Peace for the World

Peace for the World
First democratic leader of Justice the Godfather of the Sri Lankan Tamil Struggle: Honourable Samuel James Veluppillai Chelvanayakam

Monday, March 18, 2019

Palestinians seek to join US lawsuit against Airbnb, say settlement listings are war crime

Airbnb said late last year that it would delist rental properties in Israeli settlements, prompting a lawsuit by settlers
A view of the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in November 2018 (AFP/File photo)

By MEE and agencies-18 March 2019
A group of Palestinians has filed a request to intervene in a lawsuit between Israeli settlers and Airbnb Inc., alleging that several Israeli settlement listings on the US-based company's website are on lands that actually belong to them.
A Palestinian-American and two Palestinian villages located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are named in the counterclaim, filed on Monday in US Federal Court in cooperation with the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). 
In November, a group of Israeli settlers, all dual US citizens, filed a federal lawsuit in the United States accusing Airbnb of religious discrimination after the company said it would remove around 200 homes in Israeli settlements from its website.
On Monday, the Palestinian claimants accused the Israeli settlers suing Airbnb of participating in war crimes by aiding in Israel's annexation of Palestinian land.
"Their actions constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and discrimination on the basis of religion and national origin", they argued, according to a CCR press release announcing the Palestinian counterclaim.
Both Airbnb and the Israeli settlers will have a chance to approve or oppose the Palestinian group's request to intervene, then the judge will rule on whether they can join the lawsuit.
If approved, the Palestinian group will become "interven0r-defendants" in the case along with Airbnb, the original defendant. They will also be designated as "counterclaim plaintiffs" against the settlers and be allowed to air additional grievances separate from the Airbnb case.
Astha Sharma Pokharel, a legal fellow at CCR, told Middle East Eye that the Palestinians behind the lawsuit are trying to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians everywhere. 
"What our clients are attempting to do is shed light on this false narrative of discrimination and to bring the Palestinian experience and Palestinian voice into the picture," she said.
"The Israeli settlers who sued Airbnb have unlawfully appropriated and occupied these listings."

'Unjust enrichment'

In their lawsuit, the Palestinian claimants also accused the Israeli settlers of trespassing and "unjust enrichment" through their use of Airbnb. 
In addition, another Palestinian-American, who resides in the West Bank, filed a counterclaim against the settlers for discrimination.
Citing the settler's own court filing, CCR noted that several of the settlers who sued Airbnb helped establish the Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank where the rental properties are located.
One of CCR's clients, Ziad Alwan, a Palestinian resident of Chicago, told the group that he has the document proving that one plot of land in question is registered in his father's name, even though a settler runs a bed & breakfast on the property.
"Anyone looking at the facts can tell that we are the rightful owners of this land, no matter how the settlers try to spin it," Alwan said in the CCR statement.
"I am filing this lawsuit in my father's memory, and for my own children, whom I've taught to never forget that this land is rightfully theirs," he continued.
CCR Staff Attorney Diala Shamas also accused the settlers who filed the original lawsuit of "cynically using the language of discrimination in order to further their own unlawful ends".
"Our clients' experiences - Palestinians who are directly affected by these settlers' actions - show where the real discrimination and illegality lies. This case puts the settlers on trial in a US court," Shamas said.
CCR lawyers argue that not only has Airbnb not discriminated against the settlers involved in the lawsuit, but that had Airbnb not de-listed the rentals, "the company would be contributing to international law violations".

Airbnb listings still up

Airbnb announced it would remove the 200 occupied West Bank listings in November, but Middle East Eye confirmed that those listing are, at the time of publication on Monday, still listed on the company's website.
While Airbnb's decision was welcomed by Palestinians and their supporters, it was immediately denounced by defenders of Israel.
Earlier this year, Gilad Erdan, Israel's minister of public security and strategic affairs, said the move would be viewed as an act of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
At the time, Erdan warned that supporting BDS "now comes with a price" - and encouraged Israeli settlers impacted by the decision to file lawsuits against the company.
Amnesty accuses online travel sites of profiting from Israel's occupation
Read More »
But human rights groups encouraged other companies of following Airbnb's lead, welcoming the decision to de-list the settlement properties.
For years, Palestinian activists and their supporters have urged Airbnb and other companies to stop doing business in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
On 30 January, Amnesty International called on Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor to stop profiting off "war crimes" by removing home- and hotel-rental listings in Israeli settlements from their websites.
"In doing business with settlements, all four companies are contributing to, and profiting from, the maintenance, development and expansion of illegal settlements, which amount to war crimes under international criminal law," Amnesty said in its Destination: Occupation report.
About three million Palestinians currently live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, while around 600,000 Israelis live there in illegal Jewish-only settlements.
Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 war. It later unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in a move never recognised by the international community.
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A cesspit of injustice with a hardliner leading it

