Sydney Cafe Murders: The Ugly True Story Behind That Heartwarming #illridewithyou Twitter Campaign

#illridewithyou is still trending on Twitter.

So it would appear that the most important take-home message on social media about yesterday’s siege at the Lindt cafe in Sydney is not the fact that two innocent people – barista Katrina Dawson and cafe manager Tori Johnson – were murdered by an Islamist gunman under the banner of the Islamic State flag.

It’s that lots of left-leaning Australians are today feeling really good about themselves because they’ve shown just how much they care about the plight of the real victims of this crime. No, again, not Katrina and Tori: they’re just collateral damage. The real victims – at least in Twitter hashtag terms – are all those Muslims in Australia who’ve been made to feel slightly uncomfortable as a result of this latest atrocity committed in the name of the Religion of Peace (TM).

The preening, sanctimonious narcissism of this hashtag campaign is nailed in the Australian Daily Telegraph by Miranda Devine.

Denial, deflection, projection. They see themselves as morally superior to the rest of Australia, which they imagine as a sea of ignorant rednecks. In their eyes the threat is not terrorism but Islamophobia.

Yet for all the screeching, there are precious few instances where Muslims have been victimised in Sydney, unless you count anonymous trolls on social media.

Naturally, both Miranda and I were taken to task by the usual suspects on Twitter for our vile, right-wing uncaringness.

I don’t understand why ANYONE would discourage ANYONE for doing ANYTHING respectful? Is this news or hate?

Your silence on #illridewithyou shows that right completely lacks sensitivity altogether.

yeah coz blaming all Muslims for this is such a rational response. Not

you two are responding just as we expect the fascist right to. I know which side of centre I’d rather be on.

As ever, the bleeding hearts are missing the point. No one is arguing that there should be any kind of repercussions against Muslims. What we’re saying is that behind Australia’s national outbreak of mawkish special pleading and ecumenical outreach lurks yet another dodgy campaign by the inevitable lefty activists to hijack the news agenda for their dubious political ends.

As Devine notes, the woman who started the campaign by parading her own virtue in that initial tweet was Rachael Jacobs a Green party candidate from Brisbane who – as Jacobs herself admitted in a piece for Fairfax media (c’mon Gina? What are you waiting for? Buy up the rest of the operation. Then feed it to the sharks) may not have witnessed quite the scene of oppressed Muslim victimhood she imagined she had.

Elsewhere, we learn that the person who turned Jacobs’s initial, self-serving Tweet into a viral sensation was yet another left-leaning activist. Her name is Tessa Kum and here (didn’t I predict this was how the ABC would respond?) is how she was celebrated in an ABC interview.

 Inspired by other acts of generosity that she’d read about on social media, Tessa Kum invited anyone wearing religious attire who was afraid for their safety to ride alongside her on public transport.

In an emotional interview, she spoke with Ellen Fanning about the success of her hashtag, #illridewithyou.

What made you post the tweet?

‘It was very much a sort of breaking point for me. I sort of saw another tweet online indicating another woman’s act of kindness and I simply felt that there needed to be more of that in the world.She’d done a very simple thing–she had seen a distressed Muslim woman on a train take off her hijab and had approached that woman at the train station and simply said, “Put it back on, I’ll walk with you”. That broke my heart a little bit.

So there’s the sanitised version of her motivations she chose to present to the world.

But as investigative blogger Steve Sailer has discovered, Ms Kum is a little more complicated than that. Unless she is someone entirely different from the person called Tessa Kum who wrote this blog, she appears to have hate issues of her own so serious it’s about time someone started a hashtag campaign to try to deal with them.

Here is our Tessa in cheery form:

None of us can take a break from not being white. You, white person, with all your supposed good intentions, will never let us. Either because you’re actively racist, racist but with too delicate an ego to ever do anything about your racism except cry about the mean PoC, or willing to remain silent and let us carry on without support.

You’ve already won. You won centuries ago when you left Europe and decided to crush the rest of the world. Conquer, colonise, crush. Centuries this has gone on. You have centuries of victory and triumph.

You’ve won again. You’ve succeeded in driving PoC from the scene. You succeeded in driving me and others from the internet. You’ve wrenched open schisms between PoC which will take years of hard work to heal, if they heal at all. We’re diverse, we’re not monolith. We’re divided, and you will always ensure that remains so.

and

As a WoC I feel cheap.

Not worth as much to you, white person, as your fellow white people.

I’m learning about hate because I am coming to hate you, white person. You have all the control, all the power, all the privilege, and there is nothing holding you accountable. I hate the double standards and hypocrisy you display, the rank dishonesty of your conduct. I hate that you can harm us, when we cannot harm you. I hate that you have actually impacted on careers, multiple and not even directly, with your hypocrisy. I hate that you’re so dominant in the publishing industry there’s very few venues I’d consider safe to even submit to now. I hate what you have done to PoC I don’t know. I hate what you have done to PoC I do know. I hate what you have done to me, and I was not involved.

So, not a neutral party motivated solely by love of her fellow human beings, then. But an anti-white racist motivated by, er, now what was that word beginning with “h” again?

If only Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson had had time to read Tessa Kum’s screed. Then maybe they would have had the opportunity before they died to check their privilege and realise that basically – at least in the opinions of a certain kind of crusading Social Justice Warrior – they had it coming…