Editor: March 15, 2019: I woke up this morning and heard what had happened in New Zealand. I am horrified and it scares me to see what is happening in this world of ours.
A 28-year-old white male from Australia shot and killed 50 people and wounded many others in Christchurch, New Zealand in the name of white supremacy and an anti-immigration stance. What irony, when any white people in both Australia and New Zealand are by default immigrants.
All around the world it seems that divisive, racist and bigoted beliefs are getting a hold again in countries that have been, on the surface, fairly egalitarian for many years. All of us who live in Western Europe and North America and were born after the Second World War have not experienced a war on our land and it seems we have forgotten how easy it is to slide into war.
We so easily forget that as the Dalai Lama says: “we are all brothers and sisters.” At the moment, Muslims are bearing the brunt of our xenophobic fears and it appears that many people are willing to tar all Muslims with the same brush as the small minority of Muslims who are extremists. We seem to forget that throughout history and indeed at the present day all religions have extremists and all religions have perpetrated atrocities.
Remember what was done in the name of Christianity during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Remember, most of the terrorist attacks carried out in Canada, the U.S. and Europe recently have been by white supremacists who call themselves Christians. Just like Muslim extremists they want the world to be theirs and theirs alone.
Even Buddhism, a religion that most of us equate with peace, suffers from this xenophobic attitude in some places, as the persecution of the Rohingya in Burma shows us.
It is easy to forget that each and every one of us belongs to a group that has, at some time in history, been persecuted. And so for me, I realize that the most important thing I can do right now is to speak up when I hear racist and bigoted ideas being spouted. Because if we do not speak for those being persecuted now, when they come for us there will be no-one left to speak for us.
Kim Manning,
Canmore
