Zelo Street on the Mainstream Press and the New Zealand Mosque Shooting

We got the news today that, at lunch time New Zealand time, gun men shot the worshippers at two mosques over there, killing men, women and children. There are 49 dead, and many more wounded. Two men and a woman have been arrested. One of them is an Australian White supremacist. It’s particularly shocking as I understand that, while New Zealand has its problems with violent crime same as everywhere else, it’s largely quiet and peaceful compared with some other nations. I can remember talking to an elderly gentleman in my part of south Bristol, who was preparing to leave to join relatives out there. He said he was impressed with the humanity of the place. It’s still a country where neighbours greet and talk to each other, And now sadly racist, islamophobic violence has hit that nation too.

The good fellow at Crewe, who posts the Zelo Street blog, has put up a really good piece not only condemning the violence, and putting it in the context of the other massacres caused by Fascist maniacs – Anders Breivik at Utoya, the rabid anti-Semite who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the other bigots and racists who gun down and murder Jews, Muslims and gays, including children. He also points the finger at those, whose own politics and rhetoric of hate have helped to inspire such atrocities: the right-wing press. He makes the point that this hate long ago went beyond the extreme right-wing fringe, and discusses the extreme right-wing figures, from Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopolis and the Alt Right, to Tories like Boris Johnson. All of whom will claim that their venomous hatred of Muslims and minorities had nothing to do with these outrages. And he says very strongly that none of them can escape their responsibility for these events. He writes

It is an industry that does not exist in a vacuum: as with any malignant virus, once incubated, it has to spread if it is to have any effect. And here, our free and fearless press, and even our broadcast media, should hang their heads in shame, although they will not. They have published the hate merchants, given platforms to bigots, encouraged the demonisation of minorities, all for the momentary interest of profit and ratings.

Moreover, it is not just fringe media that has spread the virus of hatred. It long ago went beyond Breitbart, InfoWars and Rush Limbaugh. Now it has been transmitted by Fox News Channel, the Murdoch Sun, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, the Express, the Spectator and others. Yet the management of those media outlets are not responsible for the end product of the hatred they enable. Nor are the figureheads of the hate movement.

So it is that Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Geert Wilders, Marine le Pen, Nigel Farage, Gerard Batten, Rod Liddle, Douglas Murray, Tony Gallagher, Paul Dacre, Trevor Kavanagh, Katie Hopkins, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Paul Joseph Watson, Peter Imanuelsen, Martin Sellner, Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, Milo Yiannopoulos, Taki Theororacopulos, Fraser Nelson, James Delingpole, Boris Johnson, and so many others will rest easy this morning, safe in the knowledge that It Wasn’t Them.

Well, I have news for this collective stain on humanity, this repellent convocation of amateur human beings, this vicious cohort of hate preachers. Don’t think any or all of you can duck responsibility for what happened in Christchurch. You cannot. This is where your ignorance, hatred and bigotry leads. This is the fruit of your ill thought out labours.

Damn you. Damn every last miserable, hate-filled, bigoted, snivelling, cowardly, intolerant, selfish, worthless, uncaring one of you. Damn you all to hell.

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/03/mosque-shootings-this-is-where-hatred.html

Absolutely.

Sam Seder’s Majority Report on Stefan Molyneux’s Toxic Hatred of Women

One of the speakers at the far right ‘free speech’ rally in Whitehall tomorrow is Stefan Molyneaux. Molyneaux’s a libertarian with a bitter hatred of Islam, and is one of the major figures in the antifeminist men’s rights movement. British male feminist and scourge of racists and fascists Kevin Logan has a video on him as part of his series on misogynists, ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’. In this video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, one of Seder’s fellow hosts talks about a disturbing rant from Molyneux they’ve been sent from a listener.

It’s truly scary. In it, Molyneux tells one of his listeners that he is right to blame his mother for the bad treatment he had from his father, because women love, marry and procreate with stupid and evil men. He then goes on to blame women for just about all the evils of the modern world, including nuclear weapons, national debt and genocide.

The presenter also points out that Molyneux and the people, who follow him up, also seem similar to the mass shooter Elliot Roger. Roger was frustrated at not being able to get a girlfriend, made a video in which he also ranted about girls and women choosing bad men over a ‘gentleman’ like him, and then went off on his shooter spree to kill a few women, and the men, who attempted to defend them or simply got in the way. These people really believe that women are only there for their sexual pleasure.

It says very much about the type of people speaking at the rally tomorrow, which include Tommy Robinson of the EDL and Lauren Southern, that Molyneux’s with them. Quite apart from Molyneux’s own libertarianism, which would have everything privatised and the welfare state utterly destroyed.

The Klan in 1981 Showing the Fascist Reality of Anti-Migrant Boats for the Med

I found the above picture in Morris Dees and James Corcoran’s book, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat (New York: HarperCollins 1996). it shows an anti-immigrant vessel crewed by members of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a 2,500 man paramilitary army set up and headed by Louis Beam, The boat terrorised Vietnamese fishermen by running ‘gunboat’ near the docks and their fishing fleets. Dees is a member of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an anti-racist groups which prosecutes Fascists and right-wing extremists. The book states that the SPLC brought a lawsuit against them, which forced Beam to disband his army of racist fanatics. As you can see, a couple of these Nazis are wearing Klan costumes.

