As is being reported all over the world right now, there have been mass shootings in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a country hitherto seemingly immune to this kind of madness. At the time I write this, the number of fatalities is forty; New Zealand has never experienced, nor could ever imagine, anything like it. Four people are in custody. One of these is Brenton Tarrant, an Australian moronnial who signalled his intentions in advance on those repositories of moronnial Narcissism, Twit-Witter and Faecesbook, where he, naturally, livestreamed his attack:
https://www.news.com.au/world/...Tarrant revealed he had been planning an attack for up to two years, noting he decided on Christchurch three months ago.
He said New Zealand was not the “original choice for attack”, but described it as “target rich of an environment as anywhere else in the West”.
“An attack in New Zealand would bring to attention the truth of the assault on our civilisation, that no where (sic) in the world was safe, the invaders were in all of our lands, even in the remotest areas of the world and that tehre was no where (sic) left to go that was safe and free from mass immigration."
Elsewhere in his Manifesto Tarrant said he wanted “to take revenge for Ebba Akerlund,” a 12-year-old Swedish girl who was murdered in the Stockholm lorry attack in April, 2017 by Rakhmat Akilov, an asylum-seeker from Uzbekistan.
As a libertarian who unapologetically despises Islam for its murderous totalitarianism and shameless advocacy of the initiation of force—its Sharia Law and its Jihad in pursuit of a world-wide caliphate—I want to say for the record that I also despise Tarrant and his accomplices for their murderous totalitarianism. Apart from the senseless evil of their initiation of force today, they have betrayed the very values of Western Civilisation in whose name they purport to have acted, which include the right (denied by Islam) to peacefully adhere to any religion of one's choice, or no religion at all. They have played right into the hands of the usual suspects who will now redouble their efforts to clamp down on another of Western Civilisation's bedrock principles, freedom of speech; efforts to criminalise criticism of Islam were already well underway, and will now probably, tragically, become irresistible. Those who routinely stay silent in the face of Islamoterrorism will not hesitate to condemn "white supremacist, extremist, far-right terrorism" by name in this instance and demand the shutting down of peaceful, polemical criticism that doesn't remotely fall under any of those categories.
This is an inexpressibly sad day for those close to the victims of today's atrocity, who were not remotely directly accountable for the killing of Ebba Akerlund. Does the magnificent, history-changing principle of "I disagree with what you say but defend to the death your right to say it" have to be a fatality also?