Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 27, 2020

Shortly before he killed 51 people, the gunman who perpetrated the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooting posted a manifesto to the website 8chan in which he praised a fellow white supremacist the attacker who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.

The attacks happened across the globe in Europe, Oceania and America. But they followed similar playbooks and shared the same noxious ideas.

The connectivity between those massacres and their ideology is just one example of how white supremacists are forming alliances, working together and inspiring each other across borders. While white supremacists will sometimes call themselves white nationalists, experts say its more accurate to view them as members of an international movement that aims to advance a shared agenda.

They view themselves as part of a white collective that is transnational and that represents a race, the white race, said Heidi Beirich, who founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism following a 20-year career at the Southern Poverty Law Center. One of the big things motivating violence today is this wish to bring whites together across borders to fight for control of what they consider their historic homelands.

One strong link between white supremacists in the United States and Europe, said Marilyn Mayo, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism, is hatred of Jews for their purported control of banks and the media as well as their perceived support of immigration.

Antisemitism, she said, is a very strong thread. They believe, both in Europe and the United States that Jews have played a role in bringing in nonwhite immigrants.

Now, according to recent reports, white supremacists from different countries are conducting military training together, attending the same conferences and communicating online. In particular, the long-running war with Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine has created a fertile training ground for white supremacists.

Governments have historically viewed white supremacists as a domestic phenomenon with country-specific goals, Beirich said. But she and other researchers say a more instructive parallel would be Islamic terror groups like ISIS or al-Qaida, which governments treat as foreign terrorists and work together to combat.

White supremacists have long tried to connect across continents.

White supremacist organizations were relatively local in terms of their concerns, Beirich said. The KKK was a very American organization concerned with American politics. [If] youre concerned about minorities in Georgia, youre not going to be talking to someone in Germany about their issues until the internet transformed that.

Its like a game of whack-a-mole, Clarke said. Whenever we find out what platform theyre using, companies are pressured to shut them down, and by that time these guys have already moved on to the next.

American white supremacists, in turn, have appeared at conferences in Sweden, Finland, Russia and the United Kingdom. Richard Spencer, a white supremacist who has spoken at U.S. campuses and other venues, was slated to speak in Budapest and Warsaw, but has been banned repeatedly from visiting much of the European Union.

They believe that people like Putin and Orban are promoting white Christian society where theyre keeping out influences like Third World immigrants, Mayo said. Putin is seen as the saving grace of white Christian culture. There isnt as much immigration in Eastern Europe and white supremacists see it as a place to mirror.

Now, according to the Soufan Center report, Ukraine is serving the same function for white supremacists as Middle Eastern conflict zones have served for Islamic terror groups. In both cases, extremist groups take advantage of the lawlessness and combat opportunities of a war zone to recruit, radicalize and train adherents from around the globe.

Excluding people from Russia, more than 2,000 foreigners have traveled to fight in Ukraine, though experts dont know how many are joining extremist groups. That number includes dozens of people from the United States.

Ukraine [is] emerging as a hub in the broader network of transnational white supremacy extremism, attracting foreign recruits from all over the world, the report says. Where jihadis travel to fight in places like Syria, white supremacists now have their own theater in which to learn combat.

In order to combat these trends, experts say, tech giants need to take more aggressive action to remove extremists from their platforms. And they say the U.S. government must begin treating white supremacists like it treats ISIS and al-Qaida. That means sharing intelligence with other countries, tracking their finances and surveilling their communications.

If you look at what happened in [the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting], his tagline on Gab was Jews are the children of Satan and he owned like 20-something guns, Clarke said. And if that guy was brown and his name was Mohammed and he said the word jihad once and he owned as much as a slingshot, he probably would have been arrested.

The U.S. government did invest in resources to combat international terror after 9/11, Clarke said, but it was for a different kind of threat. We now need them for white supremacists, so what are we waiting for?

Originally posted here:
White supremacists work together, united by hatred of Jews, immigrants - The Jerusalem Post

Category: Anti-Defamation League
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