BEYOND GERMANY: WHITE TERROR IN THE US AND ELSEWHERE

Since 9/11, more people in the United States have been murdered by far-right extremists than by any other kind, including Islamist ones. In all, they have killed at least 134 people in the US; jihadists, 107; ideological misogynists, 17; and black nationalists, 13.

The year President Donald Trump took office, American white supremacists murdered twice as many people as the year before.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, minutes before a white man began shooting up mosques, he circulated a manifesto that praised Trump as ‘a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose’.

He wasn’t the first white man to find common purpose in terrorising immigrants and racial minorities, Muslims and Jews. And he wouldn’t be the last. Another white terrorist found it in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he murdered three young Jordanianand Syrian-americans in their home in 2015. In 2017, another one found it in Kansas, where he yelled at two Indian engineers, calling them ‘terrorists’ and screaming at them to ‘get out of my country’, before shooting them.

Another white terrorist found it at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing 11 people and injuring six. Another found it as he hunted Mexicans in the aisles of a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, slaughtering 23 people. Another one found it in a black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, where he entered a grocery store and shot 13 people – almost all of them black – killing 10. Another found it in a shop in Jacksonville, Florida, where, on the 60th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, in August 2023, he killed three black shoppers, and then himself.

Just as in Germany, most terrorists who strike in the United States are homegrown and white.

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