"The presidency of Donald Trump has only exacerbated the growth of Islamophobia in America today. Fear of a Muslim Planet outlines the blatantly anti-Muslim statements and policies of Trump and his closest political circle. From telling CNN's Anderson Cooper that "I think Islam hates us" to calling for a "complete and total shutdown" of Muslims entering the United States, the Trump presidency has only made the xenophobic specter of Islamophobia grow today.The book will also show that Islamophobia is not simply an American (or Western) problem either. Fear of a Muslim Planet will show the genocidal levels of Islamophobia in places like China and Myanmar.The European fixation on policing Muslim women's hijab (headscarf) is another focal point. The book ends with a clarion call for mutual understanding and coexistence amongpeople of all backgrounds, if we have the courage to summon our better selves and look beyond each other's race, religion, andethnic backgrounds.

1

“Open Your Eyes!”

In March 2019, Daoud Nabi was a seventy-one-year-old grandfather of nine living in Christchurch, New Zealand. An engineer by profession, he had escaped war in his native Afghanistan over forty years before, moving his family to New Zealand so they could have a safer life and pursue better opportunities. Upon his arrival in the Kiwi nation, Mr. Nabi had immediately immersed himself in his adopted homeland’s language and culture. He also founded a mosque and became president of an ethnic Afghan civic association, with an eye to helping other Muslims who were likewise new arrivals. He assisted Muslim immigrants with basics like finding housing, and helped them acculturate more broadly into their new community.

“He used to make everyone feel at home,” his son Omar told Al Jazeera News.

“Hello, brother. Welcome!” were the seventy-one-year-old Muslim grandfather’s last words.

He spoke them—on March 15, 2019, at about 1:40 in the afternoon—to a twenty-eight-year-old white supremacist who entered the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque armed with military-style semi-automatic weapons.

Unbeknownst to the worshippers that day, the interloper’s hideous plan was to live-stream a deadly anti-Muslim rampage on Facebook Live for the entire world to see.⁵ And that was exactly what he did.

When the dust had finally settled on that fateful day in Christchurch—a day that still resonates for Muslim communities around the world—the white supremacist had brutally murdered fifty-one innocent Muslim worshippers in one of the worst cases of Islamophobic terrorism in modern times. (It was the worst terrorist attack ever in New Zealand’s history.)

The twenty-eight-year-old terrorist—whom I choose not to name—had legally purchased online at least four semi-automatic weapons used in the attack.

While live-streaming a mass murder of this type was unprecedented, the terrorist predictably had authored a manifesto which he posted online. It was a seventy-four-page rant against Muslims, immigration, and multiculturalism.

The title of the manifesto was “The Great Replacement”; it is a document obsessed with the idea that non-white Muslim people will one day “replace” white people in countries like New Zealand by becoming a larger percentage of the population. (The words “birth rate” and “fertility” occur repeatedly throughout the document.)

But more broadly, it is a document driven by a fear of change. The author disliked that modernity has made it easier for people to travel to new countries and/or to adopt new homelands. The author seemed to pine for a “black and white” world of yore, in which people of a certain race and religion all lived in one country and never traveled or moved. The author was obsessed with the idea that non-white immigrants to New Zealand were having more children than white New Zealanders, and slowly creating demographic change.

Yet after lodging this general complaint, the author seemed unable to say exactly why it was a complaint at all.

Why would it be a bad thing if the number of Muslims in New Zealand increased slightly?

The white supremacist had no answer.

Why is it bad when Muslim people go to live in Christian-majority countries, but not when Christians go to live in Muslimmajority countries? (Consider all the British expats in Dubai, for example.)

Again, there was no answer.

Throughout the terrorist’s manuscript, the things that Muslims are going to do are left unwritten, but the author is certain that they’re very bad.

Chillingly, the white supremacist’s racist manifesto also said that he deliberately chose his targets—a mosque and an Islamic center—simply because they were the most visible symbols of Islam in the area. The worshippers had committed no particular crime or infraction in his view, other than being Muslim in a country where Muslims are not the majority. To the terrorist’s way of thinking, that was enough to warrant their murders.

