What Mark Longhurst and Sky News didn't realise about Pulse attack

Last night during the Sky News paper review at 10:30 (it wasn't repeated at 11:30) Owen Jones, who is someone I admittedly don't always agree with tried to make the point that the attack on the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando was a direct homophobic attack. In a heated exchange in which Mark Longhurst the host and Julia Hartley-Brewer tried to down play the homophobic element of the attack Longhurst said "you don't have ownership of this horror cause you're gay."

I for one, and reading social media late last night, must of the LGBT+ community were outraged by such a reaction. We saw that comment for what it was a white, straight, cis-gendered, male not understanding that an attack on a minority grouping is not merely an attack on freedom, or an attack on humans having fun. This WAS and attack on the LGBT+ community. It was the realisation of many in the LGBT+ communities' worse fears.

If ISIS are throwing people some as young as nine off buildings in the areas they control for believing them to be gay, and they are carrying out attacks in the west, who might they attack here? Well of course one of the worse fears is that someone would claim to attack a gay venue or event in the name of IS. This is what happened in the early hours of Sunday morning and it is now the worse mass shooting in American history. So yeah the LGBT+ community can see that Owen Jones was right this was an attack on LGBT+ people. It was the realisation of our worst nightmare write large of the situation in our world today.

Julia Hartley-Brewer dismissed the attacked as "mad and bad" or as a "lunatic" bit for whatever reason he drove 90 miles and had premeditated to carry out this atrocity. The use of such words do not reflect what happened. This was someone with a seriously different world view to the established liberal, western mentality, even more so that the small c conservative mentality. But there are other people with a similar mind set out there who may well be planning something similar: a similar act to instil terror in the LGBT+ individuals.

In other words an Act of Terrorism against the LGBT+ communities.

Yet Sky News chose to mock the use of those words from someone who identifies as a gay man, someone in tune with the fear that is flowing out there amongst LGBT+ viewers. They negated the sense of terror that many LGBT+ people had heightened as a result of this attack, the mocked it in a way which is in itself homophobic in nature by ignoring the real concerns of all those individuals and merely seeing this in their own eyes.

It is therefore not surprising that I see that the segment which even Sky had deemed that they could not repeat has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.