Time to Talk Frankly About Christchurch Shooter.

On Friday, March 15 a gunman walked into two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand and killed fifty people. New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, insisted that she will not name the gunman. She believes his actions were, at least in part, motivated by the desire for notoriety and doesn’t want to give it to him. I believe that despite good intentions, not naming the shooter isn’t helpful in this case. His name is Brenton Tarrant, and we need to talk about him and what he represents.

The idea of not speaking the name of mass shooters began with the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. The victims’ families and others urged the media and the public to focus on the names of the victims rather than the shooter. They fear that sensationalizing the shooter would give him what he wanted and encourage others to follow his example. Many of these mass shootings make no sense and people seeking to make sense of the senseless can focus too much on the perpetrator. It’s admirable to want to change the conversation.

The Christchurch shootings; however, were not senseless, were not random or without reason.

We know why Tarrant allegedly killed Haji-Daoud Nabi after Nabi welcomed him as a brother. Why he killed bright-eyed toddler, Mucab Ibrahim, and 14-year-old soccer player Sayyad Milne and 47 other people. Tarrant is a white supremacist, he saw them as less human than himself because they were not white. He saw them as invaders because they were not born on the soil he believed he had a right to and they did not. We know this because Tarrant allegedly wrote a manifesto titled “The Great Replacement” detailing his ideology. He believed he was protecting the white race.

And he isn’t alone.

White supremacy has been on the rise for a number of years, hate crimes against Muslims and people of Arab descent in Canada alone went up significantly just in 2017. According to Statistics Canada, hate crimes targeting Arab or West Asian populations rose by 27% and crimes against Muslims more than doubled and accounted for 17% of all hate crime in Canada.

Around the world, there have been a number of high-profile attacks by white supremacists and many that get less attention. Many Muslims and Middle Eastern people were not surprised by these attacks. Australian journalist Waleed Aly expressed the feelings of many Muslims and Arab people in response to this attack.

“I’m gutted, and I’m scared, and I feel overcome with utter hopelessness.” Aly said, “The most dishonest thing, the most dishonest thing would be to say that I am shocked.”

No, Muslim people are not shocked. They know that hate crime is on the rise and in the USA the funding to fight white extremist has been cut by the Trump administration. This same administration that frequently dog-whistles to white supremacists. The administration that Tarrant explicitly hailed in his manifesto as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

This is why the public need to talk openly about Tarrant because he isn’t a “lone wolf” as many right-wing pundits may claim. He doesn’t wear a white hood or a Nazi uniform. He looks like an ordinary white man. His ordinariness is what is most chilling about him. Because this is what white supremacy is like in our times, ordinary, hidden in plain sight.

It is also pointless to not name him in an attempt to deny him fame. He live-streamed the massacre and is already a hero among those who share his beliefs.

Not naming Tarrant or looking at his face makes it too easy to avoid talking about the difficult problem of white supremacy. Too easy to imagine him as a monster or an aberration. But with hate crime rising and white supremacists using the internet to spread their message, we cannot afford to avoid the conversation. As a Middle Eastern person, I can tell you I am gutted and I am scared and I am trying not to be hopeless, but I don’t want to find myself thinking once more how I am not shocked. In the names of those fifty victims, please don’t avoid the conversation.