A week after New Zealand shootings, Canada lurches towards internet censorship
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Summary
In the wake of the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, a gunman opened fire in a mosque, killing at least 50 people and wounding 50 more. The police have not been able to identify a suspect in the shooting, but the evidence points to a single gunman.
Transcript
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Hey folks, today I go into some depth on the New Zealand mass shooting.
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Last week when it happened, I was actually flying home from the United Kingdom.
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I didn't have a chance to get into it that day, plus the facts were still evolving.
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Without further ado, let me give you that podcast, but give me just one second first
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to invite you to become a Rebel Media Premium subscriber.
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Well, hopefully because you like what we're doing and you want to support us because we
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It's eight bucks a month and you can get our video version, which I think is important,
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Go to the rebel.media slash shows and become a premium subscriber.
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Without any further ado, here is my podcast today.
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Tonight, a week after the New Zealand shootings, Canada lurches towards internet censorship.
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It's March 22nd and you're watching the Ezra LeVant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody
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A week ago, a mass murderer in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, walked into a mosque
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shooting everyone he saw, men, women, and children.
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He then drove, he left that mosque and drove to the other mosque in town and did the same
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The whole thing took 21 minutes, but he managed to murder 50 people and wound 50 more.
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The murderer, an Australian named Brenton Tarrant, was arrested.
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At first, there were media reports that it was a team of people, almost like a terrorist
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Police basically locked down the whole city, in fact, put the whole country on alert.
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But after arresting other people, they released them.
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Turns out that Tarrant did the whole thing by himself.
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Tarrant live streamed his murder spree on Facebook.
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I have not seen it, partly because others who have say it was horrific.
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Anyone who's watched TV or the movies has probably seen more murder in our lives than
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our entire family history going back a thousand years combined.
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But although those surely desensitize us, we still know they're fake murders.
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I think the first time I saw an actual murder was when ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot alive
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But knowing that that Jordanian pilot was real and he really was being buried alive, that
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I made the mistake of watching one more ISIS murder video, so I have declined to watch any
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In some jurisdictions, a murder video may be deemed to be obscene, as extreme pornography
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I say all this because immediately the government of New Zealand banned that live stream video
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and banned anyone from posting the video or retweeting it or anything like that.
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I should say that only about 200 people apparently watched the video in real time.
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But you can imagine the natural curiosity, people wanting to know the news, especially something
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I do not want to watch the video, but nor do I think that censoring the evidence of these
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It will lead to paranoia and disinformation and conspiracy theories.
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Two years ago, a gunman holed up in a hotel in Las Vegas, began shooting at the crowd below.
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He murdered 58 people and he wounded more than 800.
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Now, no closed circuit TV footage has been released of the criminal in a town, Las Vegas,
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that probably has more closed circuit TV cameras per square foot than anywhere else in the world.
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That's the Muslim terrorist who murdered 49 and wounded 58 more in a gay nightclub in
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At first, authorities released only a partial transcript of the terrorists' calls.
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And they claimed they actually wrote that he said, praise be to God, instead of what he
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I don't believe people should watch snuff films.
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But by banning them, especially something so politically charged, it plants seeds of doubt
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Are you not skeptical of the Las Vegas shooting?
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New Zealand put an enormous effort into deleting the facts, into deleting the video.
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They pressured YouTube and Facebook and other websites into their service.
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Now, YouTube and Facebook, they say that more than a million and a half people tried that
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Surely not all 1.5 million of them are vicious monsters.
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I think a lot of them were actually the opposite.
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People who were scared, who wanted to understand the vicious monster who was there.
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But in fact, merely possessing the video is a crime punishable by 10 years in prison in
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And they're actually prosecuting people for this, by the way.
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Like I say, literally, millions of people want the news.
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It's just a fact that an Islamic terrorist threatened the prime minister of New Zealand,
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It might be upsetting news, but why force them to delete it?
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And why was Twitter doing a government's errands for them, censorship errands?
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Here's a warning from New Zealand's police on Twitter.
