Jameel Muhktar and his 21 year old cousin Resham Khan suffered severe life-changing injuries when acid was squirted through their car window in Beckton on Wednesday 21st June 2017.
A look at Tomlin's Facebook profile reveals that he has a history of sharing content from extreme-right hate groups like the Britain First spin-off "English and Proud".
This is far from the first example of someone having been radicalised by extreme-right Facebook hate groups going on to commit acts of sickening violence.
The extreme-right terrorist who murdered the MP Jo Cox was photographed at a Britain First demonstration (a picture that was reported to the police and to the mainstream media, but no action was taken); the suspect in the Finsbury Park terrorist attack followed the Britain First leaders on Twitter; and now the Beckton acid attack suspect has a history of sharing extreme-right Facebook propaganda too.
Of course extreme-right sympathisers will try to argue the case that Tommy Mair, Darren Osborne and John Tomlin are all mentally ill and not representative of the wider extreme-right.
The extreme-right "they're mentally ill - we're patriots" excuse is pathetic enough in it's own right, but coming from people who generalise about all Muslims based on the actions of a tiny violent minority, the hypocrisy is absolutely searing.
Just imagine the mentality of the kind of person whose first instinct is not to condemn this kind of savagery, but to make excuses for it.
Even if Tommy Mair and the two recent extreme-right terrorism suspects are all mentally ill, the extreme-right hate groups and their supporters who spread their propaganda all over social media are still clearly responsible because individuals resorting to acts of violence becomes inevitable when hundreds of thousands of people are subjected with daily bombardments of anti-Muslim propaganda, white supremacist ideology, and the kind of lawless lynch mob mentality that Britain First actively promote.“I honestly feel that if this was a white person attacked by an Asian…it’d be all over the news.” Acid attack victim tells #c4news his story pic.twitter.com/HPmNHcv5xj— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 29, 2017
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| Screenshot of an extreme-right post that John Tomlin shared on his Facebook profile. |
Of course the mainstream media, the government, the legal authorities, and Facebook will continue to ignore the links between extreme-right hate groups like Britain First and their spin-offs, because if a Britain First supporter yelling "Britain First" as he shot and stabbed an MP to death in the street wasn't enough for action to be taken against extreme-right social media hate-mongering, then clearly nothing ever will be.
We'll just have to witness a continuing succession of sickening atrocities committed by people who have been radicalised by extreme-right social media hate groups.
We'll have to continue to witness these extreme-right attacks with the full knowledge that Facebook won't do anything about it because hosting extreme-right hate groups full of violations of their so-called community standards is a lucrative money-spinner for them, and that the government won't do anything because they have a much more tolerant attitude towards extreme-right hate preaching and its consequences than they do towards Islamist hate preaching and its consequences.
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