Writer and commentator Owen Jones walked out of a live news discussion panel on the Orlando shootings after his fellow presenters suggested the attack was not a homophobic hate crime. In the worst shooting in recent US history, gunman Omar Mateen opened fire in gay nightclub Pulse, killing 50 people and wounding 53 others.
But on a Sky News panel discussing the daily papers front pages, host Mark Longhurst and panellist Julia Hartley-Brewer debated Jones about whether or not the attack deliberately targeted LGBTQ people.
Clearly there is a question of whether there is, as you say, a hate crime, or whether something is being done in the name of religion, Longhust said, to which Jones responded: Its both.
People rationalise their hatred, Jones said. This guy, apparently, according to his dad, saw two men kissing and he was repulsed by it, and people know this who are gay, that there are people out there who are sickened and repulsed by our very existence.
And this guy, however he dresses up his bigotry and hatred is somebody who hates gays, he hates LGBT people. And he had a gun and because of, as you say, Americas gun laws, he used that to murder LGBT people.
This was a homophobic hate crime as well as terrorism, and it has to be called out as such, he added.
Longhust commented the mass shooting was a crime against all people trying to enjoy themselves, as Bataclan was.
Im sorry, you dont understand this because youre not gay, Jones told the host.
Jones was also told by Hartley-Brewer I dont think that you have ownership of horror of this crime because youre gay. Im not Jewish, Im not gay, Im not French but Im still completely horrified by these crimes.
Host Longhust asked Jones whether he shared the view that the attack was on gay people rather than on the freedom of people to enjoy themselves regardless of their sexuality.
What on earth are you talking about? Jones responded. This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people in an LGBT venue. It was a homophobic terrorist attack, do you not understand that? Its not some abstract, kind of just picked a club out of nowhere. He picked a club because it was full of people he regarded as deviants.
As the discussion became more heated, with the host and panellists suggesting they did not know the extent to which homophobia motivated the attack, Jones eventually walked off the show.
Im sorry, I just find this the most astonishing thing Ive ever been involved in on television. If hed walked into a synagogue and massacred dozens of Jewish people, you wouldnt be saying what youre saying now, Jones added. You would be talking about it as an anti-Semitic attack. This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people.
