Mass shooting in New Zealand - twitter account of shooter (99.9999% him) still open

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

As long as mainstream politicians are dismissive of the dangers of Islamization, and continue to support mass migration of islamists, I fear incidents like these will increase in frequency.

I am not sure what's worse--the victim blaming itself or the plausible deniability of victim blaming.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

49 killed?! Jebus! Last I heard it was a shooting with no numbers yet. How awful!

"President Trump" had something nice to say on Twitter:
My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

20 minutes later....
"The ‘Jexodus’ movement encourages Jewish people to leave the Democrat Party. Total disrespect! Republicans are waiting with open arms. Remember Jerusalem (U.S. Embassy) and the horrible Iran Nuclear Deal! @OANN @foxandfriends"

 

[ZiprHead]

That may be, but even crazy people sometimes have a kernel of reason.

You're saying this was reasonable???

 

[Tom Sawyer]

That may be, but even crazy people sometimes have a kernel of reason.

You're saying this was reasonable???

I think he's saying that the immigration of Muslims leads to problems, so he understands the basis of the shooter's motivation, even if he doesn't agree with it. Of course, if one of those problems is the Muslims getting killed by psychotic incel racists, that's not really the fault of the Muslim immigration and it's invalid to point to it as an issue.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

As long as mainstream politicians are dismissive of the dangers of Islamization, and continue to support mass migration of islamists, I fear incidents like these will increase in frequency.

I am not sure what's worse--the victim blaming itself or the plausible deniability of victim blaming.

Are the victims islamists? Because if not, then the above isn't victim blaming. Mass migration of Islamists could hurt these non-islamist muslims if Derec's fears are true.

 

[Toni]

He had an issue with the UN Migration Compact, which enables more mass migration into the West. New Zealand voted for it, while US voted against and Australia abstained.
He also wrote down names of many Europeans who fought against the Ottoman Turkish (an Islamic empire after all) invasion of Europe. These days, European rulers like Angela Merkel open the floodgates to millions of Islamic mass migrants.


That may be, but even crazy people sometimes have a kernel of reason.

There is an image of a white guy with closely cropped dark blonde hair/blue eyes/light skin associated with this description on twitter. No idea of this is accurate but it seems much more accurate than describing him as an Islamist as Derec has.

I did not describe him as an Islamist. I said that western politicians not taking the danger of Islamism seriously will lead to more backlash/reprisal attacks like this one. I thought I was clear enough.
Even if he was an Islamist, though, Islam is not a race, so there is no contradiction between him being an Islamist and also white and blonde/blue eyed.

Unless I am misunderstanding Derec

You are.

and he's simply blaming the victims for existing

No, I am blaming politicians for not doing anything against Islamization of the west. Including not vetting immigrants from Islamic countries for extremist/fundamentalist beliefs.

and imagines that this shooter wouldn't have found some other excuse to shoot up some people who don't look like him elsewhere.

Again, Islam is not a race.

You are indeed blaming victims and blaming politicians for something you disapprove of and can hang your hat on as a reason for a cowardly, delusional mad man to be justified in shooting up a place filled with people with little means of escape in such a surprise attack.

No one ever said Islam was a race. I said the victims did not look like him. But go ahead and do whatever you can to justify him and at the same time try to distance yourself from a disgusting, delusional coward who committed atrocious illegal acts.

But go ahead and try to make your racist, ignorant, disgusting speculation and comments sound 'reasonable.'

 

[ZiprHead]

The New Zealand Mosque shooter says in his manifesto that he admires Donald Trump because Trump is “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Well there you have it folks. It's all identity politics. Can we now finally all recognize that as a bad thing and refocus society on the individual?

 

[blastula]

4 people were arrested and two mosques were hit but not clear whether there was more than one shooter. The livestream showed the guy leaving one mosque and driving around for a few minutes.

 

[ZiprHead]

Well there you have it folks. It's all identity politics. Can we now finally all recognize that as a bad thing and refocus society on the individual?

Says the guy who praised Duterte.

 

[Elixir]

New Zealand Terrorist Attack Mosques

New Zealand Terrorist Attack Mosques

I'm sickened and disheartened about the future of the human race.
This kind of atrocity is always met with cries of protecting religions. But there seems to be no end to the horrible shit people will do to assert that their imaginary friend is better than someone else's imaginary friend. When will we realize that all imaginary friends are created in equal stupidity?
Religion is the problem. Not "a" religion, but religion. Period.

 

[Elixir]

Why are Muslims an issue when the shooter was targeting Muslims?

Muslims aren't the issue - at least not the whole issue. The issue is people who have imaginary friends, and are so afraid of other people's imaginary friends that they feel compelled to commit atrocities against them.
IOW the issue is RELIGIONS.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

The New Zealand Mosque shooter says in his manifesto that he admires Donald Trump because Trump is “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

He admires Donald Trump? Ok, now I’m against him.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Here are the actual facts about Sharia law from Pew Research that is conveniently not reflected in anything Derec posted: The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society, including a far more comprehensive infographic that isn't so one-sided (at end). Snippets:

Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center. But many supporters of sharia say it should apply only to their country’s Muslim population.

Moreover, Muslims are not equally comfortable with all aspects of sharia: While most favor using religious law in family and property disputes, fewer support the application of severe punishments – such as whippings or cutting off hands – in criminal cases. The survey also shows that Muslims differ widely in how they interpret certain aspects of sharia, including whether divorce and family planning are morally acceptable.