It wasn’t personal.

It’s worth noting that “The Great Replacement” was also peppered with racist jokes and references to right-wing internet message boards like 8chan. It made references to the Crusades and the Barbary Pirate War—invoking conflicts involving Muslims that are both centuries old and long-settled—just as posts and memes on those message boards often do. Not coincidentally, one of the “heroes” of many 8channers is an infamous Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist named Anders Breivik, who murdered seventy-seven people in 2011 in Norway’s worst terrorist attack ever. In the Christchurch terrorist’s manuscript, he credits Breivik as an inspiration for his own mass killing spree.

The two men shared eerie similarities in many ways.

Almost a decade before the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre, anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik carried out an attack in Oslo, Norway. Breivik had targeted a multicultural-themed summer camp for teenagers, and many of his seventy-seven victims, hideously, were children.

In court, Breivik proudly admitted to the attacks and said they were his personal response to Norway’s welcoming, multicultural embrace of Muslim immigrants. According to the New York Times, Breivik’s own 1,500-page fascist manifesto was deeply influenced by right-wing extremists who had preceded him in promoting hate, violence, and Islamophobia (as well as—bizarrely—copying multiple passages from the Unabomber’s manifesto word-for-word).⁶ Breivik denounced Norway’s politicians for failing to defend the country from multiculturalism and Muslim immigration. He cited American right-wing anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer at least sixty-three times within his manifesto. Breivik also quoted from other prominent white supremacists who shared his racist worldview that Muslim immigrants posed a danger to Western societies.

But again, that danger was never expounded upon or articulated. More Muslims in Norway would be bad because … it would be bad. A government that encouraged multiculturalism was bad because … it was just bad.

Most of the people killed by Breivik had done nothing to offend him personally. Many of the victims were young white Scandinavian teenagers who were simply attending a camp celebrating multiculturalism.

Once again, it was not personal. These victims were not leaders who had enacted a policy Breivik disliked. They were not Muslims who had committed a crime or transgression. They were literally children at a summer camp. But for Breivik, that didn’t matter. Once again, it wasn’t personal.

Like the Christchurch terrorist, Breivik described himself as a righteous crusader on a mission to save white Christian European societies from the rising tide of brown Muslim immigration. Also like the shooter in Christchurch, Breivik made pop culture references and attempted to associate mainstream cultural touchstones with his agenda of murder and terror; for example, he suggested that the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2—which is enjoyed by millions of peaceful gamers—was “part of my training-simulation” and ideal for target practice before mass shootings.⁷

The links between the Christchurch killer and Breivik are many layers deep. One directly cites the other, yes. You cannot get much more direct than that. But both evil men also parroted the same anti-Muslim memes and talking points. Both attempted to make pop culture references that would connect with young people as part of their approach. One suggested that video game first-person shooters were a good way to warm up for a mass killing and the other live-streamed his massacre in the first person.

Both men were unable to say with any specificity why it was a bad thing that immigration to their country by Muslims (and others) was happening.

And for both men, it did not matter that their victims had done nothing personally. In the eyes of their killers, the simple fact of their Muslim existence had made them “fair game.”

***

The second victim of the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre was a seventy-eight-year-old black Muslim man named Abdukadir Elmi. A native of Somalia and the patriarch of his family, he was lovingly referred to as “Sheikh” by many people in the Christchurch Muslim community. Elmi had come to New Zealand ten years previously.

“This is devastating,” his son told the Washington Post after the terrorist massacre. “My father survived through civil war in Somalia. I never thought this kind of stuff would happen to him in New Zealand.”⁸

Sadly, however, that kind of stuff was happening in plenty of places that were not war-torn countries. And it was happening to Muslims of African origin just like Elmi.

In January 2017, Quebec City, Quebec witnessed its own brutal act of weaponized Islamophobia when a twenty-something Trump-supporting white supremacist named Alexandre Bissonnette casually walked into a mosque during evening prayers and opened fire, killing six innocent Muslims (whose names were Ibrahima Barry, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzeddine Soufiane, and Aboubaker Thabti) as they prayed together with nearly fifty other worshippers that fateful evening in Canada.