Israelis walking past a campaign poster showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) and other party leaders contesting next month’s elections. AFP 

 15 March 2019 
For more than 100 years, South Africa’s non-whites had been subjected to inhuman laws known as the Pass Laws. Their beginning was in the mid-18th century. The natives were treated as slaves and required to carry in their person a metal badge to enter mines and work areas. Later, other pass laws were introduced to control the entry of non-whites into white areas. 
As the winds of freedom blew across Asia and Africa, from the late 1940s through the 1950s and the 60s, South Africa’s downtrodden natives intensified their struggle for freedom.  On March 21, 1960, in the township of Sharpeville, the Pan Africanist Congress, which had broken away from the African National Congress, organised a peaceful protest against the pass laws. But it ended up in a tragedy, with the Police killing 69 protesters. The incident known as the Sharpeville massacre led to the 1979 United Nations General Assembly resolution that calls for solidarity with the peoples struggling against racism and racial discrimination. Since then, on March 21, member states have been marking this day as an International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The resolution emphasises that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and have the potential to contribute constructively to the development and well-being of their societies.
As the world next Thursday observes this important day, the UN has declared this year’s theme as “mitigating and countering rising nationalist populism and extreme supremacist ideologies.”

No country can call itself a democracy if it practices racial discrimination based on a supremacist ideology. Sadly, racial discrimination still exists today. But sadder still, it exists as a state policy in Israel.  The saddest part of it all is when such state policy is condoned by the United States, supposedly the world’s most vibrant democracy.   Israel is the only country that still has laws such as South Africa’s apartheid era pass laws. Israel has at least 65 such laws to discriminate against its 1.8 million Arab people, who form 20 percent of the population. These laws uphold the abhorrent Jewish supremacist ideology and have reduced the Arabs and the Druze to second class citizens. As the world observed the UN Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, it must be said that such discriminatory practices have no place in any civilised country worth its name. 
It was only days ago that Israel’s hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an Instagram message, declared that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed [in July 2018], Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people – and not anyone else.”
The Nation-State Law is so atrocious that it says the right to exercise national self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people.” It establishes Hebrew as Israel’s official language, and downgrades Arabic. It legitimises illegal Jewish settlements as a “national value” and mandates that the state will labour to promote its establishment and development.
Needless to say, the law has added to the humiliation Israel’s non-Jewish citizens suffer. 

Writing to Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Wednesday, activist Amjad Iraqi says, “As a non-Jew in Israel, I cannot buy property in the vast majority of the country, and I can be barred by an admissions committee from living in a small, community town if I am not deemed ‘socially or culturally suitable’. I am unable to study Palestinian history at a state school because it is not taught, and I could put a theatre at risk of losing state funding if I promote a play describing Israel’s independence as a Nakba, or catastrophe, for the Palestinian people. If I wished to marry a Palestinian from the occupied territories, I could not bestow residency or citizenship on her so she could live with me and raise a family inside Israel; any Jew in the world, however, can fly into Ben Gurion airport and become a citizen.”
Then there are laws that restrict the Arabs from building extensions to their houses. Council permissions are rarely given to Arabs. If any went ahead with extensions, the entire house is demolished. Then there are the controversial land laws, especially the Acquisition for Public Purposes (Amendment of Provisions) Law and the Emergency Regulations (Security Zone) Law. Under these laws, the state can acquire any land for public or security purposes with or without compensation. Often the law is invoked to take Palestinian lands to build Jewish settlements -- and the victimised Palestinians often reject the compensation as a mark of protest. 

