War and killing have become a video game

The late Edward Said, author of "Orientalism,” in reaction to Gulf War I, once averred that the CNN footage of the war in Iraq amounted to a Nintendo game.

Bombs, despite their devastating effects, were described as "surgical strikes" by the global media. The missiles were further deemed "smart", since they could evade tall and low structures to zoom in on their targets.

The military voyeurism that started then has come home to roost in video games, in two-dimensional or three-dimensional forms, albeit in New Zealand.

The massacres, of all places in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, are a testament to how Islamophobia has been rising.

The captured murderer is an Australian, who sprayed his bullets at innocent victims in the Islamic places of worship in New Zealand.

In a population of close to 4.1 million, there are only 400,000 Muslims in New Zealand, many of whom are emigrants. White supremacist chauvinism is not only rising, consequently to throw up leaders who speak of, indeed, govern on "America First" - an ideology favoured by the racist Ku Klax Klan in 1950s - but seeking to make victims of all those who don't share the same pigmented skin with them. The catastrophic murder in New Zealand, the country's first, is a sign that Islamophobia is spreading, not stopping.

Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand (above), did not discount the possibility of an "anti-immigrant element" in her first reaction to the bloodshed. But the root of it is the global increase in Islamophobia - the pathological fear of Muslims and Islam.

More importantly, the murder was conducted with utter frivolity. It was beamed live on Facebook by the perpetrator and goaded by anti-immigrant sentiments online, that can only egg murderers on.

As a country where the main and official religion is Islam, Malaysia may not be spared from all the flaws that come with a parochial and conservative distortion of the religion, especially by PAS and Umno which have nothing to lose, but to radicalise the country to save their own skins.

Malaysia has to work with leading Muslim powers to put a check to the rise of Islamophobia. And the tendency to take Muslims as a mere game.

When India was to whip up a nationalist frenzy, it sent its fighter jets into Pakistan. When China detained more than one million Uyghurs and Muslims, they were put into concentration camps known as "centres of re-education".

When the United States turns a blind eye to the war in Yemen, initiated by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) against the Houthis who are deemed to be pro-Iran, Washington DC is going back to the era when it cheered Saddam Hussein on as Baghdad attacked Iran in the 1979-1989 war.

All these are signs of Islamophobia, of trying to use one set of Muslims to checkmate another, only to spawn a group of white supremacists who believe they can wipe out others too.

God may not be described as an artist. But in the Quran, God clearly affirmed that He created "nations and tribes" so that they may know each other and learn from one another. He didn't create them to maim and murder one another. In fact, the sacrifice or killing of a single life in Islam is akin to be a sin against the whole of humanity. In New Zealand, the world is stunned that White Supremacists have, once again, not only reared their ugly heads, but have the gall to stream the killing spree live.

Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad was right, in this sense, when he launched the Perdana Leadership Foundation Anti-War Campaign as early as 2003. What he was warning was the penchant, and the petulant practice, of seeing all others as less than themselves. Islamophobia is a rise in militaristic crescendo to end the existence of Muslims.

All Muslim and non-Muslim countries must rise to the challenge to defeat Islamophobia, without which more than a billion believers of Islam would become easy targets; not unlike props in a video game. For Muslims, Fridays can easily be an appointment with death.

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RAIS HUSSIN is a supreme council member of Bersatu. He also heads its policy and strategy bureau. - Mkini