The "Normalization of Bigotry"

Australia, home of the Christchurch mosque mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant, has a bigotry problem, in particular a recent normalization of bigotry. This emerged yesterday when Australian senator, Fraser Anning, blamed New Zealand Muslims for the attacks on their mosques.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has called Friday’s massacre a “violent, extremist, right-wing terrorist attack” and also condemned comments from Queensland senator Fraser Anning, saying that “blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting”. 

“Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian parliament,” Morrison said. 

[Labor Party spokesman] Tony Burke also criticised Anning’s comments but said: “the normalisation of bigotry is something that is not only confined to him.” 

He said the use of hate speech was connected to violence and extremism and should be taken more seriously. 

“There’s been an attempt in Australia by many people to normalise hate speech,” Burke said. “We get told, ‘Oh, it’s just freedom of speech’.” 

He said that view had been pushed by “some [television] networks” and said the normalisation of hate speech was “not the whole story of what’s happened, but there is no doubt it is part of it”. 

The Australian man charged with murder over the Christchurch attack was not on a terrorist watchlist, and Burke said it was possible that “up until now, many people would not have viewed this form of extremism as being as dangerous to people as every other form of extremism”. 

“Anyone who had that doubt, that doubt finished yesterday,” he said.

Australia also banned white nationalist mouthpiece, Milo Yiannopoulos, from entering the country. Yiannopoulos had scheduled a speaking tour of Australia only to get tripped up by also depicting Islam as a barbaric, alien religious culture.

The alt-right provocateur and former Breitbart journalist said on Facebook that attacks such as the one in Christchurch happened “because the establishment panders to and mollycoddles extremist leftism and barbaric, alien religious cultures.”

It's time that Canadian Conservatives also dealt with their own dirty laundry that was on display recently when both Andrew Scheer and Tory senator Dave Tkachuk embraced white nationalists on Parliament Hill. Today's Tories are far too close to these degenerates.