U.S. pundit says he’s not responsible for Bissonnette
High-profile American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is firing back at critics who accuse him of inciting Quebec mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette.
Shapiro, a columnist, podcaster and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire website, was at the top of a list of Twitter feeds Bissonnette was visiting in the month before he attacked a Quebec City mosque, killing six Muslim men and injuring another five.
An RCMP document presented at Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing last month showed the killer checked Shapiro’s Twitter feed 93 times. The list included many right-wing American commentators, as well as conspiracy theorists, and alt-right and white supremacist/neo-Nazi leaders.
A tweet by a Montreal Gazette reporter featuring a screen grab of the RCMP list has been retweeted more than 5,700 times and has sparked more than 500 comments, with some suggesting those on the list played a role in Bissonnette’s rampage.
Shapiro, 34, has been described as a hero of the millennial conservative movement.
In an interview with Fox News on Friday, he said he has done nothing wrong.
“This evil piece of human crap happened to be somebody who had seen some of my tweets,” Shapiro said of Bissonnette.
“Now I have 1.4 million Twitter followers so I guess the idea from the left is that if somebody sees enough of my tweets they ’re inevitably going to become a terrorist. Weird that I don’t have a spate of enormous terrorism across the country thanks to my Twitter followers.”
Shapiro, a former editor-at-large at the right-wing Breitbart News website, suggested those attacking him over Bissonnette’s actions are part of an attempt to “imitate what we’ve seen in places like Britain, in places like Canada, to actually shut down dissenting points of view if those dissenting points of view do not meet with the politically correct standards of the left.”
He noted he has “tweeted about the evils of radical Islam and cut a video talking about the percentage of Muslims worldwide who may believe radical things based on polling data from the Pew Research Center.”
That “apparently was enough to blame me for a terrorist attack that has nothing to do with me, that I have obviously denounced, that was committed by an evil piece of human debris. All of this is nonsense generated by the left specifically in order to shut down free speech.”
In his comments, Shapiro appears to refer to a 2014 video titled The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority, which has been viewed three million times.
An analysis of that Shapiro video by PolitiFact disputed Shapiro’s contentions.
“To make his numbers work, he had to cherry-pick certain results from public opinion surveys,” according to the analysis by PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism education organization.
“Given the choice between two possible percentages, he chose the higher one. Shapiro also relied heavily on the idea that anyone who supported sharia law is a radical ... Shapiro’s definition of radical is so thin as to be practically meaningless and so too are the numbers he brings to bear. We rate the claim False.”
Shapiro is the author of several books, including Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, and Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth.
Bissonnette, 28, has pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder. He faces a life sentence, with his parole eligibility to be set between 25 and 150 years.
Evidence presented at Bissonnette’s sentencing showed the killer had a considerable interest in immigrants and Muslims and was a fan of Donald Trump, obsessively reading about the U.S. president and a travel ban he imposed on seven Muslim-majority countries two days before the shooting.
In a report on the contents of Bissonnette’s computer, police said they found no content created by the killer that “could link him to white supremacist or neo-Nazi ideology.” However, his consumption of right-wing and far-right material influenced his “opinion on immigration and the presence of Muslims in Quebec.”
Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing is to continue in June.