Since Israel was set up in 1948, US administrations have adopted a policy of supporting the Zionist state even if it practises discriminatory laws.  Thus it is no wonder when the Donald Trump administration feigns deafness to Netanyahu’s repugnant statement. Moreover, Trump counts on the Israeli lobby’s support for his reelection and also to rescue him from a calamity he may face in the Robert Mueller investigations into alleged collusion with Russia. 
Even Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council was taken in the interest of Israel. Making the withdrawal announcement Nikki Haley, the then US envoy to the UN, said:  “The UNHRC was a cesspool of political bias that targets Israel in particular.” 
The submissive and sycophantic US stance towards Israel was recently highlighted in the controversy over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s comments on the Israeli lobby.  Omar, a Somali refugee who, along with Rashida Tlaib of Palestinian origin, became America’s first Muslims Congresswomen in January, is being accused of anti-Semitism for questioning US politician’s loyalty to Israel.  In a tweet, she said: American political leaders’ support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.”  
Omar was forced to apologise, as her tweet stirred a political storm, with Trump calling for her resignation. Her own Democratic Party pondered tough action against her.  Thanks to a few powerful progressive friends in the party, Omar survived a political catastrophe so early in her career. She herself came under racial attacks, with some even associating her with 9/11 terrorists.  

The Ilhan Omar issue raises once again the question whether criticizing Israeli government construes anti-Semitism. French President Emmanuel Macron says ‘yes’; no, says Britain’s socialist leaning Labour Party Leader James Corbyn.
Although the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) says it is perfectly alright to criticise Israel, Macron’s bid to equate anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism is seen as a bid to stifle criticism of Israel’s excesses against its Arab citizens and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. In Britain, Corbyn courted the Israeli lobby’s resentment, for refusing to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. 

The stance taken by leaders like Trump and Macron will only encourage Israel to perpetrate racial discrimination, especially at a time when Israeli socialists are in disarray.  The Labour Party which promoted peace with Palestinians -- is almost a spent force.  Next month’s general elections are largely a contest between hardliners.  With hardliners holding sway, no wonder, Netanyahu has been in office since 2009 and implementing apartheid laws. Despite the Attorney General deciding to charge him with corruption or fraud, some hardliners say Netanyahu is likely to win a fifth term because of these charges and not despite them.  The hardliners are now describing him as a new Moses. In Israel, it appears that racism is the first refuge of the scoundrels. 
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Exclusive: Dalai Lama contemplates Chinese gambit after his death



DHARAMSHALA, India (Reuters) - The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, said on Monday it was possible that once he dies his incarnation could be found in India, where he has lived in exile for 60 years, and warned that any other successor named by China would not be respected.

Krishna N. Das, Sunil Kataria-MARCH 18, 2019

Sat in an office next to a temple ringed by green hills and snow-capped mountains, the 14th Dalai Lama spoke to Reuters a day after Tibetans in the northern Indian town of Dharamshala marked the anniversary of his escape from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, disguised as a soldier.

He fled to India in early 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, and has since worked to draw global support for linguistic and cultural autonomy in his remote and mountainous homeland.

China, which took control of Tibet in 1950, brands the 83-year-old Nobel peace laureate a dangerous separatist.

Pondering what might happen after his death, the Dalai Lama anticipated some attempt by Beijing to foist a successor on Tibetan Buddhists.

“China considers Dalai Lama’s reincarnation as something very important. They have more concern about the next Dalai Lama than me,” said the Dalai Lama, swathed in his traditional red robes and yellow scarf.

“In future, in case you see two Dalai Lamas come, one from here, in free country, one chosen by Chinese, then nobody will trust, nobody will respect (the one chosen by China). So that’s an additional problem for the Chinese! It’s possible, it can happen,” he added, laughing.

China has said its leaders have the right to approve the Dalai Lama’s successor, as a legacy inherited from China’s emperors.

But many Tibetans - whose tradition holds that the soul of a senior Buddhist monk is reincarnated in the body of a child on his death - suspect any Chinese role as a ploy to exert influence on the community.

Born in 1935, the current Dalai Lama was identified as the reincarnation of his predecessor when he was two years old.

Many of China’s more than 6 million Tibetans still venerate the Dalai Lama despite government prohibitions on displays of his picture or any public display of devotion.

UP FOR DISCUSSION

The Dalai Lama said contact between Tibetans living in their homeland and in exile was increasing, but that no formal meetings have happened between Chinese and his officials since 2010.