I’m putting this up, because there have been demands for similar boats to deal with the migrant ships crossing the Mediterranean. Lauren Southern, a Canadian Alt-Right propagandist, was involved with a project by a group of European Fascists to set up an anti-migrant patrol boat, until it was scuppered by a campaign by Hope Not Hate. But other Fascists groups are making the same demands, like CasaPound, an insignificant Italian Fascist party, a video on which I put up about a week ago. And Katie Hopkins, the rightwing bigot and loudmouth, whose career on this side of the Pond spectacularly imploded a few weeks ago when she became too toxic for even the Scum and the Mail to employ, was responsible for a particularly odious tweet in which she recommended gunning down migrants and their boats without remorse. She then dared the TV presenter, Philip Schofield, to challenge her on these monstrous sentiments. This came a day or two before the bodies of the migrants aboard one such ship, which had sank, washed ashore, including the infant son of a man, who had stayed behind in Turkey.

Although this photo is from another time and place, it shows you exactly the kind of Fascist patrol boat the Fascists are demanding today. And it isn’t pretty.

Hope Not Hate: Far Right Activists Obtain Ship to Prevent Rescue of Migrants from Mediterranean

More hate and persecution of immigrants and asylum seekers from the racist right. Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism magazine and website, reported on Wednesday that a group of Identitarians, Defend Europe, had secured a ship with which it intended to patrol the Mediterranean, harassing the Italian naval and coastguard vessels charged with rescuing migrants from Africa and the Middle East crossing the Med. Early in May, activists from Germany, Austria, France and Italy, and the Canadian and US social media journalists, Lauren Southern and Luke Rudkowski, travelled to the Italian towns of Catania, where they blocked a rescue ship from leaving port. Over the course of the month and then into June, they travelled to Olbia, Modena, Brescia, Bolzano and other towns to explain their mission to the locals.

They were also crowdfunding on social media to raise sufficient money to obtain a ship to stop rescue boats at sea. They have also been collecting information on the international organisations dedicated to rescuing immigrants, and their individual members.

See: http://hopenothate.org.uk/2017/06/27/far-right-secure-ship-disrupt-mediterranean-ngos/

According to a later report, the ship

is actually a Finnish-made research ship named ‘Suunta’. It is nearly 40m long and has a gross tonnage of 422 tonnes. According to Defend Europe the ship has “a range of 3000 nautical miles”, a “place for a crew of 25”, and a “crane for RIBs [small inflatable boats]”

We have tracked down the Suunta to the port of Djibouti off the east coast of Africa, which fits in with the Identitarians own claims that their “biggest problem now is, that our ship is not on the Mediterranean sea. It needs to be transferred from a different ocean.”

Hope Not Hate believe that the ship is due to leave Djibouti to reach Port Suez on the 13th of this month, in order to travel up through the Suez canal.

http://hopenothate.org.uk/2017/06/29/details-far-right-mission-hinder-ngo-rescue-missions-med/

This is quite horrific. Conditions on these boats are appalling, with the human cargo frequently packed against and on top of each other, with little sanitation. Many of them are forcibly drugged to prevent them causing problems during the voyage. These people are some of the world’s most desperate, fleeing countries torn apart by war or an oppressive, persecutory government. Many of these ships sink during the crossing. The Identitarians aim of stopping migrants from being rescued from these ships means, quite simply, that they will die from drowning.

Not that such carnage would cause many pangs of conscience amongst the Far Right. ‘Millennial Woes’, a Scots member of the Alt Right, who has since left for America, stated on one of his wretched videos that preventing further non-White immigration would mean shooting down the migrant ships. He considered this a dreadful necessity. And Sun rentagob Katie Hopkins had to apologise a little while ago, after she ranted about destroying migrant boats.

Yesterday I got the following email from the magazine, which it asked me to share.

An important update regarding the “Defend Europe” ship, the boat that has been chartered by the European far right to try to stop refugees from North Africa reaching Europe.

We have been able to track down the ship to a port in Djibouti, on the east coast of Africa, and we have eyes on its movements. We know that the boat is due to set sail next week and will reach the Mediterranean, via the Suez Canal, in two weeks’ time.

This is a very real threat. Defend Europe has two main aims: to block aid agency ships from making life-saving rescue missions, and to patrol the sea and prevent crossings from taking place.

A number of the NGOs working in the area have already recounted stories of being threatened by far right activists and fear a hostile and intimidating environment in which to carry out their essential work.

Thank you to the thousands of supporters who have shared their thoughts on how we should oppose this action. Right now, the most important thing to do is to create as much attention around this as possible.

These people really are low, to deny life-saving aid to desperately poor people fleeing from terror at home aboard such dangerous craft. They have to be stopped before their actions lead to someone dying.