Sun29Jan QUEBEC - 6 dead in 'punishment atrocity'

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Québec mosque shooting: six dead as Trudeau decries 'terrorist attack'
Two arrests made after fatal shooting on Sunday night condemned as senseless violence by Canadian PM
Graham Russell
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/30/quebec-mosque-shooting-c anada-deaths

Monday 30 January 2017
Six people have been killed and eight injured at a mosque in Québec City in a shooting denounced as a “terrorist attack” by Canada’s prime minister.

Witnesses said three people carried out the attack at the Québec City Islamic cultural center during evening prayers on Sunday. Police received the first calls just before 8pm (1am GMT).

Two arrests have been made

Earlier on Sunday, Canada’s immigration minister extolled the importance of a “compassionate and humanitarian” immigration system. “Canada is a country of immigrants,” Ahmed Hussen told reporters in Ottawa, while addressing Mr Trump’s policy. “We have always welcomed people in need of protection and will continue to do so.”
https://www.ft.com/content/fd02a150-e699-11e6-967b-c88452263daf


Trump halts refugee program; Trudeau tweets they're welcome in Canada
By Saeed Ahmed, CNN

Updated 1646 GMT (0046 HKT) January 29, 2017

(CNN)While many in the United States, caught off-guard by President Trump's executive order on immigration, protested and heaped condemnation, the neighbor to the north took a decidedly different tack.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his country's open-door policy on refugees in a series of tweets.
"To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith," the first, posted Saturday afternoon said. "Diversity is our strength."
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/29/politics/justin-trudeau-refugees-wel come-trnd/index.html

Friday executive order by President Donald Trump suspending refugee admissions for four months.

The order Friday immediately suspended a program that last year resettled in the U.S. roughly 85,000 people displaced by war, political oppression, hunger and religious prejudice. Trump indefinitely blocked those fleeing Syria, where a civil war has raged, and imposed a 90-day ban on all immigration to the U.S. from seven Muslim majority nations, citing terrorism concerns.

"We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas," Trump said as he signed the order at the Pentagon. "We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people."

Trump said the halt in the refugee program was necessary to give agencies time to develop a stricter screening system. While the order did not spell out what additional steps he wants the departments of Homeland Security and State to take, the president directed officials to review the refugee application and approval process and find any more measures that could prevent those who pose a threat from using the refugee program.

The U.S. may admit refugees on a case-by-case basis during the freeze, and the government will continue to process requests from people claiming religious persecution, "provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual's country."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/30/quebec-mosque-shooting-c anada-deaths

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Suspect in Quebec Mosque Attack Quickly Depicted as a Moroccan Muslim. He’s a White Nationalist.
Glenn Greenwald, Murtaza Hussain
January 30 2017, 7:49 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/suspect-in-quebec-mosque-attack-qu ickly-depicted-as-a-moroccan-muslim-hes-a-white-nationalist/

Photo: Francis Vachon/The Canadian Press via AP
A MASS SHOOTING at a Quebec City mosque last night left six people dead and eight wounded. The targeted mosque, the Cultural Islamic Center of Quebec, was the same one at which a severed pig’s head was left during Ramadan last June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the episode a “terrorist attack on Muslims.”

Almost immediately, various news outlets and political figures depicted the shooter as Muslim. Right-wing nationalist tabloids in the UK instantly linked it to Islamic violence. Fox News claimed that “witnesses said at least one gunman shouted ‘Allahu akbar!’,” and then added this about the shooter’s national origin:


White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack.

But these assertions are utterly false. The suspect is neither Moroccan nor Muslim. The Moroccan individual, Mohamed Belkhadir, was actually one of the worshippers at the mosque and called 911 to summon the police, and played no role whatsoever in the shooting.

The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights groups, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online.

The Globe and Mail added that he “was known in the city’s activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump.” And Bisonnette’s Facebook page – now taken down but still archived – lists among its “likes” the far right French nationalist Marine Le Pen, Islam critics Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Donald J. Trump (he also “likes” the liberal Canadian Party NDP along with more neutral “likes” such as Tom Hanks, the Sopranos and Katy Perry).

It is usually the case that there is significant confusion in the wake of attacks of this sort. And local police did apparently arrest two suspects at first: both Bissonnette along with el Khadir. And until the investigation is complete, one cannot know for certain what the motives here were. One should be careful about trying to infer too much from a hodgepodge of Facebook “likes” and, this early, even anecdotal claims about his political views. As for reports that someone yelled “Allahu akbar,” it is perfectly natural that someone in a mosque would say that upon seeing a homicidal killer randomly shooting people, or it’s possible that the shooter said it mockingly.

But this is exactly why no responsible news organization, let alone the White House, should rush to depict the shooter as Muslim and of Moroccan descent when so little is known about what happened. Yet not only did Fox and the Trump White House do exactly that, but worse, neither has retracted or corrected their claims long after it became clear that it was false:


The inflammatory effect of this sort of reckless, biased “reporting” is as predictable as it is toxic. All day long, people around the world cited these reports to justify Trump’s ban as well as their own ugly views of Muslims:


This sure doesn't fit the lefty narrative! One suspect in Quebec attack is French-Canadian, one of Moroccan heritage https://t.co/Dhs56RZkYx

— Scott Jarvis (@ScottJarvis2) January 30, 2017

The only part of any of this that’s true is that it was an act of terrorism: terrorism aimed, yet again, at Muslims by someone who has apparently been indoctrinated with a great deal of hate toward them. Media outlets and the White House led people all over the world today to believe exactly the opposite.