Though he could not vote in American elections, Bissonnette was a huge fan of Donald Trump, proudly posting selfies on social media while wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. After the mosque massacre, Quebec City police found that Bissonnette had spent hours on the internet having searched for Donald Trump a grand total of 819 times on Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Facebook shortly before his murderous act. But millions of fans of Donald Trump do not shoot up mosques. Why was Bissonnette different?

Bissonnette had previously stated that he was totally against immigration, because he thought that brown-skinned immigrants would take over neighborhoods, hurt the economy, and increase unemployment for white people. (Actual economists, of course, agree that immigration grows a country’s economy and tends to create jobs.) After his arrest, Bissonnette eventually revealed to police that he’d finally “snapped” when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau implied in a tweet that Canada would accept Muslim refugees who were turned away by Donald Trump’s Muslim travel bans. The Washington Post did further digging and reported that Bissonnette was obsessed with the Twitter accounts of other prominent right-wing personalities, including FOX News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Alex Jones of Infowars, American conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, white supremacist Richard Spencer, and even Donald Trump’s senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway. Bissonnette also enjoyed the Twitter account of right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro—the belligerent editor-in-chief of the conservative news site the Daily Wire—checking Shapiro’s social media feed at least ninety-three times in the month leading up to his massacre.⁹ Bissonnette had found media personalities who would confirm his existing beliefs. Who would assure him that, yes, this feeling in his gut was correct. Immigrants and Muslims did pose a perilous threat. Of some sort. The pundits and personalities Bissonnette enjoyed did not openly advocate the murder of Muslims, but it is hard to imagine that their attitude—that Muslim immigrants present a gravely serious problem that literally threatens the soul of the nation—would do anything to dissuade him.

The terror attacks that would quickly culminate in Christchurch did not only target Muslims. This is because in the mythological narrative of the murderous and hate-filled, any minority group can be implicated when it suits the purposes of white supremacists. A mass murderer can reconcile striking at a different group as a “roundabout way” of striking at Muslims.

In October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was devastated when a white supremacist brutally executed eleven innocent Jewish congregants in a horrible act of anti-Semitic terrorism. It was the single deadliest attack exclusively targeting Jews ever to happen in the United States and the shooter later told police that he was inspired to commit these murders because Donald Trump was not doing enough to stop immigration. Yet millions of Americans take a hard line on immigration but do not shoot up synagogues.

This shooter had bought into the deeper and age-old conspiracy theory (often used as a recruiting tool by anti-Semites) suggesting that whatever racial or ethnic group a bigot dislikes, they ought to also dislike Jews because Jewish people are somehow “behind” things that they don’t like. To them, Jewish politicians are behind pushing policies that allowed minority groups to immigrate. Jewish business owners are behind profiting from doing business with minorities. That movie you saw where a white person and a non-white person kissed? It was probably written by a Jew, or directed by a Jew, or greenlit by a Jewish studio head in Hollywood.

This particular strain of anti-Semitism (suggesting Jews are “behind” trends in immigration policy and culture) is widely promulgated on white supremacist internet message boards like 8chan that serve as the nexus of so many white supremacist mass murderers today.

When it comes to the Tree of Life shooter, once again, the deeper truth was in his unhinged racist manifesto.

“Open your Eyes!” the shooter had posted on social media in a disjointed anti-Semitic and Islamophobic rant.¹⁰ “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

A white supremacist set out to hate Muslims, but—convinced by online histrionics and internet memes that Jews were pushing for Muslim immigration—shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh. It did not matter that these Jews had done nothing personally to push any kind of agenda. For the shooter, it was enough that they were Jews, and they were nearby.

And less than a year later, in April 2019, the Jewish community in Poway, California was attacked by a nineteen-year-old white supremacist who opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle inside the Chabad of Poway synagogue. A sixty-year-old congregant named Lori Gilbert-Kaye was killed as she tried to protect her rabbi, who thankfully survived the shooting.

After the California synagogue shooting, the parents of the nineteen-year-old white supremacist stated that they were “shocked and deeply saddened” by the terrible attack. ...