Informally, however, some retired Chinese officials and businessman with connections to Beijing do visit him from time to time, he added.

He said the role of the Dalai Lama after his death, including whether to keep it, could be discussed during a meeting of Tibetan Buddhists in India later this year.

He, however, added that though there was no reincarnation of Buddha, his teachings have remained.




 The Dalai Lama speaks during a press conference in Londonderry, Northern Ireland September 11, 2017. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/Files

“If the majority of (Tibetan people) really want to keep this institution, then this institution will remain,” he said. “Then comes the question of the reincarnation of the 15th Dalai Lama.”

If there is one, he would still have “no political responsibility”, said the Dalai Lama, who gave up his political duties in 2001, developing a democratic system for the up to 100,000 Tibetans living in India.

SEMINAR IN CHINA?

During the interview, the Dalai Lama spoke passionately about his love for cosmology, neurobiology, quantum physics and psychology.

If he was ever allowed to visit his homeland, he said he’d like to speak about those subjects in a Chinese university.

But he wasn’t expecting to go while China remained under Communist rule.

“China - great nation, ancient nation - but its political system is totalitarian system, no freedom. So therefore I prefer to remain here, in this country.”

The Dalai Lama was born to a family of farmers in Taktser, a village on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, in China’s Qinghai province.

During a recent Reuters visit to Taktser, police armed with automatic weapons blocked the road. Police and more than a dozen plain-clothed officials said the village was not open to non-locals.

“Our strength, our power is based on truth. Chinese power based on gun,” the Dalai Lama said. “So for short term, gun is much more decisive, but long term truth is more powerful.”

Reporting by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
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Constitutional crisis as Speaker tells MPs he could block third Brexit vote

-18 Mar 2019Political Editor
Theresa May’s attempt to get parliament to agree to her Brexit deal suffered another major setback today, after the Commons Speaker said he might stop the government from calling another meaningful vote.
John Bercow told MPs he would not allow Theresa May to ask the Commons to vote a third time if the motion hadn’t changed.
The announcement took the government by surprise and means it’s increasingly likely that Theresa May will ask this week’s European summit for a long extension to Britain’s exit date.
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Watch the film Labour MPs didn’t want you to see

WitchHunt (60 mins, 2019) from WitchHuntTheFilm on Vimeo.

Asa Winstanley -17 March 2019
The official online debut of the new film WitchHunt has arrived, and you can watch the entire thing in the video above.
The film has faced severe censorship, including a bomb threat which successfully canceled one preview.
It tells a story about Israel’s alliance with the global far-right that Israel’s supporters would rather you not hear.
Acclaimed British directors Mike Leigh and Peter Kosminsky have praised WitchHunt.
Leigh said it “exposes with chilling accuracy the terrifying threat that now confronts democracy.”
Kosminsky said it “packs a powerful punch” and is “telling a story we just aren’t hearing at the moment.”
Last month, left-wing member of Parliament Chris Williamson was suspended as a Labour Party member – after a long campaign by Israel lobby groups against him.
Williamson had booked a room in Parliament on behalf of the group Jewish Voice for Labour so that WitchHunt could be screened.
But it was canceled after the Labour leadership came under severe pressure by right-wing and pro-Israel Labour MPs.
Unless Williamson’s Labour suspension is reversed before the next election, the move will make it hard for him to return as an MP.

Manufactured outrage

A source in Parliament told The Electronic Intifada that the ringleader of much of the outrage against Williamson was Ruth Smeeth.
Smeeth is a former professional Israel lobbyist who, since becoming an MP, has continued to receive donations from prominent Israel lobby funders.
A few days before his suspension Smeeth announced to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party that a room had been booked to show the film.
This caused the sound of “250 voices doing a sharp intake of breath,” according to our source.
Smeeth told the gathered MPs that she didn’t know who’d booked the room, but threatened that, “I can assure you that I will find out.”
According to our source in Parliament, Smeeth’s announcement to the Parliamentary Labour Party resulted in howls of outrage, including “Shame!”, “Disgraceful!” and, sarcastically, “Well done Chris!”
None of these MPs had even seen the film, as it had not been released at the time.
Their “outrage” was down to the central role in the film played by Jackie Walker.