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Here's a copy of another email also obtained by Nick Monroe from the New Zealand police
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to an internet company demanding to know the names of anyone who downloaded a copy of
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So is this to block an obscene video or to block all information?
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Now, before I go any further, let me state the obvious.
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I don't do this for any normal people who are watching, but rather for bad faith critics.
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Obviously, I disagree with and condemn this mass murderer who did his murders in the name
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I say that because to the left and to liberals and to the self-appointed censors of the media,
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It was a moment to weaponize the 50 dead bodies and fire them at conservatives.
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Andrew Scheer, the conservative leader in Canada, put out a tweet of condolences and sympathy and
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He later put out a longer statement that mentioned Muslims and mosques.
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But the fact that Scheer did not do so immediately, that he did not name check Muslims and mosques,
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was evidence to much of the Canadian media that Andrew Scheer himself was an Islamophobe who
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That's the argument made by half a dozen Canadian media, including Andrew Coyne of the once sane
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I should point out that Andrew Scheer's language in his first tweet was remarkably similar to
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that of our governor general and to that of the queen herself.
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It was an opportunity to name and shame and blame Andrew Scheer for a mass murder on the
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other side of the world, the murderer who has surely never heard of Andrew Scheer.
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By the way, in Turkey, where the murderer had traveled to, and the murderer also traveled
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to Pakistan and other places, by the way, in Turkey, their Islamist president, Recep Erdogan,
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has been using the footage of the shooting at political rallies to demonize his opponents.
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I guess he's not worried about New Zealand arresting him.
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I know why some Muslim women wear a hijab, but she's not Muslim.
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Here's a non-Muslim policewoman in New Zealand wearing a hijab.
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And even if it were, are they saying they're Muslim?
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But again, that's the weaponization of this issue by the identity politics left.
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If you're not wearing one, you obviously are a racist.
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By the way, that's exactly what the murderer set out to do.
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I say again, he is a murderer and a terrorist, and we ought to take whatever he says with
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If someone is willing to murder, they may well be willing to lie, especially a lie that
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But let me read part of it, because it's relevant.
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I chose firearms for the effect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage
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they would provide, and the effect it would have on the politics of the United States,
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and thereby the political situation of the world.
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The U.S. is torn into many factions by its Second Amendment, along state, social, cultural,
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With enough pressure, the left wing within the United States will seek to abolish the
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Second Amendment, and the right wing within the United States will see this as an attack
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This attempted abolishment of rights by the left will result in a dramatic polarization of
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the people in the United States, and eventually a fracturing of the U.S. along cultural and racial
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But whether or not he meant that, that's exactly what has happened.
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In fact, it's like his manifesto was taken as an instruction manual by the left, in addition
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We have instant massive disarmament of the people.
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New Zealand has just decided to ban all the guns used in the shooting.
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And if you don't hand them in, you will be arrested, and get almost as much time as if you have
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If that mosque had had an armed guard or an armed congregant, as some U.S. churches do,
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The murderer here probably wouldn't obey a gun control law, given that the murderer
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here wasn't obeying the don't murder people law.
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This isn't about stopping the next terrorist attack.
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You saw the terrorist himself boasted about different ways he could have killed.
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But do you think that he would look at a new law against a particular kind of firearm and
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say, oh, well, then I'll give up my murderous plans?
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He says he likes Trump in some ways and hates Trump in other ways.
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So like I say, there's something here for everyone.
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He says his intellectual inspiration is Candace Owens.
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Surely he must be just saying that, knowing that the left-wing media in the world would
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Again, the media were only too happy to comply and take advantage of the crisis.
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Here is news that Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor, best-selling self-help author, a
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friend of our show, his book is now being banned in New Zealand.
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Maybe you've heard of the website called Zero Hedge.
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In fact, I don't even understand everything in it.
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And do you know that kind of opportunistic authoritarianism is coming here to Canada, too?
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Canada is going to consider all the tools that we have at our disposal to deal with this effectively.
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When the executives of the social media companies come to the ministerial meetings and present their cases,
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they usually come with lots of examples about how quickly they moved on this and how quickly they moved on that
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and how their technology allows them to respond within seconds and so forth, and that they're doing their best.
