Jump to content

Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy


bad_teammate

Recommended Posts

Quebec Mosque Shooter Was Consumed by Refugees, Trump and Far Right

QUEBEC — When Alexandre Bissonnette learned of Justin Trudeau’s now-famous tweet welcoming refugees to Canada, the waif-like 28-year-old political science student told police that he snapped.

Just hours after watching a television report suggesting Canada would accept immigrants spurned by President Trump, Mr. Bissonnette packed his Glock handgun and rifle, picked up a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, and trudged the snow-covered streets of Quebec to a nearby Islamic Cultural Center.

As 53 men were finishing evening prayers, he unloaded 48 rounds. Six people were killed — several of them by shots to the head — and 19 were injured, one paralyzed for life.

These details surfaced during a three-week sentencing hearing that ended late last month. Mr. Bissonnette faces up to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and is expected to be sentenced in the coming months.

 

The hearing was a grim reminder that more than a year after the Jan. 29, 2017, rampage, Canada is still grappling with Mr. Bissonnette’s crime. It shocked the nation and underlined the perils of Islamophobia and the far right in a country that prides itself on its multiculturalism and tolerance.

Herman Deparice-Okomba, director of the Montreal-based Center for The Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, said the sheer obscenity of someone gunning people down in a place of worship in peace-loving Canada had convulsed the country because it shattered Canadians’ image of themselves as the ultimate humanistic, open nation.

“Canada sees itself as a nation of immigrants, and people thought that such a thing was impossible here,” Mr. Deparice-Okomba said. “Bissonnette’s crime wasn’t just against a community. It was against Canada’s collective vision of itself. We are all wounded.”

During the often chilling hearing, prosecutors, survivors, prison psychologists and people who knew Mr. Bissonnette painted a portrait of a socially isolated but intelligent young man who developed an obsession with the far right, mass killers, Donald Trump and Muslims.

Sometimes it felt as if Islamophobia was on trial. Mr. Bissonnette was not charged with terrorism, prompting outcries from Muslim groups that, if his name had been Muhammad, the charges would have been different.

Under the Canadian Criminal Code, the burden of proving terrorist intent is high, and legal experts said prosecutors likely concluded that securing a first-degree murder conviction would be less risky.

Some survivors testified they were too afraid to return to the mosque. In a strictly secular province that recently passed a law banning people wearing face-coverings from giving or receiving public services, the court allowed Muslim witnesses to swear on a Quran.

Acting alone, Mr. Bissonnette also raised a difficult question: How did a mousy and soft-spoken chess-obsessed student from a middle class family become a killer?

In the month before his rampage, he trawled the internet 819 times for posts related to Mr. Trump, reading his Twitter feed daily and homing in on the American president’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. He kept a cache of guns underneath his bed at his parents’ house. Among his only friends was his twin brother, Mathieu.

Mr. Bissonnette told investigators he wished he had killed more people, and had wanted to protect his family from Islamic terrorists.

“I was, like, sure that they were going to come and kill my parents also, and my family,” he said in a video of a prison interrogation played in court.

During the hearing, Mr. Bissonnette was handcuffed and his tiny frame was covered in a baggy sweatshirt. He fluctuated between stony silence and tears from inside a glass enclosure, flanked by two police officers.

He was impassive while Megda Belkacemi, the 29-year-old daughter of one of the victims, the university professor Khaled Belkacemi, testified about seeing her father with a hole where one of his eyes should have been.

But when the judge called his parents “collateral victims” of the attack, he sobbed.

Mr. Bissonnette’s erratic personality was also revealed in a haunting 50-minute 911 call — played in court — in which he turned himself in. He repeatedly told the operator he was going to shoot himself.

“I’m sick of this,” he said, adding: “I’ve never hurt anyone.”

Throughout the proceedings, Mr. Bissonnette’s parents, Manon Marchand and Raymond Bissonnette, a public sector worker and a lawyer, sat stoically in the front of the courtroom’s public stalls, overflowing with families of the victims. At one point, the couple comforted a woman in a head scarf.

Experts on radicalization said that in Quebec, a French-speaking province surrounded by an English-speaking majority, the anti-immigrant far right offered fertile and perilous ground for psychologically unstable youths like Mr. Bissonnette seeking a sense of identity and a scapegoat.

Mr. Deparice-Okomba said Mr. Bissonnette was part of a growing number of educated, middle-class youths in Quebec drawn to far-right ideas, fueled by the election of Mr. Trump and fanned by fears that immigrants threatened Quebec’s identity.

When he started the center in 2015, he said it dealt with 17 cases of youths in the province radicalized by the far right. Last year, the center had 154 such cases, he noted, compared with 126 cases of youths radicalized by Muslim extremism.

Nevertheless, he stressed that far-right groups in Quebec like La Meute, or Wolfpack, which castigate Islam, remained marginal.