Far-right alliance

Walker is a Black and Jewish anti-racist activist.
Her opposition to Zionism, Israel’s state-sanctioned ideology, plays a key role in the film, as does her likely expulsion by Labour later this month.
But WitchHunt takes a far wider view than Walker’s case alone.
It puts the entire, years-long, manufactured “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” campaign into its correct global context.
As the film’s narrator argues in its conclusion, the fact that far-right European governments and parties todayare growing ever closer to Israel shows a “convergence of fascist and neo-Nazi groups with hardline Zionists.”
As a worrying UK example of this, the film cites anti-Muslim fascist leader Tommy Robinson’s recent trip to Israel and funding by anti-Palestinian groups.
“This natural alliance may now be part of a more coordinated common cause” of the far-right and Zionism around the world, the film’s narrator argues.
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Military Public Diplomacy


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by Dr Sarala Fernando-March 16, 2019, 7:14 pm 

At this time when the Human Rights Council in Geneva is focusing on the implementation of res.30/1 and politicians are stirring up a huge controversy at home over transitional justice issues, how can we find a sustainable approach to the dilemma? On the one hand, the majority public gratitude towards our war heroes who brought the armed conflict to an end at considerable self sacrifice and on the other hand individual cries for justice over missing family members who need to be heard. At home, we are on the right path, using local expertise to strengthen the human rights protection system, to set up special institutions like the Missing Persons office and the Reparations office which is in the offing. However the military will also have to build its internal capacity to arrest and try their own offenders according to internationally accepted military standards. The adverse publicity over one individual’s behaviour (viz the Defence Attache in London) has shown how new complications have been created for outgoing Defence personnel who must now be advised how to handle the renewed public scrutiny when representing the country abroad.

This article argues that pieces of information now scattered must be better organized with regard to the humanitarian activities of the military in the post-war period which are breaking new ground and represent an example of public diplomacy where they are creating new partnerships. A decade has passed since the armed conflict was brought to an end by military means and yet we know little about military humanitarian activities during the post-war era. I do not refer to the natural disaster related events spurred by climate change such as the increasingly severe droughts, floods and earth slips, in which the role of the military has become indispensable and is well recognized by the people . I refer instead to the post-conflict humanitarian activities, sometimes called "hearts and minds", carried out by the military, which historically have taken two different routes. The initial infrastructure-building activities soon after the conflict ended like rebuilding roads, bridges, houses under government direction have received most publicity. Less is known about the subsequent military humanitarian activities involving people to people relationships which have gone quite far in the recent years.

Take for example how Northern politicians are always clamouring for the release of lands held by the Army in the North, but few give credit to the Army for its role in de-mining these areas where the LTTE had scattered explosives indiscriminately. Although several NGOs are also receiving considerable foreign assistance for this purpose, over 80% of the work has been undertaken by the Army. The returning people however are well aware of this work and appreciate what the Army has accomplished. In the larger picture, this important work of the Army has enabled Sri Lanka to join the Ottawa Convention and target making the country mine-free by 2020, a huge boost internationally. Facts and figures were laid out recently by a Tamil Secretary to the relevant Ministry, noting that initially the suspected hazardous area stretched over 1,302 sq km in the North and East and some 1,277 sq.km had been released for safe settlement enabling the resettlement of some 258,000 families.

Most recently, the Army is moving out of most of the farms it had set up in the North. However the picture provided from interviews with the local people is that they regret this move, as it seems the army has provided a steady source of income and security, enabling the building of strong personal relationships. Army engineers have constructed or repaired hundreds of houses, roads and schools on their own initiatives. Some time ago there was a TV clip of a military commander transferred to another location surrounded by weeping villagers, young and old, men and women, who were evidently appreciative of his leadership in enabling them to rebuild their lives. Is a new picture emerging of the military commander as "shepherd of the flock"? While at the national level our politicians are unable to find consensus on vital issues, the army seems to have given a free hand to their district level commanders to do what they feel necessary to build robust relationships with the people.

