What The Reaction To Far Right Terror Misses Out

By Steven Durrant – The Media Fund: In the wake of the sheer horror of the Christchurch terrorist massacre, one bleak truth remains largely unaddressed.

Sure, the right has thrown up their hands in mock horror at the very suggestion that their ceaseless agenda of hatred and “othering” validates the ideology of international white supremacist terror.

Sure, liberals and the left have been unusually strong in calling out the likes of Murdoch, May, The Mail et. al. who revel in their well-rewarded roles creating this rancid atmosphere.

Obviously, some supposedly “centrist” elements have stumbled around hopelessly, like BBC’s “News”night platforming of the small but vicious Generation Identity on Friday, with requisite softball questions. (Many campaigners who work tirelessly for various causes may wonder why they don’t earn the studio slots they think they deserve. It turns out those who share their ideas might just not be brutally murdering enough people.)

Again on the BBC, Andrew Marr was quick to shift the conversation on his Sunday morning show, away from establishment media and political complicity, towards blithely blaming “the internet”… a thing that many such journalists still appear somewhat bemused by.

And quite how The Mirror allowed footage of the carnage to be streamed is anyone’s guess. It’s perhaps harder for Facebook, the original source, to have struck it down immediately because it was broadcast as a default. But The Mirror’s output will have been the result of a decision and not a junior one. The Mail Online behaved likewise and also posted the butcher’s “manifesto” (a mystifying flattering term for a rant that’s pretty much a loose compilation of 8-chan paranoia), but it’s less surprising for the website of a historically hard-right organisation to air this propaganda.

 

READ MORE …

---