Sunday, March 17, 2019

"I Disagree With Violence But....": The Justification and Celebration of the Christchurch Mosque Murders By Paul Fromm and Robert Jones

It didn't take long for the likes of Paulie to try and justify the murder of 50 adults and children worshiping at two Christchurch mosques. In a post on his blog, Fromm posted the entirety of the murderer's "manifesto" along with his own forward justifying the attack while couching that justification if claims to oppose violence:


The most relevant section of the forward his here:


Of course long time readers of ARC and those who know the long history of Fromm's support for violent hate groups who do the dirty work that he tacitly promotes know just how hollow Fromm's claim to "disagree with... violence." He has supported groups such as the Aryan Guard/Blood & Honour, Volksfront, the KKK, and a multitude of groups who have engaged in violence and he has rationalized every single instance:


In fact he has his own links to Christchurch, New Zealand where another violent hate group had been founded:


Here Fromm is shaking hands with Kyle Chapman while on a speaking tour of New Zealand in December 2010. Chapman was leader and founder of the neo-Nazi hate group Right Wing Resistance that formed targeting Maori and other Polynesian peoples, other New Zealand peoples of colour, Jews, and Muslims:
Right Wing Resistance also had a number of chapters around the world. Many were quite small including a Canadian chapter whose sole active member was profiled on the blog in late 2015:


Fromm isn't the only prominent disseminator of hate propaganda who has helped to poison the well and creating the conditions that contribute to events such as the Christchurch tragedy. Like others regarded as leaders or (to use a more resent term) influencers in the white nationalist movement internationally, Fromm toes right up to the line where he doesn't overtly advocate for violence, but justifies it when it occurs as the inevitable consequences of an ethnically diverse society and that the remedy is to make society not ethnically diverse.... however that task would be accomplished is left up to the imagination. These dog whistles are heard by those who ARE potentially inclined to commit such reprehensible acts, but those who have helped to foster this noxious environment have their plausible deniability. 

A figure on the far right whom I have written about due to his active involvement in protests and groups that are increasingly more extreme, Robert Jones, represents the kind of person people like Paulie are dog whistling too:


We usually find the sort of radicalization Robert Jones is undergoing in teens, however like the children who find their way into hate groups, Jones is someone who seems desperate to belong to something. He has been a member of the Soldiers of Odin, the Proud Boys, and the JDL as an affiliate. He has eventually been booted from all three of the groups mentioned and now he's on his forth, the hate group known as the Northern Guard. He has also embraced overt fascism and worships Donald Trump as a sort of living god (note that he has more than one Facebook account two of which I will be sourcing in the article without bothering to make the distinction):




When the Christchurch murders took place, Jones was immediately drawn to the manifesto which he has spent a great deal of time sharing online:





Jones seems aware that posting links to the manifesto, as well as the video of the murders, violate Facebook's terms of service regarding dissemination of hate propaganda and violence, but he seems determined to share these with a wide audience:


Jones' reaction to the murders has been equally crass:



Duarate seems to be under the impression that Fraser Anning, the Australian senator
who blamed the Muslim community for the the murder of their members for
the audacity of living in New Zealand, is a leftist because he likely didn't
read the article.... because he seems to be an idiot.


The term "retribution attack" used by Jones is telling as he very quickly begins to justify the murders and dehumanize non-white peoples:




Far more disturbing however is not his justification of the murders, but his argument over the targets suggesting others more worthy of being murdered:







He includes in his screed the praising of mass murderers Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik:



As a reminder to readers, McVeigh murdered 168 people including 19 children in what was at that point the worst terrorist attack to take place on American soil and Breivik murdered 77 people, including 69 members of the Worker's Youth League; the youngest child at the summer camp was 14 years old. In both cases Muslims were initially blamed (ARC wrote a lengthy article about the murders in Norway not long after they occurred), a phenomenon that continues and includes conspiracy theories suggesting the Christchurch murders were the result of Islamic extremism.

Jones finishes up his missive with some good, old, nihilism:

I don't doubt that Jones is aware of Fromm, though there's nothing to indicate that he has been influenced by Fromm's dog whistles directly. That hardly matters though since Jones isn't wanting for radicalizing influences:









Birds of a feather, eh?


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