“Youths here typically don’t get radicalized because they feel discriminated against since Canada is such an inclusive society,” he said. “Rather, they get radicalized due to ideological convictions. They feel they must do something to prevent catastrophe.”

The internet also appears to have provided Mr. Bissonnette with both a forum and a pretext to vent his rage.

François Deschamps, who ran a web page raising money for Syrian refugees, said Mr. Bissonnette had spent months trolling the group’s Facebook page.

“He liked to express views that were ultraconservative, racist and anti-Muslim,” he said, “He would also go to event pages of feminist groups and write ‘FemiNazis.’ ”

Like last month’s Toronto attacker, Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old who fatally ran over 10 pedestrians with a rental van, Mr. Bissonnette was preoccupied by Elliot Rodger, the man who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in May 2014 after railing about his failures with women.

Mr. Bissonnette also browsed websites linked to the white nationalist Richard Spencer, the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine African-Americans at a South Carolina church.

The hearing raised the thorny question of whether bullying — and society’s failure to prevent it — had pushed Mr. Bissonnette on his deadly course.

Lucie Côté, a French teacher who taught Mr. Bissonnette in high school, told the court that he was mercilessly picked on by students, laughed at and shoved against the wall.

“Alexandre developed nervous reflexes, reflexes of fear,” she said. “Alexandre was not a monster.”

Acquaintances who knew Mr. Bissonnette at Université Laval said he was “that student nobody notices.” He joined a chess club, hunted and sought refuge on a shooting range. In the weeks before the attack, he became withdrawn, friends said.

Éric Debroise, who led a political discussion group at the left-leaning Université Laval, recalled that Mr. Bissonnette arrived for the first get-together at a bar wearing a shirt and tie when everyone else was in T-shirts and jeans.

When he immediately brought up the National Front and Marine Le Pen’s immigration policies, Mr. Debroise said he cut him off, and he sulked in silence.

Consumed by anxiety and depression, Mr. Bissonnette told police he contemplated suicide at 16. He developed an alcohol problem. He wanted to become a pilot but got a job at a call center instead.

After Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Muslim, attacked the Canadian Parliament in October 2014, Mr. Bissonnette bought his first gun. It was one of several he would purchase legally, omitting his psychological problems from application forms, according to Marc-André Lamontagne, a psychologist who interviewed him in prison.

Six weeks before the mosque attack, Mr. Bissonnette told Mr. Lamontagne he went to a Quebec City shopping center to kill people and himself, but couldn’t go through with it.

“He had fantasies to do something big so that people would not laugh at him after his death, so that people would remember him,” Mr. Lamontagne said.

At the Quebec mosque, its windows still pocked with bullet holes, the Muslim community is still struggling to come to terms with the attack and their fear and grief.

The mosque’s president, Mohamed Labidi, said anti-Muslim incidents intensified before and after the attack. Before the killing, a severed pig’s head was left on the mosque’s doorstep. When he announced plans to build a Muslim cemetery on city land six months after the attack, his car was set on fire.

He blamed far-right groups and anti-immigrant “trash radio” hosts for creating a “toxic climate.”

Amir Belkacemi, the son of Khaled Belkacemi, said his father had come to Canada from Algeria in the 1990s to escape terrorism, only to become ensnared by violence here. Still, he said he had no intention of leaving the place he calls home.

“Quebec didn’t create the monster Alexandre Bissonnette,” he said. “But the Islamophobia here gave him his motive.”

Edited by bolverk
linkage
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Chrispy said:

Where is speech compelled? 

It’s compelled in many ways. And it’s ok. You can always quit if you are asked to say something you don’t want to say. Same as this guy in Canada. If he doesn’t like it he can find another employer. 

But this is a silly hill to die on. Saying “I’m happy to call you what you want to be called unless I’m compelled to do so” is like saying. “I’m happy to say the sky is blue unless the government tells me I must say it’s blue when it’s blue”. It’s still fucking blue, so call it what it is, and ignore the god damned government. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Where is speech compelled? 

From the mundane - “all workers should ask ‘do you want fries with that’ - upwelling is important.” To the serious: “it is company policy to refer to all customers by the name or pronoun they put on their order. If someone submits an order as ‘zey,’ refer to that person as ‘zey.’” To even more serious - “every person is seen as a representative of the firm. When you travel to job sites in your personal vehicle, you can’t have political bumper stickers.” (A restriction, not a compulsion, but quite serious and political).

It happens all the time.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

It’s compelled in many ways. And it’s ok. You can always quit if you are asked to say something you don’t want to say. Same as this guy in Canada. If he doesn’t like it he can find another employer. 

