Echoes of Isil tactics in black militant’s online ‘self radicalisation’
IT SOUNDS like a terrorist rallying cry from al-Qaeda or Isil: “Kill the pigs who kill our kids!”
Yet this call for the murder of police officers was the slogan chanted by Malik Shabazz, at the time the leader of the New Black Panther Party, at a protest 20 years ago.
Black extremist groups are nothing new in America. They rose to prominence in the mid-Sixties as an alternative to the non-violent stance of Martin Luther King, but in recent years they have found a new, more powerful tool than mass rallies: social media and the internet.
Micah Johnson, the gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas, was a follower of several of America’s most violent black rights groups, but may never have attended any of their meetings or rallies.
A group calling itself the Black Power Political Organization claimed on its Facebook account that it was behind the attack, though there is no evidence Johnson had any connection to it.
Police are investigating whether he had become self-radicalised by reading material posted online by the likes of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), the African American Defense League, the Nation of Islam and Black Riders Liberation Party.
He had either “liked” or followed them on his Facebook page, but told police before he was killed in a stand-off that he was not affiliated to any groups.
The term “self-radicalisation” has become familiar through the catalogue of Islamist terrorist attacks the world over, and the tactics used by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and others bear clear similarities to the worst extremes of black separatist groups. Johnson was, after all, doing exactly what these forums of boiling hatred have been telling their followers to do for years.
Dallas is the home of the New Black Panther Party (which has no link to the now-defunct 1960s Black Panther movement) and its website has a document titled which claims that white men have a secret plan to commit genocide against all non-white people.
It believes black Americans should have their own sovereign nation, and its 10-point platform calls for a country in which black people can make their own laws, with all black prisoners in US jails released to “the lawful authorities of the Black Nation”.
King Samir Shabazz, the head of its Philadelphia chapter, said in 2009: “I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker [white person], I hate it … You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!”
The group reserves particular hatred for the police, who it calls “pigs”. Following the killing of Alton Sterling by white police officers in Louisiana, Dr Mauricelm-Lei Millere, the NBPP’s founder told his Facebook followers: “It is time to visit Louisiana and hold a barbecue. The highlight of our occasion will be to sprinkle Pigs Blood!”
Nor was that a unique outburst. Last year, following the death of black detainee Freddie Gray in Baltimore, he took to Twitter to say: “If Freddie Gray’s killers walk you will see cops being killed in broad daylight… In self defence blacks must kill.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the US, says there are 180 black separatist groups in the country, compared with 190 branches of the Ku Klux Klan (though neo-Nazi and other white power groups double that number).
President Barack Obama will now come under pressure to explain why their online presence was not shut down before it was too late.
But, America’s right to free speech, enshrined in the First Amendment, makes it difficult to prosecute extremists for incitement.
Prosecutors must prove a direct link between a speech and a particular criminal act and experts have spoken frequently in the past about the nearimpossibility of bringing a successful prosecution against the likes of Louis Farrakha, the Nation of Islam founder.