I was seeing patients when the breaking news flashed on the TV screen in the waiting room. By the time I walked to my desk, my WhatsApp feed was full of links, videos, and among them the devastating image of the martyring of an American icon. Viewing his final moments – to my physician’s eye – I knew the single bullet was immediately lethal.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination will have more impact on the freedom of speech than the Valentine’s Day Fatwah issued by the Ayatollah of Iran in 1989 on Salman Rushdie.
The death threats that followed the publication of the Satanic Verses, the burnings of books, and booksellers and the murder of a Japanese translator, cemented Islamophobia as both an increasingly powerful political and judicial shield that enables Islamists to evade scrutiny and an increasingly expansive and sinister censor. In the almost 40 years since the Ayatollah’s first decree, the chilling of speech surrounding ideas relating to Islam, Islamism, and Islamic institutions have only expanded.
Soon after Charlie Kirk’s murder, he was labelled as an American Christian martyr. Martyrdom elicits gaping chasms of divides: on one side of the abyss, there are those who mourn (as I do) and, on the other side, the unreachable bank of those who relish the rise of what the Network Contagion Research Institute at Princeton terms Assassination Culture.
This chasm will emerge to be greater than the division that followed the attacks of 9/11. Recall President George W Bush addressing Congress shortly after 9/11, saying to the audience they were either ‘with us or you are with the terrorists’ only for the $6.4 trillion-dollar Global War on Terror that followed to unwittingly pit the Western World against the Muslim Majority World. After Charlie Kirk’s death, the divisions threaten to deepen inward.
My unpublished research during my 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship in Science and Religion examining martyrdom ideology and Islamism confirmed martyrdom seeks always to rent societies apart. Fifteen years later, I recognise here in America the beginning of a similar parting divide which has defined Islamist jihadism for decades. How Americans react to Charlie Kirk’s assassination – where domestic radicalisation fueled domestic terrorism threatens the very fabric of our nation.
Our reaction to this act of terror is also a litmus test – do we grieve or do we celebrate? Americans, myself included, have been horrified to see relish and celebration – a truly grotesque moment to behold. Videos of those celebrating online are a shocking testament to a section of Americans utterly dehumanised and devitalised as to place no value on human life. Worse, the American electorate is so deeply ‘otherised’ from its counterpart, through years of consuming endless streams of images, derogatory speech, and animus on social media, chat rooms and other virtual spaces that nothing, when it comes to ‘the other’ contains any meaning. Compassion is extinct.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox, still raw from the slaying of Charlie Kirk, recognised the defining moment we find ourselves in immediately as he reflected. The Governor observed he was unable to know whether what we decide is to come will be the beginning of a better America or if – as Leonard Cohen once sang – we want it darker.
Our test as a nation, and as a beacon to other nations, is simple: do we truly believe, and are we truly capable of defending, our First Amendment within which the entire universe that has made America so unique is contained? Or will we see it permanently decimated, as so many of America’s enemies seek with a passion.
A single bullet not only extinguished Charlie Kirk, it sought to kill belief in the constitutional guarantee to the freedom of religion, speech, and the freedom to assemble – Charlie Kirk, in his final moment, embodied all three.