But this is a silly hill to die on. Saying “I’m happy to call you what you want to be called unless I’m compelled to do so” is like saying. “I’m happy to say the sky is blue unless the government tells me I must say it’s blue when it’s blue”. It’s still fucking blue, so call it what it is, and ignore the god damned government. 

Wrong, it wasn’t a university guideline, this was law. He couldn’t escape it in his personal life. You have no idea what you’re taking about. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


From the mundane - “all workers should ask ‘do you want fries with that’ - upwelling is important.” To the serious: “it is company policy to refer to all customers by the name or pronoun they put on their order. If someone submits an order as ‘zey,’ refer to that person as ‘zey.’” To even more serious - “every person is seen as a representative of the firm. When you travel to job sites in your personal vehicle, you can’t have political bumper stickers.” (A restriction, not a compulsion, but quite serious and political).

It happens all the time.

This was law that extended to his personal life, not company policy. This is not a hard concept.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This was law that extended to his personal life, not company policy. This is not a hard concept.

Start using racial slurs on your personal FB page.

See how many private employers terminate you when it comes to their attention that you regularly drop the N bomb. It happens. Frequently.

Most companies have a policy - written or not - that employees should not be loathsome racist shitbags, even on their personal time.

And they enforce it.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have been trying to figure out how to tell this story without too much detail, but I once quit a job over this very thing. My company ran at least one  sweatshop in China. I’d been told we didn’t do that. Our company acted as if we didn’t do that and marketed as if we didn’t do that. I had business that took me to China where I saw the sweatshop first hand. I had said we had no sweatshops before seeing we had at least one sweatshop. I refused to continue to say that after I returned to the states. My employer gave me an ultimatum to continue our public story about no sweatshops or they would fire me, so I quit. 

I am being compelled to silence on several topics today by my current employer, but I’m ok with those rules so I’m not leaving.   

Anyone compelled to speech or silence by their employer has the option to quit if they don’t want to follow those rules. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


Start using racial slurs on your personal FB page.

See how many private employers terminate you when it comes to their attention that you regularly drop the N bomb. It happens. Frequently.

Most companies have a policy - written or not - that employees should not be loathsome racist shitbags, even on their personal time.

And they enforce it.

That’s restricting speech, not compelling it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Have you read the law? Do you know how the law it is broken in practice?

Yes, I’ve read it. The law is purposely vague on what “promoting hatred because of gender identity” exactly is. There’s a lot left up to interpretation, which is why Peterson is under fire for hate speech. Unless, of course, he simply folds and says what he’s told, which is an awful thought. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Chrispy said:

Yes, I’ve read it. The law is purposely vague on what “promoting hatred because of gender identity” exactly is. There’s a lot left up to interpretation, which is why Peterson is under fire for hate speech. Unless, of course, he simply folds and says what he’s told, which is an awful thought. 

But to be clear, nothing in the law compels speech, correct?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Where does the law compel speech?

His nonuse of these made up pronouns is considered hate speech to many under the new law, which they have made a criminal offense. It’s terribly written law that is extremely vague. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

But to be clear, nothing in the law compels speech, correct?

If his nonuse of the proper pronouns constitutes “promoting hatred of gender identity”, then yes he will be compelled to certain speech or pay the fines, jail time, etc. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

I have been trying to figure out how to tell this story without too much detail, but I once quit a job over this very thing. My company ran at least one  sweatshop in China. I’d been told we didn’t do that. Our company acted as if we didn’t do that and marketed as if we didn’t do that. I had business that took me to China where I saw the sweatshop first hand. I had said we had no sweatshops before seeing we had at least one sweatshop. I refused to continue to say that after I returned to the states. My employer gave me an ultimatum to continue our public story about no sweatshops or they would fire me, so I quit. 

I am being compelled to silence on several topics today by my current employer, but I’m ok with those rules so I’m not leaving.   

Anyone compelled to speech or silence by their employer has the option to quit if they don’t want to follow those rules. 

It’s a law, not a company guideline. I’m trying to follow you my man, but good lord. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

If his nonuse of the proper pronouns constitutes “promoting hatred of gender identity”, then yes he will be compelled to certain speech or pay the fines, jail time, etc. 

Please show me in the law where it compels anyone to use pronouns.

Edited by David Dennison
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Please show me in the law where it compels anyone to use pronouns.

I’ve already explained this David, I’m growing weary. If an individual feels that his nonuse of specific gender pronouns constitutes hate speech, he could be subject to criminal prosecution. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Chrispy said:

I’ve already explained this David, I’m growing weary. If an individual feels that his nonuse of specific gender pronouns constitutes hate speech, he could be subject to criminal prosecution. 

But the law doesn't compel anyone to use proper pronouns. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

His nonuse of these made up pronouns is considered hate speech to many under the new law, which they have made a criminal offense. It’s terribly written law that is extremely vague. 

Every word is made up. You need to quit saying that like it’s a bad thing. What you mean is “this new word I don’t like.”

Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

It’s a law, not a company guideline. I’m trying to follow you my man, but good lord. 

I was responding to the point that companies don’t compel speech. With the exception of my last post I’ve been talking about that specifically since you kept saying it doesn’t happen. 

I don’t like laws that restrict speech. I have a problem with laws that restrict speech. I don’t have a problem with companies that do the same. You seemed to have a problem with both. I was addressing one of those problems. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

Every word is made up. You need to quit saying that like it’s a bad thing. What you mean is “this new word I don’t like.”

They created these words and I find them silly, but that’s beside the point 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

If it’s interpreted as hate speech, which it has been, then yes. 

That's a restriction, not a compulsion. The law does not compel anyone to use any word. The law restricts the use of words if they are deemed to be hate speech.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

That's a restriction, not a compulsion. The law does not compel anyone to use any word. The law restricts the use of words if they are deemed to be hate speech.

No, they deem his nonuse of a pronoun of hate speech. Meaning he must use the correct ones. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

No, we aren't. I know exactly what you're arguing. The fact of the matter is, the law that was passed does not actually compel anyone to say anything. 

Of course it does. You want pronoun usage to be specifically enumerated in this bill, when it’s merely a symptom of a poorly written bill. The far reaching consequences of which continue to evade you. Be happy of your chains, but leave me out of it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

27 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

Of course it does. You want pronoun usage to be specifically enumerated in this bill, when it’s merely a symptom of a poorly written bill. The far reaching consequences of which continue to evade you. Be happy of your chains, but leave me out of it. 

I don't think this law applies to either of us, metaphor notwithstanding.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/4/2018 at 4:55 PM, Chrispy said:

Bill C-16 told him he must, you need to read it, it will scare the hell out of you. Again, they didn’t ask him to call them these pronouns, they told him to use these pronouns, there’s a distinct difference. 

Please direct me to the part of the bill where it says an individual must use the pronouns you are talking about.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Please direct me to the part of the bill where it says an individual must use the pronouns you are talking about.

I’ve explained as much Ad nauseam, your inability to understand is not my burden to bear.

Edited by Chrispy
I’m regarded
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, David Dennison said:

I understand exactly what you're saying. I disagree with your interpretation and conclusion.

Fair enough. That’s proof, at least to me, that the bill is poorly written. There’s a lot left to interpretation, which concerns me due to the capricious nature of humans. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Chrispy said:

They created these words and I find them silly, but that’s beside the point 

But “they” created all the words in all the languages going back to when we started having a launguage. Some of those words are weird or silly, like awkward or moist, but “they” created all of them. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

44 minutes ago, Chrispy said:

Already have, he’s been threatened with fines.

No, you haven't.

No one has threatened Jordan Peterson with fines. I posted a video in which he articulates the nature of his victimization, which is his own interpretation of what the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is going to do based on conspiratorial thinking. Watch the video starting at 10 seconds in.

Here are his words:
"Well I think that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is probably obligated by their own tangled web to bring me in front of it."

The Tribunal has done nothing. They've said nothing to him. This is 100% a figment of his imagination.

Envisioning a scenario in which you might be punished is not a fucking threat of punishment. Jordan has delusions of martyrdom and grandeur.

Like the alt.right and the right-wing in general, he's a bitch-ass whining white man who is under zero oppression but calls out like he's literally under the jackboot of a trans-lesbian ANTIFA super-soldier.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, bad_teammate said:

No, you haven't.

No one has threatened Jordan Peterson with fines. I posted a video in which he articulates the nature of his victimization, which is his own interpretation of what the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is going to do based on conspiratorial thinking. Watch the video starting at 10 seconds in.

Here are his words:
"Well I think that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is probably obligated by their own tangled web to bring me in front of it."

The Tribunal has done nothing. They've said nothing to him. This is 100% a figment of his imagination.

Envisioning a scenario in which you might be punished is not a fucking threat of punishment. Jordan has delusions of martyrdom and grandeur.

Like the alt.right and the right-wing in general, he's a bitch-ass whining white man who is under zero oppression but calls out like he's literally under the jackboot of a trans-lesbian ANTIFA super-soldier.

I disagree, but you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. He’s absolutely been threatened with fines, as has his institution. You can dismiss it as fantasy, but it’s jusy not the case. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It’s weird, it’s like when airplanes got invented and therefore the word airpllane has to get created, and some people are like, wtf is the new made up word, I’m not going to use it. 

Also, one does not have to use pronouns to talk about people if one doesn’t choose to do so. 

This whole thread is dumb. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

All words are created.

There is no such thing as a natural word in our language.

You people are fucking imbeciles.

Create as many words as you choose, but I will not be conscripted into saying them. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Pancho changed the title to Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy


×
×
  • Create New...