Friday 15 March 9.

12pm,
The diary of a Scottish Muslim Woman; After the Christchurch Massacre
Smina Akhtar, University of Glasgow
Today I feel broken. I woke up around 7am and checked my phone as normal and
discovered that a white supremacist, a fascist had shot and killed 49 people at two
Christchurch mosques in New Zealand. This massacre happened thousands of miles
away from Glasgow but I cried and I’ve been crying for most of the day, I generally
don’t cry a lot. I was horrified at what had happened but not surprised, this was
waiting to happen in a world where anti-Muslim racism is now the dominant form of
racism practised by the state, the media and the far-right not just in New Zealand but
in Europe, America and of course Britain. I still couldn’t stop the irrational thoughts
and questions, questions that I already knew the answers to, such as, how did we
get to a point where Muslims like me are hated so much? I attended the evening
vigil called by the Muslim Council of Scotland in Glasgow city centre, it was an
extremely cold evening which worked in my favour because I could tell people that
my eyes were watering when in fact, I just couldn’t hold back the tears. It was
so9me time afterwards that I felt the overwhelming urge to express my fury and tears
in words.
Minutes before he started shooting, Brenton Tarrant a 28 year old born in Australia
posted a 74 page manifesto where he claimed that Muslims would soon outnumber
the white race which he entitled “The Great Replacement”. He wore a webcam in his
helmet to record his massacre which he livestreamed on Facebook. That is not the
behaviour of a sane individual is it? It’s very easy and perhaps convenient to
dismiss him as a deviant, normal people don’t go to a mosque and film themselves
shooting people while they are praying do they? Just hours afterwards, members of
the far-right, clearly inspired by Tarrant attacked worshippers outside an East
London mosque. For those of you who are thinking how can attacks on Muslims be
described as racism? I know Muslims aren’t a race but today’s racism is expressed
in cultural terms so can include religion giving it the flexibility to adapt to what the
racists require at any given time and context, which makes anti-Muslim racism very
real.
So why did Tarrant do it? Where did he get his racism from?
The project to dehumanise Muslims was ramped up following 9/11. The attacks on
the Twin Towers in 2001 were used to justify the West’s ‘war on terror’, which was
essentially a war with the sections of the Muslim world which didn’t yield to their
agenda. It started with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq because it is easier to
enter wars with countries whose people are first defined as less than human. So, it
was necessary to construct a discourse of the Muslim man as a terrorist, a sexual
deviant and oppressor of women who weren’t even allowed to choose what they
wore.
The 7/7 terrorist attacks carried out in London, because they were carried out by
Muslims born and bred in the UK, resulted in the re-formulation of state
counterterrorism policies focussing on British born Muslims, as a homogenous group

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of potential terrorists. Muslims were and still are required to prove their loyalty and
Britishness by giving up their cultures and accepting a set of undefined “British
Values” and a “British way of life. Any visible signs of Muslimness are viewed with
suspicion.
Tarrant’s racist ideas are sanctioned and practised by the very top of Western state
structures, by far-right organisations and by sections of the media, he just put them
into practice. In his manifesto, Tarrant praised President Trump for his work in
renewing the hopes of the white race, he praised Anders Breivik, the Norwegian
white supremacist who massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011, in fact, Tarrant said
he had Breivik’s blessings for his actions. Since he became President, Trump has
consistently pursued a racist and Islamophobic policy agenda, from his bans on
Muslims entering the US to his determination to build a wall to keep Mexicans out.
Even if he denies he is a white nationalist, the white nationalists think he is one of
them, and in tune with Tarrant he is intent on making America white. His reasoning
is based on the racist assumption that Muslims are terrorists, yet every single
terrorist attack carried out in America in 2018 was carried out by white nationalists.
Let’s also not forget that Trump retweeted Jayda Fransen the leader of Britain First,
a far-right British group to the delight of their members. In effect, giving state
sanction to their abhorrent racism and fascism. He is effectively partly responsible
for propping up right wing anti-Muslim racism both in Britain and in America and now
in New Zealand too.
Responsibility for this attack and similar ones lies too with sections of the media. As
soon as Tarrant was identified as the killer today, the vile right-wing Mail online put a
link to his Facebook live video on their site essentially acting as clickbait. The right-
wing press have presented him as a blond haired “innocent boy” who grew up
without a father. In contrast, they vilified Shamima Begum a 19 year old Muslim
woman whose new born baby had just died in a freezing refugee camp, they called
her a traitor, a “Jihadi bride” who should never be allowed to return to Britain and the
Metro described her dead 18 day old son, as an “ISIS baby”.
So, a murderer of 49 innocent Muslims is presented in the most sensitive and
humane way where whiteness denotes goodness while the Muslim woman is
labelled as the evil terrorist. It’s not just the gutter press that peddles racism and
Islamophobia in Britain. The so called respectable and quality media gives voice to
career racists and islamophobes such as Piers Morgan who consistently defends
Trump and Melanie Philips a Guardian columnist who claims that islamophobia is
manufactured and overstated. Whilst the BBC gives constant coverage to Nigel
Farage and far-right Muslim hater Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson).
Many of our own politicians are also guilty of actively pursuing an agenda of racism
and islamophobia, thus when the former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson describes
Muslim women who wear the burka as bank robbers and post boxes it gives
confidence and state sanction to racist ideas, and legitimacy to racist attacks. When
the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid revoked British citizenship from Shamima Begum
he was giving a clear message to all Muslims that we are the “other” and are only
British on terms defined by the British State. Let us also not forget Theresa May’s

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“Go Home” vans and Windrush which resulted from her ‘hostile environment’ policies
which only targeted Black people. Sajid Javid promised an end to the Windrush
deportations but he has broken his promise, we must hold him to account for that.
The battle against racism and islamophobia is one that we must all actively
participate in. We can increase security on mosques but we must do battle on the
ideological and political level too. Politicians must be held to account, we must force
them to stop deportations, we must call out the racist politicians and stop buying
racist rags like the Sun and the Mail. Racism in all of its forms must be called out
wherever we see it or hear it, in our workplaces, amongst our friends and families
too. I am a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, I found out just a few days
ago that a far-right group was trying to organise on campus. I contacted some
members of my department, one of them is a union rep, we met just yesterday and
decided to get the union to call a campus wide meeting on the far-right, racism and
free speech for all students and staff. What we do will make a difference, the far-
right presence at the university is small, we will do our best to make sure it is totally
eradicated.
In the words of Raymond Williams “To be truly radical is to make hope possible,
rather than despair convincing”. I am convinced that we can build a better world.
Smina Akhtar is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow
This article was published in Commonspace on 16 March 2019