My Response to Senator Fraser Anning: Don’t Drag Jesus into Your Hatred

The world mourns the death of 49 innocent Muslim worshippers gunned down in an extreme of rightwing terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In response, Australian Senator Fraser Anning has made outrageous remarks, condemning the attack while also implying that the Muslims deserved it, referring to the massacre as vigilantism rather than terrorism, and quoting the words of Jesus to justify his remarks.

I’ve written a response to Senator Anning over at Eternity on Fraser Anning: Don’t drag Jesus into your hatred.

Anning distorts the word of Jesus as Matthew reports them. In context, Jesus is being arrested by the security apparatus of the chief priests, when one of his disciples grabs a sword and strikes the slave of the high priest. Jesus in turn admonishes him to put his sword away because taking up the sword means perishing by the sword. Jesus warns that violence begets violence and it is futile to resist senseless violence with further violence. Whereas Anning twists Jesus’s words to mean that violence against Muslims is merely the logical result of violence by Muslim extremists, Jesus asserts that violence creates a further spiral of violence and his disciples must extract themselves from such a deadly spiral.