BUFFALO PAYS PRICE OF WEB’S WHITE LIES
Until online platforms stop supremacist misinformation circulating, more minorities are at risk of the radicalised
AFTER yet another horrific horrific mass mas shooting in America, this week has brought the same tired calls for tighter gun controls.
Within minutes of twisted teenager Payton Gendron’s evil race-fulled terror attack, US politicians offered their usual hollow prayers and condolences.
Attending the shooting scene in Buffalo, New York, it was clear to me their words were meaningless to the relatives of the people the 18-year-old shot dead.
The reasoning for bigoted Gendron’s attack was laid out in a sick 180-page manifesto the teen had published online before taking out his weapons to kill.
He is the latest in an ever-increasing line of far-right fanatics whose hatred of other races has become so toxic that they felt the need to kill.
Not only did Gendron lay out in meticulous detail his sadistic plans and abhorrent views, his ramblings even included a call for London mayor Sadiq Khan to be killed.
In the coming days, we will undoubtedly hear from officials that he was a lone wolf – a claim, they will argue, that is backed up by his own words.
”I am the sole perpetrator of the recent attempted mass shooting,” Gendron wrote within his manifesto.
But nothing could be further from the truth. For without the views of others being published online for everyone to read, it is doubtful the once quiet school kid would have turned into a killer.
Gendron himself admits he was radicalised over the years through the internet. He said the process had accelerated in the early months of the pandemic when he became immersed in the far-right extremism and violent white supremacy he was reading about on the web.
Saturday’s shooting targeted a predominantly African American Buffalo neighbourhood where, the internet taught him, he could maximise victims. The attack killed 10 people and wounded three; 11 of the 13 shot were black.
It bears striking similarities to other far-right atrocities of recent years, including the 2019 massacres in El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand.
But the phenomenon is no coincidence. Terrorists learn from one another. They study one another’s tactics and methods.
Racism and religious intolerance is fuelling a wave of deadly violence.
Black people are being attacked solely because they are black, Jews are being targeted just because they are Jewish, and Asian Americans and Muslim Americans are being assaulted simply because of their race and religion. This systematic xenophobia flies in the face of the principles countries like ours and America were built on.
Gendron may be the most recent terrorist to use the internet for an international platform, but he will likely not be the last.
Until social media companies that profit from their existence become accountable for monitoring and stopping radicalisation, innocent people will continue to lose their lives.