After The Sydney Siege, The Clash Of The Fearmongers
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=168886#168886
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/author/Brendan%20O/'/Neill>BRENDAN
O’NEILL EDITOR Some peddle fear of
Islamofascism, others promote panic about Islamophobia.
16 DECEMBER
2014
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/16360#disqus_thread>63
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he Sydney siege – the grandiose name being given
to the
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-30485355>invasion
of a chocolate-and-coffee shop in Sydney by a
mentally ill sex abuser – has exposed the dual
fears of the ‘war on terror’. On one side we have
those of a more right-leaning persuasion citing
the siege as evidence that Western nations like
Australia are under threat from ‘politically
motivated violence’ stoked up by outsiders. And
on the other side we have small-l liberals, those
who fancy themselves as searing critics of
officialdom, claiming that actually it’s the
insiders, Western nations’ own apparently dumb,
prejudiced, Muslim-fearing populations, who are
the true source of social instability today. One
side ratchets up fear of Islamofascism, the other
spreads panic about Islamophobia. One side frets
over foreign-inspired lone wolves, the other
agonises over the native masses and their likely
response to seeing a brown man doing something
bad on the news. Both sides peddle the politics of fear.
What happened in Sydney yesterday was certainly
tragic. Ordinary people were buying their morning
coffee in a Lindt cafe when they were terrorised
and held hostage for hours by a clearly disturbed
man in Islamo-headgear and wielding a gun. Three
people, including the gunman, were killed. This
is terrible. But was it an act of terror, as
such, never mind an act of war? The man who
carried out the attack, Man Haron Monis, was
apparently a troubled individual, a weird sheikh,
a<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/15/man-haron-monis-sydney-siege-suspect>‘fringe
and erratic’ man, who was under investigation by
the police for sexual assault. His attack could
just as easily be seen as the random act of an
individual with mental problems, which he then
tried to doll up as ‘political’ by waving a black
Islamic flag and demanding a phone conversation
with Tony Abbott. Monis was certainly a threat to
the people in the cafe, but he posed no threat to
Australia or its national security or democracy.
Even to describe his actions as the ‘Sydney
siege’, as if he had the whole city under his
command, is to imbue his erratic behaviour with
way too much menace and meaning; he should be
known as the Lindt loser, the chocolate-shop gunman.
Yet too many are rushing to hold up his actions
as hard evidence that Australia faces a
dastardly, foreign-inspired threat. Observers
claim the Lindt attack reveals the
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/11293694/Islamists-take-hostages-in-Sydney-cafe-siege-live.html>‘dangers
of lone-wolf terrorism’, and that the West
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/after-the-sydney-siege-the-clash-of-the-fearmongers/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/11293694/Islamists-take-hostages-in-Sydney-cafe-siege-live.html>faces
‘a new phase of terrorism that is far more
dangerous, and more difficult to defeat, than
al-Qaeda ever was’. This is fear talking. The
terrifying tag ‘lone wolf’ gives the impression
that individuals, anyone with a Koran and a gun,
can hold the West to ransom; but they can’t. They
can invade coffee shops and, worse, plant bombs
on trains and buses, but they cannot unleash any
kind of serious instability. They can harm
individuals, which is terrible, but they cannot
harm society. Unless, that is, we allow them to.
The impact of acts of terror is determined, not
by the terrorist himself, who is usually isolated
and weak, but by us, by how we choose to respond
to his actions. It is society’s resilience, or
otherwise, which determines whether terrorism
will be absorbed, coped with and moved on from,
or allowed to become a defining incident after
which we curb liberty, intensify everyday
security and live in a state of heightened
anxiety. Too often today, fearful Western
societies overreact to acts of terrorism, talking
them up as momentous and allowing them to change
our way of life. Such an advertisement of Western
insecurities, such a public depiction of sad,
lone blokes as a mortal threat to the West, could
prove deadly in the long term, acting as an
invitation to other hateful, anti-Western
individuals to have a pop at the West, too.
Certainly yesterday’s global concern about what
was happening in a Lindt shop in Sydney, with
reportedly everyone from Barack Obama to David
Cameron on tenterhooks, will have signalled to
other terroristic opportunists that they, too,
could potentially bring the West temporarily to
its knees by carrying out one scrappy, bloody act of violence.
Yet the response of so-called critical and
liberal commentators to the Sydney siege was, if
anything, even worse than the panic exhibited by
some officials and experts. In keeping with other
recent acts of Islamic terrorism in the West,
these observers responded by instantly asking:
‘Will the mob now rise up and attack Muslims?’
Even while the siege was ongoing, the Australian
Twitterati and sections of the commentariat were
expressing pre-emptive solidarity with Muslims in
anticipation of an
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-30479306>‘Islamophobic
backlash’ in response to the siege. That is,
almost their very first response upon seeing a
Muslim carrying out an act of public violence was
to wonder what Oz’s Neanderthal white hordes
might get up to in the streets. To fear the lone
wolf who waves a foreign flag and a gun is one
thing; to fear the populace, the masses, the
blob, takes the politics of panic to another level.
During the siege, an Australian woman posted a
message on Facebook claiming she had seen a
Muslim woman on a bus removing her hijab,
presumably to hide the fact she was a Muslim.
Before long, the hashtag #illridewithyou – that
is, ‘I am willing to sit with a Muslim on a bus
and be nice to him or her’ – was trending on
Twitter. Some people actually printed out the
hashtag and
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-30479306>carried
or wore it in public – a stunning act of
narcissism, designed to draw attention to their
presumed moral decency and implacable anti-racism
in contrast to the alleged kneejerk Islamophobia
of the uneducated and gruff. This fear of
Islamophobia, this view of the masses as a pogrom
in the making, has accompanied every terror
attack in recent years, from 9/11 to the Madrid
train bombings to
<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/2271#.VI97QV5SHx4>London’s
7/7. It speaks to the chattering classes’
profound discomfort with their fellow citizens,
whom they presume to be naturally racist and
easily stirred up by hotheaded media coverage of
Muslim people and Muslim behaviour. A bomb goes
off or a gun is shot and they immediately think:
‘How will they respond to this?’ In a terrible
irony, it is precisely this view of Western
society’s masses as being ignorant of, or even
disgusted by, Islam and its practitioners which
fuels the narcissistic sense of grievance and
self-pity exhibited by many of the young Western
Muslims attracted to groups like Islamic State.
These individuals often feed off the anti-Western
outlook of Western society itself, the idea that
the West is hostile to Islam, which is most
vociferously promoted by the West’s own blob-fearing chattering classes.
So the Sydney siege – or the Lindt event, rather
– shines a light on the extent to which modern
public debate is really just a clash of fears, a
struggle between different breeds of panic. The
debate doing the rounds is pretty much: ‘What’s
more terrifying: Islamofascism or Islamophobia?
Muslim wolves or mass idiots?’ A better question
to ask would be this: why is our first response
to even small acts of violence always fear rather
than defiance and simply carrying on with life
exactly as it was the day before one guy with a
grudge decided to do something wicked?
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.
--
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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