Could we draw some lessons from these successful peace-building stories? One feature is that they appear to be spontaneous, good results derived from personal leadership and not proceeding according to any programme or prepared guidance. It seems to depend on the military commanders having the ability to quickly deploy resources, people, material and finances towards completion of a local level felt need and agreed task unlike the provincial authorities which are paralyzed by various political and administrative struggles. There would also be a psychological benefit bringing together those who had to make war with those civilians who had to bear the brunt of the conflict and disruption to their lives. In East Africa lessons were learned that it is possible for human beings to find solace by turning their lives around– there, some of the worst hunters went on, post-independence, to become respected game wardens.

From scattered news reports it appears that military commanders in the North are encouraged to engage in charitable work identifying an area of work of their choice - education, health, livelihood support etc. One has to read between the lines of news reports to learn of such civil-military cooperation, which is not publicized by the army. For example an organization in the South reported recently of the assistance received from the Wanni commander involving a project to provide shoes to school going children in that area. That commander had chosen to support primary school education setting up schools and needed facilities in the area under his jurisdiction. Other reports mention that thousands of coconut seedlings and other agricultural products have been distributed among the people to encourage farming and a scholarship scheme for students has been implemented recently on the initiative of the army without using public funds. Recently livelihood training in the Killinochchi area made the TV news with special emphasis on encouraging women to take up small business opportunities. A distinct feature of this type of cooperative activity is that the Army and the people are in a direct relationship without the usual intermediaries, politicians, bureaucrats or NGOs. Incidentally those intermediaries are the most critical of military efforts but does their criticism have the backing of the people?

Now a decade after the armed conflict was ended, the military and the civilians appear to be building new relationships on the ground, based on mutual understanding and helping hands. Our authorities would do well to get some recognized independent study of these new relationships, learning from the good as well as the negative experiences of this humanitarian work which would be quite useful to present with our reporting obligations to the HRC in Geneva. The Army presence in the conflict- affected areas is not as negative as some would have us believe.

(The writer is a retired member of the Sri Lanka Overseas Service who served as ambassador to Sweden and Thailand)
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The Inspiration for Terrorism in New Zealand Came From France

The gunman who massacred Muslims was inspired by ideas that have circulated for decades on the French far-right.

Mourners gather outside the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia after a 28-year-old Australian-born man, Brenton Tarrant, appeared in Christchurch District Court on Saturday charged with murder for killing 49 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attack is the worst mass shooting in New Zealand's history.Mourners gather outside the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia after a 28-year-old Australian-born man, Brenton Tarrant, appeared in Christchurch District Court on Saturday charged with murder for killing 49 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attack is the worst mass shooting in New Zealand's history. (JAIMI CHISHOLM/GETTY IMAGES)
BY , 
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No photo description available.
When white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 chanting “they will not replace us” and “the Jews will not replace us,” few of the assembled extremists knew where those slogans came from. By contrast, Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian accused of shooting dead 49 worshipers at two mosques and wounding dozens more in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, was more explicit when it came to his intellectual inspirations. In the 74-page manifesto he posted before the rampage, he praises the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik and draws on his work while noting his admiration for the interwar British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. But French ideas figure most prominently in Tarrant’s thinking.

He cites watching “invaders” at a shopping mall during a visit to an eastern French town as the moment of epiphany when he realized he would resort to violence. His manifesto appears to draw on the work of the French anti-immigration writer Renaud Camus, including plagiarizing the title of his book Le grand remplacement (“The Great Replacement”)—a phrase that has become commonplace in European immigration debates and a favorite of far-right politicians across Europe, including the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and a group of younger far-right activists who call themselves “identitarians.”Tarrant writes of initially dismissing stories of an invasion of France by nonwhites that he had encountered while still at home, but, once in France, he adds: “I found my emotions swinging between fuming rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of the invasion of France, the pessimism of the french [sic] people, the loss of culture and identity and the farce of the political solutions offered.”
Although Tarrant seems eager to give Camus credit, the French writer pushed back against those insisting that he acknowledge that his ideas may have inspired carnage.
 Facing a barrage of criticism on Twitter, Camus himself responded by denouncing the attack. “I find it criminal, idiotic, and awful,” he wrote, while accusing the perpetrator of “abusive use of a phrase that is not his and that he plainly does not understand.”

