Assault rifle in hand, Brenton Tarrant stormed into the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on the 15 March 2019. His objective was clear. Tarrant, a white supremacist, wanted to kill as many Muslim worshippers as he could. And kill he did, livestreaming the massacre as he went. He took the lives of fifty-one innocent victims. How should we describe this kind of extreme and egregious wrongdoing? Can we make sense of it? How should we respond?
One survivor of the attack, Mohammed Siddiqui, described Tarrant as ‘the devil’. ‘Yes, I call him a devil because you entered the house of God with evil intentions to kill innocent people. You’ve killed the dreams of my friends and family with … your gutless action.’ The Daily Mail echoed this language, calling Tarrant an ‘evil terrorist’. If Tarrant really is evil, it might seem that the best response from victims would be to condemn him, to support the strongest possible legal punishment, and shut him out forever. Maysoon Salama, whose son Atta Elayyan was murdered by Tarrant, said to the killer ‘you gave yourself the authority to take the souls of fifty-one innocent people, their only crime – in your eyes – being Muslims … You transgress beyond comprehension; I cannot forgive you’. Salama’s refusal to forgive is perfectly understandable. Her loss is unfathomable, and Tarrant himself is completely unrepentant. We might wonder whether it would ever be morally permissible to forgive someone like Tarrant. Yet there are people close to this tragedy who did forgive. Janna Ezat, whose son Hussein Al-Umari was one of the fifty-one victims killed in Christchurch, came face to face with Tarrant in the courtroom. She said, ‘I have decided to forgive you, Mr Tarrant, because I don’t have hate, I don’t have revenge … The damage is done. Hussein will never be here’. Could it be permissible to forgive evildoing in this way?
Tarrant’s murderous spree in Christchurch is shocking and horrifying, but far from unique. If we look to another recent example of terrorism – the suicide bombing at the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017 – we find similar denunciations in terms of evil, and similarly divergent opinions as to whether forgiveness is the right response. In this case it was an Islamic extremist, Salman Ramadan Abedi, who detonated a bomb that killed twenty-two concertgoers and parents. The Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, said ‘these were children, young people and their families that those responsible chose to terrorise and kill. This was an evil act’. One of the victims was Liam Curry. Liam’s mother Caroline declared ‘forgiveness will never be an option for such evil intentions, and those that played any part in the murder of our children will never ever get forgiveness’. In contrast, Figen Murray, whose son Martyn Hett was also killed that night, did choose to forgive. In Figen’s words, ‘forgiveness is not for the benefit of the terrorist. It was for my benefit.’
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