White male perpetrators of violence receive understanding from the media, while Muslims are seen as the very definition of terrorists.
Violent white men get understanding and pleas for their circumstances to be taken into account. Violent Muslims get “who radicalised them”. It’s media racism — or media bigotry, if you want to get hung up on the “Islam isn’t a race” excuse — in action.
Now, belatedly, there seems to be a dawning realisation that mental health might actually be relevant not merely for understanding why angry white men commit violence but for some violent Muslim extremists as well. The role of mental illness in the background of terror attack perpetrators certainly needs more study — some experts say it plays no significant role (and people with mental illness are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the community), but time and again, mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness feature in the background of perpetrators. So, too, does domestic and sexual violence, as the case of Man Haron Monis indicates.
Nowhere does this play out more clearly than in the connection between Western military action and violent responses from radical Muslims. This connection is now so well-established and so widely accepted that it’s laborious to document — it has been made by the CIA, by MI5, the Pentagon, by all UK intelligence agencies advising Tony Blair before the Iraq War, by counter-terrorism experts, and even made by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. And yet when an Australian Islamic cleric made the same connection, he was demonised as a terrorism apologist by News Corp and government ministers, people like Trump and Pauline Hanson for doing so.
The double standard doesn’t extend merely to the bigotry of the Murdoch press or the casual inconsistency of thoughtless journalists. Earlier this week, at least 73 Syrian civilians, including 35 children, were killed in airstrikes in the Syrian town of Manjib, with the casualties confirmed by several different monitors of civilian casualties. The United States is the only air force operating in the area and now says it is “investigating” what happened. Such investigations tend to take many months and the results only emerge long after the relevant incident has long been forgotten.
While the media is focused on covering the bloody attacks in Europe, the bomb blast occurred at Kabul killing 80 and wounded hundreds of people wasn’t a headline topic in the media. Another ISIS attack. But why the same ISIS claimed attacks usually don’t carry same weight in every place of the world?
If the same brutal massacres don’t carry the same weight of attention, morning and fear, militants will be more inclined to orchestra mass attacks at places where they consider more appealing for propaganda and recruitment purpose to boost up the claims of victories.
The problem is that such events perpetuate exactly the anger and disaffection that provides such fertile soil for Islamic extremists.
White or not, men or not, adult or not, Muslims or not, religious or not, any person can become radicalized if the conditions are met to motivate the individual’s perpetration of mass violence .
The indifference of Western media, and the West itself to those casualties of non white people outside the West reinforces the impression of a profound double standard. It’s a double standard with a real human cost.
