Platforming an Islamophobe to address Islamophobia: The limits of facile engagement, expertise, and erasure

Facile engagement is the neoliberal state's response to hate that has been actively cultivated by decade-long white supremacy. The performance of engagement communicates the impression of a response while the lack of deep engagement fails to address the deeper underlying issues. As superficial performance, engagement keeps the infrastructure of whiteness intact, failing to address the underlying reasons that make up the infrastructures of white supremacy.

The performance of engagement is meant to assure communities that the state is taking actions while being complicit in the reproduction and recirculation of white supremacy.

In a recent example of this in Aotearoa New Zealand, in the backdrop of the Christchurch white supremacist terror attack, the Crown had organized a meeting on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism, inviting experts to discuss the evolution of terrorism risk in New Zealand, online extremism, the role of media, and the consequences of hate. 

The meeting, called He Whenua Taurikura, meaning ‘a land or country at peace’, it would seem was organized to address the infrastructures of Islamophobia that propel hate and led to the Christchurch terror attack. However, consider the framing here. Nowhere in the title of the meeting is Islamophobia mentioned. Instead of addressing Islamophobia and its ties to white supremacy, the meeting is labeled "Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism." Such communicative inversion is the first step toward the erasure of necessary conversations on addressing the specifics of Islamophobia and white supremacy that underlie the form of terrorism that reflects the Christchurch mosque attack.

One of the speakers at this event was Juliet Moses, a spokesperson of an organization called NZ Jewish Council.

In her speech, Moses urged leaders to be consistent in condemning terrorism.

"We need to hear leaders condemn all support for terrorism and all terrorism equally whatever the source, target, and circumstances, and even when it is not politically expedient to do so.

"Hezbollah and Hamas, their military wings are proscribed terror organisations in New Zealand but we saw a rally in support of Hezbollah on Queen St in 2018."

Let's interrogate closely this rhetorical trope, "we should condemn all forms of terrorism equality" in a conference of experts assembled to discuss Islamophobic terrorism. Turning the conversation on Islamophobic terror to all forms of terror is a fundamental rhetorical trope of Islamophobia. The trope works to shift attention away from the question on hand, Islamophobia, working actively to minimize it.

In this instance, it sets the ground for the Islamophobic narrative often deployed by Zionists that invoke references to Hezbollah and Hamas to project Muslims as terrorists. The construction of the Muslim as terrorist, as an "other" forms the communicative infrastructure of Zionist propaganda, that has often worked alongside white supremacists to spread Islamophobia (Aked, 2015).

Moses further went on to state,

"I do fear that there is a particular fixation on whiteness as the source of evil."

The invitation to unity offered by Moses zeroes in on the discussion of whiteness as the source of concern, not the infrastructure of whiteness that propelled the white supremacist terror attack. It is ironic that a meeting that has followed from a white supremacist attack would platform a speaker that sees the conversation on whiteness that underlies white supremacy as the problem. The desire for social cohesion in this ideology works through the erasure of necessary conversations on whiteness that underlies white supremacist infrastructures of hate.

About one hour of research on Moses online led me to her digital communication that render visible the underlying racist, anti-trans, anti- sex work ideology she espouses (see for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDfIzrwSYmU as one example). 

What is the overarching ideology that led the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) to invite Ms. Moses as an expert to the meeting? It is worth asking, what is exactly the expertise that Ms. Moses was bringing to the conversation? What is the definition of expertise used by DPMC? How did Ms. Moses qualify under this definition of expertise? Who recommended Ms. Moses to the panel? Were there objections raised to Ms. Moses being platformed at the conference? How were these objections responded to?

Any process of inclusion is also a process of exclusion. 

It is then worth asking, if the rationale was on including Jewish voices, why weren't organizations such as Alternative Jewish Voices included that specifically work on building registers of solidarity between Jews and Muslims?

More powerfully, the entire first day of the meeting did not feature the voices of the Muslim survivors of the Christchurch terror attack. 

The ideology of expertise works through the erasure of the lived experiences of community members who have borne with their bodies and lives the effects of Islamophobia. 

Engagement as facile performance brackets such voices as narratives to be showcased in community engagement forums and reports while the knowledge of how to address the violence of the terror attack is produced by experts. The marked absence of Muslim experts studying Islamophobia from the panels depict the workings of the infrastructures of expertise constituted by whiteness. The politics of expertise as the politics of erasure holds up the ideology of whiteness, and ultimately leaves unchallenged the Islamophobia that is perpetuated by white supremacists in settler colonial societies.


References


Aked, H. (2015). The undeniable overlap: Right-wing Zionism and Islamophobia. Open Democracy.