News
Greg Evans
Nov 09, 2018
On Wednesday night, a gunman in Thousands Oaks, California, shot dead at least 12 people at the Borderline Bar & Grill.
The man who police have identified as the suspected shooter is Ian David Long, a 28-year-old Marine veteran who had reportedly been suffering from PTSD.
He shot himself at the scene after carrying out the massacre with a legal 45-calibre handgun, which was fitted with an illegally extended magazine.
Yet before Long's identity was confirmed, numerous conspiracy theorist had begun spreading misinformation that the perpetrator of the attack was a 'Middle Eastern' man.
This appears to have been started by a now-deleted tweet posted by local news anchor Jory Rand who reported that he had spoken to a man who had witnessed the shooting and shooter as "Middle Eastern looking with a beard".
According to The Daily Dot, Rand wrote:
Just spoke with a man who was at the front door of the bar when the shooter began firing.
Says he had a handgun, shot the guard at the door, threw several smoke bombs inside, and then continued firing.
Described shooter as middle eastern looking with a beard. More to come...
An interview was also conducted with the witness and was broadcast on CNN.
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This testimony was soon taken as fact by some Twitter users who began to report the story, with some adding that it was a religiously-aggravated terrorist attack.
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Many of the tweets spreading the false information have since been deleted.
Paul Joseph Watson, a contributor to Alex Jones' Infowars, has doubled down on his earlier tweet explaining that he was only reporting what he had read on the 'mainstream media' and also shared a screenshot of a Google search which showed that Sky News had reported that witnesses to the shooting had described the shooter as 'Middle Eastern'.
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Laura Loomer has described the changing of the 'narrative' to be 'strange' as he was originally a 'Middle Eastern man' but is now a 'white marine.'
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Pamela Geller, who is a political activist and commentator, and who has previously been accused of spreading Islamophobia, has accused the media of attempting to protect Islam in her coverage of the story.
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HT Daily Dot
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