White supremacist terror is framed as individual acts while Muslim victims are deindividualized

Evidence

Brenton Tarrant was just another regular white man. So regular that he believed that a country where he was not a resident or a citizen was his own. … So regular that he walked into two mosques and massacred fifty-one people. Innocent people he called “intruders” and “invaders.” “Intruders” in a country that they lived in and were born in. “Invaders” in a city where they owned homes and held passports that he did not. … So regular that he believed them to be terrorists because of their faith and fashioned himself a freedom fighter “protecting” his people. “Freedom” in the figure of a foreigner toting a machine gun and recording the massacre inside two mosques that he made into morgues. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 942

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on Islamophobia as a coordinated global condition alongside Iftikhar’s global-synthesis view.
• SEED: The ‘regular white man’ frame is a strong narrative device for an essay on how whiteness grants individuation while racialized others are aggregated.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of who gets called terrorist and who gets called freedom fighter, and how white supremacy erases both perpetrators’ and victims’ history, is dense enough to sit with.