The survey involved a total of more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews in 80-plus languages. It covered Muslims in 39 countries, which are divided into six regions in this report – Southern and Eastern Europe (Russia and the Balkans), Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.
...
Within regions, support for enshrining sharia as official law is particularly high in some countries with predominantly Muslim populations, such as Afghanistan and Iraq.1 But support for sharia is not limited to countries where Muslims make up a majority of the population. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Muslims constitute less than a fifth of the population in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique and Uganda; yet in each of these countries, at least half of Muslims (52%-74%) say they want sharia to be the official law of the land.

Conversely, in some countries where Muslims make up more than 90% of the population, relatively few want their government to codify Islamic law; this is the case in Tajikistan (27%), Turkey (12%) and Azerbaijan (8%).

Indeed, the survey finds that support for making sharia the law of the land is often higher in countries where the constitution or basic laws already favor Islam over other religions.2 Majorities in such countries say sharia should be enshrined as official law, including at least nine-in-ten Muslims in Afghanistan (99%) and Iraq (91%). By comparison, in countries where Islam is not legally favored, roughly a third or fewer Muslims say sharia should be the law of the land. Support is especially low in Kazakhstan (10%) and Azerbaijan (8%).
...
Muslims who favor making sharia the law of the land generally agree that the requirements of Islam should apply only to Muslims. Across the regions where the question was asked, medians of at least 51% say sharia should apply exclusively to adherents of the Muslim faith. This view is prevalent even in regions such as South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, where there is overwhelming support for enshrining sharia as the official law of the land.
...
Muslims around the world strongly reject violence in the name of Islam. Asked specifically about suicide bombing, clear majorities in most countries say such acts are rarely or never justified as a means of defending Islam from its enemies.

In most countries where the question was asked, roughly three-quarters or more Muslims reject suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians. And in most countries, the prevailing view is that such acts are never justified as a means of defending Islam from its enemies.
...
The survey finds little evidence that attitudes toward violence in the name of Islam are linked to factors such as age, gender or education. Similarly, the survey finds no consistent link between support for enshrining sharia as official law and attitudes toward religiously motivated violence. In only three of the 15 countries with sufficient samples sizes for analysis – Egypt, Kosovo and Tunisia – are sharia supporters significantly more likely to say suicide bombing and other forms of violence are at least sometimes justified. In Bangladesh, sharia supporters are significantly less likely to hold this view.

There is, of course, much much more including a special section on Sharia Law here: Beliefs about Sharia



And with all of the about immigration, Pew actually projects that by 2050 Europe will only have about 10% of its population Muslim and the US will only be about 2.1%.

And, of course, in America it's still extremist white guys that are the biggest problem:

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 15 percent of discretionary spending — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and a colleague met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Well, anyone who wants more of a religious basis to laws for any segment of the population is someone I’m opposed to.

 

[Toni]

Why are Muslims an issue when the shooter was targeting Muslims?

Muslims aren't the issue - at least not the whole issue. The issue is people who have imaginary friends, and are so afraid of other people's imaginary friends that they feel compelled to commit atrocities against them.
IOW the issue is RELIGIONS.

No, the only ‘imaginary friends’ that come into play here are those that people with serious mental illnesses believe are telling them to murder other people.

And FWIW, the god worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship is the same deity.

 

[JohnG]

I know a few of us here are anti-religion, and I was at one time as well. Eventually I realized that religion has nothing to do with this stuff, it’s all political.

It’s as simple as this: Some middle eastern people get radicalized when you bomb the snot out of them, remove their wealth, destroy their opportunity, and crush their hope. Any group of people would react the same.

Derec, I hope you and other racists figure this out one day.

 

[repoman]

In addition to group aspects of how religious/ethnic ties can build a community for good or ill there is a lot of stuff with social isolation and cutthroat economics happening. Religion can be a backstop in troubled times. Family is falling apart: son addicted to intense porn and never talks to girls, daughter going on sketchy internet dating sites, wife gambling massive cash and you starting to drink heavily. Going back to religion is easy and except for community time in a mosque or church not so effective. Other types of community would be better, but are hard to implement in a fractured society.

It will take a long time for people from a muslim tradition to use something else other than Islam as an emergency backstop for tough personal or family times. Even a large secularizing group of people of a defined ethnic group with muslim heritage may vigorously snap back into Islam in nasty times.

ETA: The post above this, which I did not read before making mine, is similar in concept.

If there were newcomer immigrants of the same ethnic makeup to the current muslims in NZ, but had a very similar version of christianity to the rest of NZ, how would that effect things? Similar meaning that the newcomers would not get any grief for going to an old mainline NZ church or vice versa.


Also, forgot that if the level or perception of vice in society gets too large the call for strict rules like Sharia will be heeded. Something has got to stop the gambling, drinking, porn and whoring in their mind.

Only the most strict denominations of Christianity approach the toned down, vanilla version of Sharia.

 

[blastula]

49 killed?! Jebus! Last I heard it was a shooting with no numbers yet. How awful!

"President Trump" had something nice to say on Twitter:
My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

"Best wishes" and an exclamation point from the sociopath never having any experienced any feelings of sympathy,

 

[Elixir]

the god worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship is the same deity.

Okay, so they kill each other over disputes about who has it right about their shared imaginary friend.
Again, it's not "a" religion, it's RELIGIONS.
The ability and willingness to indulge in hate and hateful acts over imaginary friends is not an aberration, it is the norm and has been for millennia.