On a related note, there is another global/domestic aspect to this story emerging. Various world leaders and US Dems/media are calling on POTUS to change his tone among other things:
Trump Assails News Accounts Linking Him to New Zealand Massacre
March 18, 2019
The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019
Hirono calls out Trump for 'appalling' comments she says encourage violence
In Wake Of Mass Shooting, New Zealand's Ardern Calls For Global Fight Against Racism
March 20, 2019
Dalia Mortada
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visited Cashmere High School in Christchurch, which lost two current students to the shootings at two mosques last Friday that killed 50 people.
Vincent Thian/AP
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern returned to Christchurch for the second time since a gunman killed 50 people in an attack on two mosques last Friday.
Her first stop was at Cashmere High School, which lost two current students and one former student in last week's shooting, NPR's Rob Schmitz
reported.
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/20/70506...t-against-raci
In the shadow of Christchurch, let’s drive racism out of Australian politics
Why does it seem so hard for people to grasp the connection between hate-filled speech and hate-filled violence? The alleged attacker who carried out
Friday’s massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, was acting on a toxic belief system — one that has been long nurtured by opportunists in politics and the media, in Australia and elsewhere.
Those innocent victims — the toll now stands at 50— reaped what others had sowed.
The alleged gunman, a 28-year-old Australian, saturated himself in the verbal violence of Islamophobia and white supremacy. His manifesto name-checks figures
from outside Australia: people such as the United States’ Candace Owens and Norway’s murderous Anders Breivik.
But there are also those at home who’ve created the soil to nourish violence.
Last August, a Queensland senator, Fraser Anning, used his
first speech to Parliament to call for a return to a “European Christian” immigration system and a ban on Muslims migrating to Australia, even managing to work in the repulsive phrase “final solution.”
He was condemned, but he’s still in Parliament. In the hours after the Christchurch attack, he used his parliamentary letterhead to present his response, essentially
blaming the victims for their own deaths.
In its general programming, Sky News Australia has turned into our version of Fox News. (Both are controlled by the Australian-turned-American media baron Rupert Murdoch.) Sky’s attention-seeking programming even
included an interview last year with Blair Cottrell, a Hitler-admiring, far-right extremist who had been found guilty of inciting contempt, revulsion or ridicule of Muslims.
In a Murdoch-owned tabloid in Melbourne, prominent columnist Andrew Bolt has written of “us” disappearing as
“a tidal wave of immigrants sweeps away what’s left of our national identity.”
Meanwhile, the politician in charge of immigration, Peter Dutton, has seized on criminal behavior by some young immigrants in Melbourne to condemn a wave of “African gang violence” so severe that Victorians were “scared to go out to restaurants” —
a statement that was widely mocked.
It was also Dutton who suggested Australia should
provide special help to white farmers from South Africa — arguing that they were being persecuted and needed help from a “civilized country” like Australia.
The Australian media and politicians, in other words, have form when it comes to flirting with racism. Sometimes the racism is explicit, as seen in the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation; sometimes it’s more guarded.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...lian-politics/
Related
New Zealand to broadcast Muslim call for prayer on national TV, radio on Friday
AFP
March 20, 2019
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/a-week-a...yer-nationally
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