'Start rounding them up!' Conservative commentator blames mass shooting on peace activists

Conservative commentator and U.S. Army veteran Jim Hanson took to Fox News Sunday to lay blame for the deadly mass shooting in Australia targeting its Jewish community on critics of Israel’s military siege on Gaza.

On Sunday, at least 11 people were killed and at least 29 injured after two gunmen opened fire at an event on Bondi Beach celebrating the start of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, according to BBC.

Hanson, the chief strategist at the U.S.-based conservative think tank Middle East Forum, blamed the attack, in part, on “groups” that he accused of spreading “lies” about Israel’s siege on Gaza, which has killed at least 70,000 people, the majority of them women and children, though other analyses suggest the death toll to be much higher.

“The idea you can secure any large group of people in a country like Australia, the United States or others is just not possible; we have to get them left of the attack before they do it, infiltrate their networks, find their funders and start rounding them up and putting them away!” Hanson said, appearing on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

“We can't stop an event like this, but we can stop the groups we're now allowing to go ahead and use the Gaza genocide and the Gaza famine – and other lies like that – to generate outrage and cause these types of horrific events.”

Despite Hanson’s assertion that accusations of genocide were false, a United Nations commission found in September that Israel’s actions in Gaza did constitute genocide, as have a litany of other international organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Hanson’s dismissal of claims of famine in Gaza have also been similarly rebuked by leading human rights organizations and bodies.

Nevertheless, Hanson continued to lay blame for the attack on such groups, declaring there to be an immediate threat of what he called the “red-green axis,” which he described as a coalition of “Islamist movements” and “the leftist revolutionary movement.”

“To undermine western culture… events like this are designed to do that,” Hanson said. “They're designed to strike fear, they're designed to ruin our ability to enjoy the wonderful culture we've built in the hopes of rising up and bringing what they have, which is an Islamist culture that's destructive, and a leftist-communist-style culture which is equally destructive.”