Canadians like to think of ourselves as less racist, less right wing and especially less violent than Americans. But two recent events coming after a previous series of mass murders has shaken this belief. Four members of a Muslim family were murdered in a hate crime while out for a stroll last Sunday in London, […]
Brenton Tarrant was sentenced last week. The Australian national who butchered, with relish, 51 individuals in Christchurch at Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre, found himself facing something unique in New Zealand: jail for life without parole. He pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one of terrorism. He also faced a tsunami of victim impact statements – over 200 in all.
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
— Lord Acton,
A David vs. Goliath battle between the independent Virginia-based online journal Consortium News and the gigantic Security Communications Establishment of Canada has begun this week. As Consortium News’ Editor-in-Chief, Joe Lauria wrote in his recent press release:
Surveillance activities and the law are often at loggerheads. The former specialises in destroying privacy; the latter, in so far as it might be adequate, sometimes furnishes a means of preserving it. When it comes to exposing overly-eager surveillance activity, obstacles arise. Ironically, the privacy of agents, and the sacrosanct nature of their abuse, become points of issue. Public interest tests are employed, often against the public. To expose such conduct might be to compromise the State apparatus altogether.
Earlier this month, popular ‘progressive’ news website The Intercept published an article entitled “From El Paso to Sarajevo: How White Nationalists Are Inspired by the Bosnia Genocide”, written by journalist and staff writer Murtaza Hussain. The piece argued that many of the perpetrators behind mass shootings and domestic terrorism in the West — from the convicted far right extremist behind the 2011 Norway attacks to the suspect charged in the recent mosque shootings in Christchurc
It was predictably ugly: in tone, in regret, and, in some ways, disgust. Australia emerged from the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting isolated, the true spoiler of the party which saw 17 states facing the obstinacy of one. It had taken place on Tuvalu, some two hours flight north of Fiji. The capital Funafuti is located on vanishing land; the island state is facing coastal erosion, the pressing issue of salinity, the very crisis of its existence.
Writing under the title of “If the El Paso shooter had been Muslim”, Moustafa Bayoumi stated the obvious.
“If the El Paso shooter had been a Muslim,” Bayoumi wrote in the British Guardian newspaper on August 6, US President Donald Trump “would be lobbing accusations such as ‘Islam hates us’ in the direction of Muslims and not lecturing the public about video games.”
It had to come. A massacre, broadcast in real time and then shared with viral automatism; the inevitable shock, and the counter from the authorities. The Christchurch shootings, inflicting fifty-one deaths upon worshippers at two mosques in quiet New Zealand on March 15 this year, have spurred Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Laws have been passed regulating guns in her country. Interest has increased in monitoring white nationalist groups. But Ardern was never keen keeping the matter local.
Over the last 20 years extreme right-wing groups have been on the rise throughout the world. They share a belief in white supremacism and conspiracy theories that allege there is a global plot to replace white Christian populations with Muslims and people of color.
