"It is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the western world for generations and it has to be called out as such."From: NewNowNext
British journalist Owen Jones walked off the Sky News set during an interview Sunday when Julia Hartley-Brewer, a fellow commentator on hand to speak about the tragic Orlando massacre on Saturday, tried to downplay the homophobic nature of the attack.
Jones was on air to analyze the motive of the killer, Omar Mateen, and became increasingly irritated throughout the eight-minute interview as host Mark Longhurst and Hartley-Brewer insisted the attack was against “human beings” and not LGBT people specifically.
“At the end of the day this was a homophobic hate crime, as well as terrorism and it has to be called out,” said Jones. ” I have to say, on Sky News and lots of news channels, there’s not been many LGBT voices that I’ve heard myself.”
He added: “It is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the western world for generations and it has to be called out as such.”
The interview was conducted after Mateen’s own father issued a statement saying his son became enraged by two men he saw kissing in Miami recently, but Hartley-Brewer refused to consider his homophobia a motive in the assault.
She even went so far as to suggest Mateen would have hated her equally because she is a “gobby woman.”
Said Jones:
“I’m sorry, I just find this the most astonishing thing I’ve ever been involved in on television. If he’d [Mateen had] walked into a synagogue and massacred dozens of Jewish people, you wouldn’t be saying what you’re saying now.You would be talking about it as an anti-semitic attack. This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people.”
Jones elaborated on the reason he walked out of the interview in a column for The Guardian Monday. In it, Jones says he was upset that his co-panelists considered the massacre a terrorism issue rather than a homophobia issue, when in fact it can be both.
“This was homophobia as well as terrorism,” he wrote. “It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened.”
He added on Twitter: “Thanks for all the lovely comments: but it really was just an instinctive reaction to an unpleasant situation, this isn’t about me.”
“Orlando was both a terrorist attack and a homophobic attack on LGBT people – this really isn’t hard.”
Orlando was both a terrorist attack and a homophobic attack on LGBT people - this really isn't hard.— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) June 13, 2016
Below, the interview’s tensest moments:
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