But the accused killer’s manifesto echoes Camus’s writing in many ways—most notably in the fear of demographic erasure by which a new population replaces an existing one, a process Camus insists is akin to colonialism. In his essay “Pegida, mon amour,” Camus praises the overtly anti-Islam German group Pegida as a “great hope rising in the East” and a “liberation front” that is fighting the “anti-colonialist struggle.” For him, there is no hope of living together in Europe when “there is a colonial conquest in progress, in which we are the colonized indigenous people” and the weapons of sheer numbers and demographic substitution are used to subjugate the natives.

Tarrant eerily echoes these ideas. “Millions of people [are] pouring across our borders … [i]nvited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labour, new consumers and tax base that the corporations and states need to thrive,” he argues in his manifesto. “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”

The accused killer claims his goal was to “show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands.” He chose the mosques because the worshipers were a “large group of invaders, from a culture with higher fertility rates, higher social trust and strong, robust traditions that seek to occupy my peoples lands and ethnically replace my own people.”

As the world recoiled in horror from the carnage carried out in yet another house of worship, Camus spent much of the day distancing himself from the terror and defending his innocence. To be sure, he has never advocated murder. In an interview with one of us published in Vox in 2017, Camus elaborated on his theories, which are often cryptic in his writings. “Of course, if you change populations, you can’t expect the same civilization to hold on,” he said at the time. “The refusal to be replaced is a very strong feeling in man. … The will not to be replaced was at the center of resistance to colonialism. … People don’t want other people to come in their territory, in their country, and change their cultures and their religions, their way of living, their way of eating, their way of dressing.”

He also took great pains to distinguish between Nazism, which he deplores, and the ideas undergirding white nationalism for which he appeared to have greater sympathy. “I think races do exist and that they are infinitely precious. … I pray for the conservation of all races, beginning with those which are the most under menace.” When asked which race was most threatened, he replied: “Well, probably the white one, which is by far the least numerous of the old major classical ‘races.’” France, too, he insisted, “is fast losing its own territory, where its own culture and civilization is quickly becoming just one among others, and not the most dynamic, and which is rapidly being colonized.” While vigorously rejecting the use of violence in Charlottesville, Camus maintained: “I totally sympathize with the slogan: ‘We will not be replaced.’ And I think Americans have every good reason to be worried about their country.”

Demographic anxiety about declining white populations and rapidly increasing immigrant ones—especially those consisting of Muslims—is central to nativist parties’ programs across the globe. In the 20th century, this fear can be traced to the apocalyptic visions of Enoch Powell, the anti-immigrant English politician, who in the 1960s famously envisioned rivers of blood in Britain brought on by immigration, and the French author Jean Raspail—the two men whom Camus cites as “prophets” in an epigraph to Le grand remplacement.
Jean-Yves Camus (no relation to Renaud), a French scholar of the far-right, sees Tarrant’s ideas as more firmly rooted in Raspail’s thinking than in great replacement theory. “The shooter is much more extreme than Renaud Camus,” he said in an email exchange Friday. “Camus coined the term ‘grand remplacement’ to show his belief that the native European population is being uprooted by the non-Caucasian immigrants, especially the Muslims. Renaud Camus never condoned violence, much less terrorism.” He added: “Raspail is another thing.”
 
Raspail’s dystopian 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, has become a beacon for far-right figures from French politician Marine Le Pen to U.S. President Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon and white supremacist Iowa Rep. Steve King. In 2015, during the Syrian refugee crisis, Le Pen, who has known Raspail since she was a toddler, urged her millions of social media followers to read his novel in order to stop France from being “submerged.”

Raspail foresaw a Europe in which the arrival of refugees “would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean white sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children.” He was particularly afraid of miscegenation: “Another would preach unlimited sex, in the name of the one, single race of the future.”

At the time, he was full of praise for the “white” nations of the South Pacific, lauding them and their historically strict and racially-based immigration policies as “champions of the Western World stuck away in the far-flung hinterlands of Asia.” Recent Australian governments have enthusiastically endorsed similar toughness. In October 2015, recently ousted Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott denounced Europe’s “misguided altruism” and warned that rescuing capsizing migrants at sea was “a facilitator rather than a deterrent” for mass immigration and that while a cold-hearted policy might “gnaw at our consciences … it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever”—a warning that cultural replacement might await.

