Ardern put a halt to these designs, deftly turning our collective sight in the other direction, moving the world to pay tribute and give life to the fifty-one victims the prevailing tide sought to bury. The Muslim victims, shot down by a white supremacist terrorist, who in those ninety-six hours after the last bullet was fired risked being buried and forgotten forever. That black hole in our memory that the War on Terror sets aside exclusively for Muslim victims, where there is no collective mourning and no elegies of respect are read, waited for them. Ardern did her part to fill that hole, stopping their fall into the forever of forgetting by doing what so many failed to do: saying their names and praising their memory.

XREF: Connects to patterns of asymmetric mourning in the War on Terror era, where non-Western victims are often erased from public memory.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 980