'Slaughter by appointment': Australian presenter Waleed Aly's powerful message after Christchurch
Waleed Aly is a 40-year-old Australian writer, television presenter and university lecturer who was born in Melbourne to Egyptian parents.
Unidentified assailants killed 49 people and injured 48 after they opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch city of New Zealand. One of the attackers even recorded a video of the assault and shared it on social media.
Shortly after the attack, Australian television presenter Waleed Aly appeared on his show The Project and talked to his audience about his views on the attack. Aly said that the attack did not shock him – it made him feel “gutted and devastated, but not shocked”. Aly recalled a number of attacks that happened across the world – a shooting in a mosque in Canada’s Quebec, a man running over pedestrians in London’s Finsbury Park, Jews shot dead inside a synagogue in Pittsburgh in the US – and said that with all these acts of terrorism across the world, news like the Christchurch attack does not shock him anymore.
Aly called the Christchurch shooting “slaughter by appointment”, since the shooters chose the precise timing of prayers to carry out their attack. He also read out disturbing points from what is being called a manifesto posted online by one of the shooters.
Aly praised the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for calling the attack an act of “terrorism”, but, at the same time, also recounted how Australian leaders have spoken of Muslims and immigrants in the past. Aly’s powerful five-minute address was aimed at driving home the point that “terrorism doesn’t choose its victims selectively,” and that targeting all Muslims for the acts of terrorists is incorrect because they are as affected by the violence as any other community.
Here is a testimony from an eye-witness of the terror attack, who tried to save one of the victims who was shot.