Racist lies are fueling terrorist attacks
In El Paso last weekend and across the globe this year, white supremacists have left manifestos referencing a racist conspiracy theory to justify slaughtering religious and ethnic minorities.
Alleged killers in Christchurch and El Paso, Texas believed a theory that claims white people are being “replaced” by people of colour through mass immigration. Conspiracy theorists often falsely claim this is a deliberate effort by any number of groups demonized on the far right: liberals, Democrats, Jews, and Muslims. It’s the theory peddled by white-supremacist groups seeking recruits and the torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville two years ago. It’s also a thinly disguised—and often not disguised—talking point from some conservative politicians and pundits.
By leaving these conspiratorial manifestos, white supremacists are trying to add to a long and growing library of terror, and get others to follow their examples.
“They’re also trying to inspire others about the urgency of the moment. In particular with the New Zealand shooter and this guy in El Paso, these ideas building on each other,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre's Intelligence Project, said. There’s no question these people are feeding off each other because they’re referencing prior manifestos. In name alone, the conspiracy theory began in 2011, with the book The Great Replacement by French author Renaud Camus.
The anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant text likened the growth of nonwhite populations to the genocide of white people in European countries. This supposed genocide is nonexistent. White supremacists use it as an excuse for violence anyway.
On Aug. 11, 2017, white supremacists led a torch-lit march on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. The marchers chanted “You will not replace us,” or sometimes “Jews will not replace us,” in a callout to the conspiracy theory.
The gathering was intended as a coming-out moment for America’s increasingly visible white-supremacist movement. On the second day, a neo-Nazi drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing one.
The conspiracy theory continued to gain traction with white supremacists. The Christchurch shooter referred to the “replacement” in the title of his manifesto before he allegedly massacred 51 people at a mosque in March—and livestreamed it on Facebook for propaganda.
White supremacists online glorified the Christchurch attack. The alleged shooter at a Walmart in El Paso cited the Christchurch tract as inspiring him to murder Hispanics. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and current distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the alleged attackers were mobilising each other.
They all cite each other,” Watts said. The El Paso shooter cited Christchurch. Then he talked about how a month ago, he started to think about an attack.
“Because of those successful attacks, you’d see a wave of inspired attacks, meaning that there are often one, two, three people already thinking about doing an attack,” Watts said. When those people see a violent incident, “they mobilize because they want to get into the media storm. They want to be part of that phenomenon. It becomes a contagion.”
ISIS terror and white supremacist terror both require a wide network of online extremists potentially ready to commit violence for the cause. The difference with the current wave of white supremacist violence, Watts said, is that white supremacists are decentralized and do their organizing through a leaderless online movement, rather than following orders from recognized leaders.
Media treatment of ISIS and white supremacist violence are also different, Watts noted. “What is remarkable is that our response to white violence is just, “This guy is a bad apple; he’s crazy,” he said. But an ISIS member is called a terrorist. Sometimes, the white supremacist rhetoric actually comes from conservative media and politicians. Even from Trump and others, there’s a lot of talk about Latinos ‘invading’ the United States and white people are basically being pushed out of their areas by them. Trump on Twitter has repeatedly described Hispanic immigrants as “invading” the U.S.—the same terminology the alleged El Paso shooter used—and in a campaign speech last year said migration from Central America was “like a war” on America.
Unfortunately, the problem is going to get worse in the US against people of colour. And all Fijians there are people of colour.
The disturbing takeaway is that this type of thinking is subtly being fed into the Fijian psyche by some politicians as they are deliberately planting seeds into the electorate for the next election – based on ethnicity.
While the Hon PM has strongly denounced this, the other leaders are not - which is akin to enabling it. This was something that should have been rejected by the intellectually lame and irrelevant leader of the NFP.
Even when a smart and savvy NFP candidate in the last election resigned from the party because of her disgust at the gutless leader, the leader chose to keep quiet giving a lame statement that one is entitled to one’s opinion, proving once again that he is nothing but a dumb political opportunist.