No name of knife attacker killed by police has been officially released, despite senior officers saying the killer was known to the New South Wales force
Update: the attacker has finally been identified as Joel Cauchi, a 40yo Queensland man. Hartley Brewer and Kern seem to have deleted their tweets but only Hartley-Brewer has bothered to issue a correction at the time of this update. None has apologised and Riley has added a follow-up tweet in which she still attacks Palestinians supporters, saying ‘no, the man being named Joel Cauchi has not changed my opinion that is is wrong for people on the streets to be calling for mass terror attacks across the world’. Opponents of genocide are not, of course, doing this.
Pro-Israel apologists who tried to exploit today’s mass-casualty knife attack in Sydney, Australia, by claiming it was committed by ‘Islamists’ or ‘Jihadists’ and linking it to protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza look to have been humiliated after early, though still unconfirmed, reports indicated the killer was a pro-Israel fanatic named Benjamin Cohen.
Five of the six killed were women, including a young mother stabbed while trying to protect her baby. Children are reportedly among those wounded.
Right-wingers including TV ‘personalities’ Rachel Riley and Julia Hartley-Brewer were quick to put out social media posts blaming Muslims and supporters of Palestinian human rights:
And the rabid Lee Kern, unsurprisingly, spewed a string of tweets blaming ‘Muslim terrorists’ and ‘fundamentalists’:
The idea that another kind of fundamentalist may well be responsible for the murder of six innocent people and the wounding of five more does not seem to have perturbed their world view – at the time of writing, none of the trio have deleted their posts.
The name of the murderer, despite him being shot dead by an unnamed police officer – and comments from senior New South Wales police officers that the killer ‘was known to the police’ and no terrorist motive is suspected – has not been released, leading some to voice suspicions that this would never be the case if the killer was a Muslim. Only time will tell whether the early reports are correct.
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