A prominent Swedish journalist has sparked a Twitter backlash with a column arguing that the Sentinelese tribesmen who killed a US Christian missionary had acted in a "completely rational" way fending off the evil of “white men.”
In the controversial piece published by Aftonbladet, Peter Kadhammar said the death of John Allen Chau, who the tribesmen killed with arrows, was “tragic” but that the residents of the island were acting in a “completely rational” way.
"Let in the white man, and your world is soon wiped out,” Kadhammar wrote, arguing that indigenous peoples in Australia, North America and Africa should have done the same thing when European colonizers arrived.
The legacy of white people is one of "rifles, cannons, lies, senseless cruelty, ruthlessness, bribery, broken treaties, expulsions and imported diseases,” he wrote, saying that the entire white civilization was “based on genocide.”
“Only when the genocide policy reached our own continent did it become a criminal offence. It was at the Nuremberg tribunal after the Second World War", he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, Kadhammar’s article sparked a flurry of reactions on Twitter. Some agreed with the journalist’s premise, with one saying that the members of the tribe had a “right to live protected” in their home and that people “must be allowed to defend themselves” – others were less enthusiastic, lashing out at the writer for what they saw as an anti-white diatribe.
“Do you take responsibility for the murders that will take place on white people in the future?” one user wrote.
Given the current political and social tensions bubbling in Sweden over the issue of migration, many branded Kadhammar a hypocrite, asking if it was okay to kill foreigners who showed up in Sweden, since the journalist had applauded “the idea of killing foreigners who show up with foreign religions.”
“Question: Does this apply only to those who scream 'Jesus loves You' or even those who scream 'God is greatest' in Arabic?” one person asked.
"Now compare Kadhammar's message with the following one: Let in men from Middle East and North Africa, and your world is soon wiped out", another user added.
Meanwhile, others dropped in to the debate to remind Kadhammar that the Christian missionary was actually Asian, not white.
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