Nearly five decades after he wrote the novel, Raspail has not changed his views. In an interview at his Paris apartment in 2016, he told one of us that he saw a movement taking shape, much like the small band of men who face down the refugees at the end of his novel, gathering in an old stone house to keep a tally of the body count as they shoot down the “invaders.”

“We’re fed up. We’ve seen enough. … There is going to be a resistance movement, and it has begun,” Raspail said from behind a desk surrounded by memorabilia from his travels. “If the situation becomes the one I predict—catastrophic—there will certainly be resistance that is both tough and armed,” he added. “People will want to liberate their city.” The simple fact, Raspail said bluntly, is that “without the use of force, we will never stop the invasion.”

 Tarrant took that worldview to heart on Friday and attempted to couch his racially inspired terrorism by drawing on the more palatable language of ethnopluralism, a concept now popular in far-right circles as a method of deflecting charges of racism. “[T]he attack was not an attack on diversity, but an attack in the name of diversity,” the accused killer wrote in his manifesto. “To ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted [sic] in unrestrained in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy.”

This concept reached its political apogee in a country that Camus and many white nationalists are fond of citing as a warning of what’s to come for the beleaguered white race: South Africa. From 1948 to 1994, the idea of autonomy for different races in different places was central to Pretoria’s policy of apartheid (literally, “separateness”) and was sold to the world under the name “separate development.”

It was the brainchild of Hendrik Verwoerd, a Nazi-sympathizing Afrikaner nationalist during World War II who served as South Africa’s prime minister from 1958 until he was assassinated in 1966. After his death, the usually unsympathetic opposition newspaper Rand Daily Mail praised him for refining a crude ideology of white supremacy “into a sophisticated and rationalised philosophy of separate development.” Indeed, in the waning days of apartheid, the government sought to establish “independent” black puppet states based on tribe and language in distant and undesirable locations; by doing so, the apartheid intelligentsia had hoped to externalize its race problem by stripping blacks of South African nationality.

Like Tarrant’s ideological smorgasbord, the idea of a great replacement is not an original one. The concept has a long pedigree in France, dating back to the late 19th century, when nationalist authors such as Maurice Barrès lamented rootless cosmopolitans and celebrated a France rooted in identity and lineage. He was a leading voice among the anti-Semitic propagandists during the Dreyfus affair and warned of new French citizens who wanted to impose their way of life. At the time, the “invaders” he feared were Jews—not Muslims. “They are in contradiction to our civilization,” he wrote of the immigrants becoming French. “The triumph of their worldview will coincide with the real ruin of our fatherland. The name France may well survive; the special character of our country will be destroyed.”

In the 1920s, the businessman François Coty, who owned the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, presented the great replacement in more concrete terms. The internationalists had decided, he wrote in the paper, “to replace the French race with another race.”Having arranged for the demise of the true French and the importation of new citizens, with their French identity on paper, these new arrivals would become “naturalized enemies.”

 Camus habitually plays “the role of ‘respectable’ reactionary,” explained the journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams in the New Yorker a few months after Charlottesville, “because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered—a far cry from the manifest brutality of the skinheads and the tattooed white nationalists who could put into action the xenophobic ideas expressed in ‘Le Grand Remplacement.’” Now, as those inspired by his words unleash terror, Camus is once again seeking to disavow violent extremists. But dodge as he might, violent extremists clearly see themselves as responding to his call to halt the colonization of Europe. In the hours after the New Zealand attack, Camus retweeted a French lawyer’s defense of his position—putting a litigator’s twist on the U.S. National Rifle Association’s favorite evasion: “Bullets kill people, not ideas.”

It’s an odd argument for Camus to uphold—a man who, for all his faults, appreciates the power of ideas. Indeed, his writings are peppered with references to Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, and the French philosopher Ernest Renan while decrying “the disappearance of culture and identity” and railing against the “endless propaganda” of the “immigrationist and multiculturalist” system. Alain de Benoist—another French thinker who has long been a prominent figure in right-wing circles and who is, like Camus, linked with today’s identitarian movement—has been more explicit and honest about the relationship between philosophical thought and action: As Williams noted in the New Yorker, “Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously ‘the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.’”

If they do, then no matter how vociferously he condemns violence, Camus cannot easily walk away from the terror his ideas have now inspired.
 
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