This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Two years on, we’re still failing the victims of the El Paso massacre
By: []
Date: 2021-09
Two years ago today, a lone 21-year-old white man walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire. Shortly beforehand, he had posted a sick justification online, as so many radical Right terrorists have done over the past decade.
All the shooter needed was five minutes to murder 23 people, while wounding another two dozen – many critically – the youngest of whom was two months old. That baby was among those described as ‘invaders’ in a manifesto posted on the notorious 8chan imageboard. Though the site’s moderators quickly took down the original post, it remains only a few clicks away, having been widely downloaded and shared by users.
In the very first sentence of that hateful screed, the El Paso terrorist explicitly cited the ‘Christchurch manifesto’, published months earlier and half a world away, shortly before the murder of 51 people at two mosques in the New Zealand city on 15 March 2019.
Rather than targeting Muslims, as was the case in Christchurch, the El Paso terrorist claimed that his savagery was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”. “They are the instigators, not me,” he continued, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
He called this ‘an inconvenient truth’. But the majority of his victims were American citizens. And all were innocents going about their daily lives, murdered by a man with a racist ideology, who proudly claimed: “I am against race mixing […] physical separation would nearly eliminate race mixing and improve social unity by granting each race self-determination within their respective territory(s).”
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