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Well, I think the public is beginning to lose some patience with we're doing our best argument.
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And I think we need to examine all of the tools.
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Oh, so we have a massive right-wing terror threat here in Canada, do we?
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You know, Trudeau just gave $10.5 million to Omar Khadr, an al-Qaeda terrorist.
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Trudeau says we have to welcome back any ISIS terrorist who wants to come here because,
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and he really said this, they have an important voice we need to listen to.
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Trudeau has stopped stripping ISIS terrorists of their Canadian citizenship.
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And Ralph Goodale and Justin Trudeau are going to pressure the Internet companies to do his bidding here, too.
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And if they can ban Zero Heads, just a huge website, well, surely they can ban, oh, I don't know, the rebel.
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Well, you're some sort of Islamophobic terrorist?
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The New Zealand killer was a terrorist and a murderer.
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His manifesto was a mishmash of half-baked ideas.
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It was designed, I do believe, to cause mayhem and madness.
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But it is not a license for the Ralph Goodales of the world and the Andrew Coines of the world to silence us on genuine subjects.
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It is not bigoted to question the religion of Islam itself any more than it is bigoted to question the doctrine and philosophy called Christianity.
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More than 90% of Canadians, in fact, do oppose it.
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The reason we've had the media surge is indeed because a mass murderer of 50 people in New Zealand is truly news.
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There is no link to genuine debates here about multiculturalism or immigration or the separation of mosque and state.
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It's the Jacinda Ardern's and the Ralph Goodales and the Andrew Coines who are using those dead bodies for their own political purposes.
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And I note their silence in the face of other similar mass murders in recent days, at least when it's Christians being murdered by Muslims, whether it's in Nigeria or the Philippines.
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It gives them cause to do things they've always wanted to do, like banning guns or banning books or banning websites.
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That's not a solution to terrorism, by the way.
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It won't make a single person safer, but it will help the global left continue their mission.
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We'll talk about a mass kidnapping in Italy that I'm sure you haven't heard of because it doesn't fit the New Zealand narrative.
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Well, some massacres or attempted massacres receive enormous coverage, and I think they should.
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I think the mass shooting in New Zealand is a story that should be reported on widely.
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It's very interesting and disturbing, and it's a horrific crime and a tragedy, too.
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But others seem to get little or no media coverage, and I wonder if there's some sort of pattern.
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Look at this story that was highlighted by the son of the U.S. president, Donald Trump Jr.
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I'm not at all surprised it's getting little to no coverage.
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It doesn't fit the media narrative that everyone trying to come here is Mother Teresa and everyone who wants security and vetting is racist.
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And he retweeted a video, and I'll quote the video caption, video footage of the attack,
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where the Senegalese man attempted to set a bus full of kidnapped children on fire.
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Video is not graphic, but you can hear the screams.
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I'm surprised that such a brazen hijacking in Italy is not getting wall-to-wall coverage.
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Well, let's take a moment to look at that film, and that tweet is correct.
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It is not graphic, but it is terrifying nonetheless.
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51 children and their chaperones, who had been held hostage on a bus for 40 minutes, ran free, screaming.
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Joining us now via Skype from Milan, Italy, is our friend Alessandra Bocchi,
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from whom I first noticed this news, because funny enough, it wasn't on CNN or in the New York Times.
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Alessandra, great to have you on the show again. Thanks for being here.
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What city was this in, in Italy, and has it received prominent news coverage in Italy itself?
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So this happened in Milan, in northern Italy, and it was a school bus that was supposed to go to the gym after school.
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And the driver changed the direction of the bus and threatened the kids.
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He covered the floor with petrol to then set it on fire.
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And he said explicitly, I'm doing this to end the deaths in the Mediterranean.
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He had criminal precedents for sexual offences and for driving under the influence.
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So it's unclear how he managed to even be a bus driver for school children in the first place.
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And how the media has covered, or rather not covered, this story is pretty crazy.
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I mean, it shows the double standards that there are.
