The Standard Petition Against the Backlash is Getting Even Faster

by Thomas Samm (January 2015)

A friend once laughed as she told me how her elderly mother had phoned to say she had sent her daughter an email, “so you’ll probably get it by tomorrow morning.” The traditional print media in its electronic form is even quicker than my friend’s now late mother could have imagined. Ready-made self-pitying activist screeds are mechanically cranked out by grown men wanting to yell and wail about their victimhood, even before the most elementary facts of a case have been drawn up in history’s first draft. One “Sydney-based writer and activist,” who faxed over to the British media a long ago-written response to his home city’s siege-murder event, was at the far opposite end of the spectrum to those carefree dumb Sydneyers who took selfies in front of an ongoing scene of kidnap and murder.

Osman Faruqi in the Independent expended a single negative adjective on the wrongness of the perpetrator’s act: “devastating.” (Note the word’s usual collocation with more elemental or contentious tragedies, like hurricanes or debt crises, where culpability is phenomenal or arguable.) Faruqi then used one on the victims themselves, the non-muslim residents of Australia: “patronizing.” You only have to read the title of his article to know that physicist Alan Guth got his theory of parallel universes just by flicking through the oped pages of newspapers like the Independent. “Sydney siege: Australia’s Muslims need much more than #IllRideWithYou’s hollow symbolism.” For you see, after two of Australia’s non-Muslims have been murdered by a Muslim, it is, to Osman Faruqi, Australia’s Muslims who need “much more.” But much more of what? Material aid? Social welfare? Educational coupons? Psycho-sexual counseling? Faruqi never specifies what Australia’s Muslims need much more of after the murder of two Australian non-Muslims because they are non-Muslim. But that is his position, and the Independent wishes to publish it: that it is Australia’s Muslims who need much more as two non-Muslim families mourn their children and relatives murdered because they were Australian and non-Muslim.

One reason #IllRideWithYou became mere symbolism was because “despite repeated call-outs, I [-Faruqi-] was unable to find a single Muslim who took up the offer to ride with anyone yesterday.” Fair dinkum to them: they, unlike Faruqi, were possibly aware that advertising your misplaced sense of victimhood on the day of two other person’s slaughter might come across as a little outré. Either that, or the old saying is true: there’s no such thing as gratitude, just the expectation of gratitude. But I wouldn’t impute anything to Australia’s “Muslim community,” an appellation Faruqi uses seven times in his article. I would instead impute much to the Independent.

..at which point hostages are taken. Because the endgame scenario is the adaptation, in whatever degrees, of Australia and all other societies like it to the prescriptions contained in Man Haron Monis’s favorite book.

“I am not the kind of person to decry social media campaigns” reassures Faruqi, thereby implying that there is a kind of person who decries social media campaigns. “Nor,” he goes on, “am I not seeking to condemn those who are trying to help”. Which of course means he is seeking to condemn those who are trying to help. In turn, I am not the kind of person to decry sloppy grammar, but I am sure that Faruqi would be the kind of person to impute an accidental confession to anyone from the Australian community who were to make a similar slip up in prose, especially in light of the fact that he cynically interprets #IllRideWithYou as implicitly condemnatory of Australians for requiring “a social media campaign… for such basic humanity.” A few hours after two of their number have been murdered by one who might have had his hand held on the subway, thinks Faruqi and the Independent, is the time to call into question the basic humanity of all Australians.

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