From Portland to Penrith

Portland, Oregon, Friday:

Suspect in Portland double murder posted white supremacist material online, Jason Wilson, May 28, 2017:

Police in Portland, Oregon, have charged a white supremacist with a double murder and hate crimes, after he allegedly cut the throats of two passengers and stabbed another on a commuter train late on Friday afternoon.

According to police, while riding the MAX train in suburban north-east Portland, Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35, began “yelling various remarks that would best be characterized as hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions.”

When fellow passengers attempted to intervene, Christian stabbed three of them. One man, 53-year-old Ricky John Best of Happy Valley, Oregon, died at the scene. Another, 23-year-old Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche of south-east Portland, was pronounced dead at a local hospital. A third, 21 year old Micah Fletcher, was treated for injuries that police said “are not expected to be life-threatening”.

A Pattern of Enabling Racist Violence, Rose City Antifa, May 27, 2017:

On Friday May 26th, a man on Portland public transit was reported to have yelled Islamophobic hate speech at two women, one in a hijab. He was confronted by other passengers, and now two of these people are dead, and another is in the hospital. White supremacist Jeremy Christian was arrested for the attack. Christian is well-known to anti-fascist activists in Portland, because he was recently seen at one of Joey Gibson’s free speech rallies.

Joey Gibson, a video blogger from Vancouver, WA, has already taken to Facebook to plead that people not “politicize” these deaths, well aware of how Portland is already long tired of his endless circus. The deaths are tragic, but the crime was always political. The attack occurred on the day before Ramadan. The islamophobic slurs that witnesses reported Christian yelled before the attack are no different than those used by Joey Gibson’s friends, the homophobic and xenophobic street preachers, seen around Portland screaming at immigrants and others. This is the rhetoric that Gibson defends under the banner of free speech. Jeremy Christian posted often and at length with threats of violence against anti-fascist activists. The victims of this crime were killed because they were standing up to hate speech. These are identical to threats that Gibson’s group and other associated far-right groups have made against those same activists.

See also : Portland deaths: Son who died trying to stop Muslim abuse ‘a hero’, BBC, May 28, 2017 | Tri Met Heroes GoFundMe fundraising campaign for the families of the deceased and injured.

Penrith, NSW, Sunday:

Anti-Islamic protest takes place in Penrith, Troy Dodds, the western weekender, May 28, 2017.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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