During a segment on Sky News, journalist Owen Jones couldn’t stand what he was hearing and walked off set.
The host of the TV show Sky News Sunday and his guest refused to acknowledge the Orlando shooting as having homophobic ties.
Mark Lonhurst and guest Julia Hartley-Brewer were chatting to Jones, when the conversation focused on Omar Mateen’s shooting rampage on Sunday morning.
Jones then referred to the tragedy as a “homophobic hate crime, as well as terrorism and an international attack on LGBT people”. But the host and his guest dubbed it a crime against humanity.
“But it’s something that’s carried out against human beings, isn’t it?” Longhurst said, adding “on the freedom of all people to try and enjoy themselves.” Hartley-Brewer questioned why Jones would think he has “ownership of the horror of this crime.”
Fed up, Jones walked off.
If you had watched the full segment, you would have witnessed a build up to the part Jones walked off. Below is a collection of each time the trio conversed over the mass shooting and by the end, you see just why it happened:
Jones then took to the Guardian to explain why he walked off:
It was an instinctive reaction to an unpleasant and untenable situation. If the conversation was about an attack on Jewish people it would rightly be described as antisemitic, and there is evidence of Mateen’s homophobic tendencies from his father and former coworkers.
This was homophobia as well as terrorism. It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened.
Today, the ‘we only care about LGBT rights if Muslims are involved’ brigade are out in force. As a gay man, I am proud to live in a city represented by a Muslim mayor who has faced death threats for supporting and voting for LGBT people to have the same rights as everybody else. The bigots must not be allowed to hijack this atrocity.
Longhurst later said it was not his “intention to offend.”
[source: huffingtonpost]
