 A white supremacist gunman went to the Al-Nua Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre and opened fire on the congregation while they were at prayer. 50 people were killed, dozens more were injured and the youngest named victim was 3 years old. One of the victims was a 71-year-old Afghan refugee and as the gunman approached the Mosque the first thing he said to the gunman and what turned out to be his last words were welcome brother. We think of mosques as being hotbeds of extremism and you know you walk in and you know you get fitted with your suicide vest and sent to a Costco or whatever but that's not what it's like. When you go to a mosque it's a space of intense vulnerability even just the actions of removing your shoes and cleansing yourself and you know bowing towards Mecca it's so disarming in a very literal sense and I think of all those times I've watched my grandmother pray whether it's in a mosque or she's just doing her Salat at home and I think about that incredible sense of peace and silent reflection and trust she's got so much trust in the world around her when she's praying like that and the thought that anyone could walk in there and commit an act of violence there aren't words for how I feel and how other Muslims feel when you consider that and it's not just a Muslim thing either the Charleston church massacre began with Dylan Roof being welcomed in amongst the congregation you know the people these violent racists are targeting could be your auntie your uncle your father your mother your kid and the thing that has gotten in the way of that gunman viewing those people in that way is propaganda and that propaganda hasn't just come from the dregs of the internet it's come from the very centre of power I found it instructive to read the Christ Church gunman's manifesto and to compare it to Anders Breviks manifesto from his massacre in Norway and what I immediately noticed is that the Christ Church gunman intended this manifesto to be poured over obsessed over dissected and argued about and I think that was a very deliberate choice your court in this position of being faced with an unbearably grave tragedy on the one hand and then a reasoning for it which disavows all seriousness whatsoever and when you're in that position it becomes very hard to articulate where the political fight back begins so for instance you know he live streamed his whole rampage and as a kind of semi-ironic battle cry he yelled subscribe to PewDiePie and now everyone's arguing you know to what extent is PewDiePie a white nationalist does he share blame does he share culpability and it's a sort of push and pull between is he joking or is he racist and it's the same with all of these references peppered through the manifesto we're in a situation where you've got these performances of racism but because it's dressed up in clown shoes you can't identify the racist and that's a deliberate place to put us in it means that we can't even agree on a shared language or a shared terminology for what's going on so one thing to realize is that YouTube facilitates this so the way the algorithm works is you start on one video and it auto plays the next or it recommends the next and you're never more than a few clicks or a couple of videos away from some really extreme white nationalist content so there's a kind of conveyor belt towards more and more hateful thinking so that's one way in which this sort of social media culture works and it's not something that people have a great deal of personal agency in the second thing is that ideas like the great replacement which is the perfect marriage really between Islamophobic racism anti-semitism and white nationalism because the theory goes that there is a sort of Zionist conspiracy to breed out white people for one of a better term is that these theories exist and proliferate within those spaces I think the first thing we need is a transformation in our establishment media culture because it is no good for Melanie Phillips to come out and say she was horrified and felt disgusted by the actions of the Christ Church shooter when on seemingly a monthly basis she will publish articles arguing that Islamophobia doesn't exist and this is after by the way Anders Bravik quoted one of her articles in full in his manifesto she of course has said she doesn't agree with him in any way but you know these racist mass murderers sure do find it hard to tell and the fact that figures like her like Rod Liddle who called for more Islamophobia in the Tory party like Douglas Murray all these people who have made their livings from whipping up hatred against Muslims and also closing down the space we have to describe that hatred I think should no longer be considered respectable faces on the current affairs circuit the second thing would be looking quite seriously at how you can break the power and the media dominance of Rupert Murdoch he is a man who has nourished from every one of his platforms channels and newspapers a state of paranoia when it comes to thinking about Muslims and in particular Muslim immigration to the global north and so we need to think quite seriously about how actions can be taken across borders to break up his media empire the third thing is tech giants so these platforms which host and build up the careers of many of these strange alt right figures white nationalist politics are no longer an unfortunate byproduct of youtube but perhaps central to its funding model and central to its growth and if youtube won't regulate itself then I'm afraid governments are going to have to regulate it and the fourth thing I think we need to completely overhaul PSHE teaching in this country but also in America also in New Zealand also in Australia because these were the classes that I bunked off when I was at school they didn't seem to teach me or anyone else in the class anything particularly useful but I feel that those are ideal settings to actually help prepare kids for the kind of online landscape they will be inhabiting because is incredibly desensitizing after maybe the fifth or the sixth time someone tweeted the video of the christ church killing at me I stopped being shocked by it and no one should be put in that position we should all feel this very deeply and I think that this kind of radicalization of white nationalist fascist far right you know murderers it starts with I think that process of desensitization and I think that's also where the humor comes in it's it's meant to normalize and to first shock and then numb people to a particular kind of discourse and you don't deal with it simply by getting rid of it you need to prepare young people for it because also generations which are you know younger than mine younger than ours they're digital natives they don't remember a time without the internet and that genie's out the bottle you can't put it back in