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If you look at the New Zealand shooting, where about 50 people were killed, if I'm not mistaken.
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In this case, it was 51 children who risked being burned alive.
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I mean, they were saved last minute by a young boy who was able to take his handcuffs off and hurt himself while doing so.
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And he managed to call the police with a phone that had accidentally fallen on the ground.
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And the guy threatened to, he actually, he used a lighter to set the bus on fire.
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We have a short clip of that young boy, the hero.
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I know you've watched this clip because I got this clip from your Twitter feed.
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Let's just show that boy for a second, and then we'll turn the volume down in Italian, and maybe you can explain to us what he said.
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Okay, we'll take that volume down because most of our viewers don't speak Italian.
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But Alessandra, can you tell us what that young boy said?
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His face was obscured because, of course, he's a minor child.
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This man threatened us, and he tied us to the floor and covered the floor in petrol.
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Now, this is terrifying, but it's also puzzling to me.
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He was twice convicted of drunk driving, and yet he's a school bus driver.
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He was convicted of sexually molesting a minor, and yet he's a school bus driver.
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But also, which is very odd to me, is he's obviously been in Italy for quite a while if he received Italian citizenship in 2004.
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So he didn't just come over on these migrant-packed ships in the last few years.
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He's been in Italy for 15 years, but he obviously regards Italy as hostile, as a hateful place that he wanted to hurt in the most brutal way he could imagine,
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What do you make of that, the fact that 15 years in the country, and he was a terrorist still.
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Yeah, well, it clearly shows that there's a problem with integration with some people.
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And also, I'd like to add that the way that the story was covered, the fact that he was in the international media,
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actually in the Italian media, even the most left-wing media mentioned the fact that he was of Senegalese origin in the headline,
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or at least the first paragraph, whereas the English-speaking media, so the Guardian, BBC, and so on,
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didn't mention it until the third or fourth paragraph.
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It was crazy, and in the headline, they didn't even say where this happened.
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So there's this weird wanting to omit these facts, which are central to the story.
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The fact that he's Senegalese, of Senegalese origin, is inherently, is inherent to his motive,
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which was to stop the death in the Mediterranean of his compatriots.
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The prosecutors also found that on his phone, he sent videos to Senegalese friends that he had who were living in Senegal,
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telling them, Africa writes off, you should stop coming over here,
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and instead we should punish Europe for its politics towards migrants.
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So it's obviously, if this was just a random crime, you don't need to mention the ethnicity, because he's a citizen.
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But if his country of origin is the motive behind the attack, a terrorist attack,
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Yeah. Now, he was complaining about the deaths of Senegalese and other Africans,
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But in fact, under Matteo Salvini, the new interior ministry of Italy,
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since he has blocked these human traffickers, that's really what they are.
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They can call themselves well-meaning people, but they're human traffickers,
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and they do it for profit. Either they're being paid by human traffickers,
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or they're being paid by, you know, leftist international groups.
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They're being paid one way or the other. They're not doing it for free.
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Since Matteo Salvini closed the ports in Italy,
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the number of deaths in the Mediterranean has fallen,
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In many ways, Salvini has saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of these Africans.
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Yes, exactly. In addition to that, the lie that has been propelled and propagated in the media
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for the past year, that this populist government is responsible for deaths at sea,
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I actually linked on my Twitter an interview by the BBC to the interior minister, Matteo Salvini,
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and you have blood on your hands, which, by the way, isn't even a question.
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Like, it's not his place as a journalist to make that accusation.
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But this lie that, you know, this government is responsible for more deaths at sea,
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you will find that actually deaths at sea have more than halved.
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And so, actually, under this government, the fact that it's closed the Italian ports
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has made less people take that dangerous journey,
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and the NGOs have almost completely stopped working, except for a last one,
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and this was the reason behind this attack, actually,
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that one Italian NGO wasn't allowed to disembark the migrants in Italy,
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and Salvini sued the boat for threatening public safety and human trafficking.
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So, this was the reason behind the attack, but nobody died on that boat.
