REFRAMING THE SYDNEY SIEGE BY DR REBECCA HUNTLEY DECEMBER 17, 2014 246 27 16 Like so many Australians I was up early on Tuesday morning to find out if the Martin Place siege had ended. Like so many Australians I couldn’t believe that hostages had died, not here, not in Australia of all places. I turned to our nation’s leaders for solace, for words that would make sense of all this. I was sorely disappointed. Premier Mike Baird said this was an act that threatened democracy. Our Prime Minister described it as politically motivated and our ‘brush with terrorism’. Opposition leader Bill Shorten described it as an act designed to ‘divide our country’. They all spoke solemnly about Australian values. None of these words made sense to me at all. They were words more suited to an event like the Boston bombings, like 9/11, even Bali. These were all orchestrated terrorist plots with perpetrators with clear political goals and links to sophisticated, well-resourced terrorist networks. Is there another way to look at the Sydney siege rather than primarily through the terrorism angle? Why are we talking so much about terrorism when we should be talking about crazy people with access to guns out on bail? It’s a provocative question for sure, but watching the coverage of the siege over the last two days I was dismayed at some of the media and the political response to this, the determination to make the link to terrorism before full facts had emerged – and even when the facts indicated something else. There was much that emerged while the siege was going on and after which should have caused anyone to question whether this was act of terrorism as we usually understand it to be. The gunman didn’t fit the profile of a young radicalised jihadist. It was not the usual modus operandi of groups like ISIL. The gunman had to request an ISIL flag be sent to the cafe – a pretty strong indication he wasn’t connected to any domestic network of ISIL operatives. There has been no evidence that he procured the gun through terrorist networks or anyone in the Muslim community. He was in fact a fringe dweller in the Muslim community. Some of the experts on terrorism warned in strong terms not to be too hasty to characterise this as terrorism. I watched as some in the media continued to pursue the terrorism angle almost to the exclusion of other issues. How we frame any event, tragic or otherwise, has huge significance, as analysts of the events of September 11 have pointed out. What if that incident – a greater and more obvious threat to American values and democracy than the Martin Place siege was to our values – had been framed as a crime of domestic terrorism rather than act of war? The gunman at the centre of the Martin Place siege was a man with mental health issues, alienated from community, desperate. Did he have more in common with Martin Bryant than the September 11 perpetrators? He was unstable, with a history of abuse and violence towards women, and yet out on bail. Did he have more in common with Luke Batty’s father than with any of the Bali bombers? This is not to say that the gunman’s interest in ISIL and religious extremism is irrelevant or shouldn’t be explored. But my concern is that if the terrorism and religious extremism aspect to this crime is given undue weight or greater relevance than the facts (which are yet to fully emerge), then that may stop us from properly understanding and responding to what has happened. It could distort the public understanding of this event, it could help feed current fears in the community – about radical Islamists, terrorism, even immigration – and it could make it even harder to address the causes of what happened. rebecca-huntley*Dr. Rebecca Huntley is a Director at the market and social research firm Ipsos. She runs heads up The Mind & Mood Report, Australian’s longest running social trends study. She is the author of numerous books, a feature writer for magazines including Australian Vogue and a columnist for BRW. She presents RN Drive on a Friday on Radio National. Follow her on Twitter @RebeccaHuntley2
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:40:10 +0000
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