A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney.
We should be angry, writes Janet Albechtsen in The Australian, over the latest terrorist outrage in Manchester. She goes onto list the other recent terrorist attacks in western cities – from Nice, to Paris, Boston, Copenhagen and Sydney – and asks: where does this end?
The anger is as understandable as the question is urgent. Why should Westerners be murdered by Muslims while taking a stroll, running a marathon, sitting in a cafe, or attending a concert?
But anger is not thinking. On the contrary, it can be dangerous if unaccompanied by disciplined reflection.
Anger is presumably the emotion felt by the man who murdered two defenders of a Muslim woman shielding her from his abuse on a Portland train. The same applies to a British man who kicked a pregnant Muslim women in the stomach, causing the loss of her baby.
They presumably also thought that “Islam is a problem,” as Gary Johns attempted to explain in his column in The Australian.
If anger was not the operative emotion, perhaps hate? Certainly, Johns’s column, which casts Islam as a barbaric religion, can hardly be read as an exercise in careful differentiation at a time of acute public anxiety about religion and terror.
Read the full article by A. Dirk Moses at ABC Religion and Ethics.