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but obviously he was listening and reading the mainstream media,
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and, you know, many others also have this anger, thanks to this lie.
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That's what our friend Joel Pollack suggested yesterday.
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I asked him what he thought about the New Zealand killer,
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saying, oh, I admire Candace Owens, the black Republican,
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I thought that, obviously, a white supremacist murderer
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doesn't admire Candace Owens, a young black woman.
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I thought that he's just pushing buttons in the media.
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But Joel Pollack said, well, maybe he believes the media,
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because the media portrays Candace Owens, a young black woman, as a Nazi.
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And that makes me follow up to your answer there, Alessandra.
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Maybe migrants and other Italians and other people
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are believing that Matteo Salvini is a fascist murderer,
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and maybe people like you and I can see through it.
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But if you keep propagating these lies about Salvini,
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about the opposition to these human traffickers,
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maybe one in a thousand or even one in a million people
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and will do something insane like this terrorist attack.
00:28:32.180
How much blame should we give to the propaganda media
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Because, actually, you mentioned the New Zealand attack.
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In the manifesto, the terrorist mentioned the birth rates,
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the declining birth rates, many times as reason for his resentment.
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The fact that this government is responsible for more deaths,
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And so they've stoked up this division and hatred
00:29:17.160
that they claim that they're against and trying, you know, to fight
00:29:24.540
It's just on the other side, so they don't care.
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You're being very generous with your time, Alessandra.
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I won't keep you long, but I do have two more quick questions for you.
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Just because I have you and I find Italy so very interesting
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and you're a window into Italy for our viewers.
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And what I mean by that is Hungary was one of the first countries to say,
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Stop to the EU bullying, less wealthy countries than Germany.
00:30:02.660
Is Italy becoming that dissident state that stands up to the EU?
00:30:18.140
because it's a more powerful country in the European Union
00:30:22.100
So there's no more backlash anymore for closing the ports, for example,
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At the beginning, the European Commission and senior members of the EU
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or representatives who were pro-EU were very hostile towards this policy,
00:30:42.480
So I think Italy has the potential of achieving much more
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and changing really the course of politics in Europe.
00:30:55.280
In the United Kingdom, which more than two years ago voted for a Brexit to leave the EU,
00:31:01.720
Theresa May, the so-called Conservative leader,
00:31:04.820
she's Conservative in name, but she certainly has, in my view,
00:31:07.700
been doing her best to resist actually leaving.
00:31:13.360
because, of course, the UK is supposed to leave in just over a week.
00:31:18.900
But I see various UKIP or Brexit, pro-Brexit politicians in the United Kingdom
00:31:29.840
you can stop this because if a single EU country
00:31:35.020
vetoes the extension of the UK's participation in the EU, it's off.
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The UK has served notice to the EU that it's leaving on March 29th.
00:31:53.000
no, no, no, we're sticking with the March 29th exit as per Article 50.
00:31:58.460
And I know that some of these Brexiteers have asked Matteo Salvini
00:32:06.820
I know that's a very long and complicated question,
00:32:08.540
but do you think there's a chance that Italy could help get the UK out?
00:32:17.740
I've not heard that Salvini or Di Maio have any intention of that sort.
00:32:23.440
Actually, Giuseppe Conte, who's the prime minister,
00:32:26.140
said that he would like an extended period for Brexit
00:32:43.100
I rely on your Twitter feed to tell me things about Italy
00:32:53.780
In fact, I would know certain things that were not true.
00:33:23.160
Did you feel personally guilty for what happened in New Zealand?
00:33:32.360
he and his kind think that you must be a hater.
00:33:35.840
If you have any criticism of mass open borders migration,
00:33:43.160
And I think that that is going to be the campaign tactic we see in Canada
00:33:46.820
for Justin Trudeau and Ralph Goodell in their re-election.
00:34:00.240
Oh, and if you keep talking about subjects he doesn't like,
00:34:08.620
That, plus an extra dollop of Internet censorship,
00:34:14.340
Well, folks, that's our show for today and for the week.
00:34:17.220
Until Monday, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,