Domestic Terrorism – Informed Comment

A New Crop of Disruptor-Politicians is failing the Earth

John Feffer — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 05:04:25 +0000

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – House Republicans, Euroskeptics, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro are the agents of a new kind of political disorder that parallels the chaos of failing states, economic catastrophe, and climate disasters.

By John Feffer | January 11, 2023

Some politicians just hate politics. They get into the game in order to disrupt it. They have such a visceral hatred of governance that, like suicide bombers, they’ve smuggled themselves into government in order to blow it up from within.

Much of the coverage of the multiple attempts to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker treated the uprising of the “radical wing” of the Freedom Caucus as a political tactic. The 20 Republicans who opposed McCarthy on more than a dozen votes extracted a series of important concessions before they relented to voting along party lines. In other words, these politicians were playing the time-honored political game of horse trading.

But there’s another way of looking at how these far-right politicians held Congress hostage to their demands.

Back in 2001, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist mused that he and his cohort wanted to scale back government until it was small enough “to drown in a bathtub.” The struggle between McCarthy, himself a MAGA toady, and the likes of firebrands Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ), was no mere political game. Rather, Americans were glued to their newsfeeds in the new year watching a new generation of self-hating politicians in their attempts to drown the U.S. government in a bathtub.

Don’t believe me? First, let’s take a look at the perps.

Twelve of the 20 holdouts rejected the results of the 2020 election and thus participated in the undermining of U.S. democracy. Several, including Scott Perry (R-PA), reportedly sought presidential pardons from Donald Trump for their efforts to overturn the election. Chip Roy (R-TX) has explicitly said that his work is all about “empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does.” Lauren Boebert wants to dispense with representative government altogether by making it subordinate to churches.

Article continues after bonus IC video
CBS Miami: “As Brazil Reels From Riots, Bolsonaro Finds Home In Florida”

These are not politicians. They are coup followers waiting for the return of their authoritarian Godot.

Next, let’s look at the concessions this band of not-so-merry pranksters extracted from McCarthy. First there’s the “motion to vacate the chair,” which allows any one member of the House to call a vote to recall the speaker. They should rename this rule the “chaos option,” since it offers pretty much anyone the opportunity to bring the chamber to a standstill over a leadership battle.

Another concession requires spending cuts to accompany any decision to raise the debt limit. Raising the debt ceiling to avoid default has become a fraught process in Democratic administrations as Republicans in Congress use the requirement as a way of forcing government shutdowns (for instance in 2013). During Trump’s tenure, Republicans had no qualms about raising the ceiling since their would-be authoritarian leader was in charge of government and transforming it into a incoherent mess. In the next two years, expect the Republicans to demonstrate just how much they hate government by bringing it to the brink of shutdown as often as possible.

In a third concession, McCarthy agreed to a 10-year budget proposal that caps spending at 2022 levels. Peace activists might be cheered by the estimated 10 percent reduction in military spending such a budget cap would entail. But let’s be serious. The Republicans won’t actually cut from the Pentagon side of the budget. They’d simply slice off more from the non-military side with approximately 18 percent reductions in health-care spending, agricultural supports, child nutrition, and the like.

In other words, the Republicans have turned on the faucets and readied their knives to make government small enough to fit in the bathtub. If they win in 2024, their new slogan will ring out: let the drowning begin!

Not Just the United States

Nigel Farage deserves an award for world’s most self-hating politician. Here was a guy who despised the European Union so much that he couldn’t wait to push his country out of it. Farage was a main force behind the Brexit campaign in the UK, which improbably succeeded in 2016 with a narrowly passed referendum.

And what exactly was Farage’s job at the time?

Why, he worked as a UK representative in the European Parliament! Farage was first elected to the principle representative body of the institution he hated in 2009. He was reelected to his post four more times—even in 2019 after the Brexit vote. For a guy who hated the European Union, you’d think he’d be the first to jump ship. But how could he resist being in the European Parliament on the day when Brexit went into effect in order to gloat big time.

In January 2020, Farage made a final speech in which he declared that:

I am hoping this begins the end of the project. It’s a bad project. It isn’t just undemocratic, it’s anti-democratic and it gives people power without accountability. That is an unacceptable structure… I can promise you, both in UKIP and indeed the Brexit Party, we love Europe – we just hate the European Union.

When he began waving the Union Jack, the speaker of the European Parliament cut him off and told him to leave. That the speaker hadn’t cut off Farage’s mic 11 years earlier proves just how wrong the Euroskeptic was and just how democratic the EU is.

Over the years, Farage had made out like a bandit at the EU’s expense, having taken home $6,000 a month plus a daily allowance of more than $300 for what was, at least to Farage, an anti-job. A couple years ago, the EU fined him for misuse of budget, but frankly he should be forced to forfeit everything he’d ever earned from his political tenure in parliament on the grounds of political malpractice.

Farage is part of a new generation of far-right-wing politicians who don’t believe in politics. They operate in the political world, for democracy is the name of the game in their countries, but they are fundamentally anti-political. Like Donald Trump, they are good at breaking things, but they haven’t a clue about how to forge the political compromises necessary to build things.

Vladimir Putin is a model in this regard. He has systematically deconstructed democracy in Russia, such as it was after Boris Yeltsin stepped down in 1999. He has done whatever he can to sow political chaos in Europe and the United States by supporting Euroskeptics and, in a spectacular series of dirty tricks, Donald Trump. And now, after causing so much damage in Chechnya and Syria, he is busy destroying Ukraine.

Not all far-right actors are anti-political. Viktor Orban, for instance, is an intensely political creature who has cleverly maneuvered his way into power in Hungary and then wielded that power very effectively (though malignly). Georgia Meloni, too, is a crafty politician who has no intention of destroying the institutions she needs to implement her regressive anti-immigrant and “pro-family” policies in Italy.

But all of these imps of the perverse—the MAGlogdytes, Nigel Farage, Vladimir Putin—are the agents of a new kind of political disorder that parallels the chaos of failing states, economic catastrophe, and climate disasters. In practice, they view liberal democracy as a fatally flawed model characterized by stolen elections, deep-state conspiracies, and unacceptable parliamentary compromises. Not surprisingly, these self-hating politicians all gravitate toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum.

They are no doubt watching what is happening in Brazil with bated breath.

Attempted Coups

All self-hating politicians dream of coups.

For Vladimir Putin, the coup was of the slow-motion variety, with political opponents neutralized over a period of time and consolidation of authority taking place within a democratic shell.

Donald Trump, as Maggie Haberman details in her book Confidence Man, reveled in his newfound authority to use Air Force One, invite whomever he wanted to the White House, and order Diet Cokes with a tap of a button on his desk. But as a man of limited imagination and even more limited managerial capability, Trump couldn’t effectively plan for a seizure of power in the aftermath of his loss in the 2020 election. He could only gesture in that direction and rely on a cohort of equally inept advisors (remember Giuliani at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference?) and a poorly organized mob that did a lot of damage without achieving any of its goals.

But don’t let ineptitude distract from the central purpose of this circus. As Roger Stone, the intermediary between the mob and the mobster-in-chief, put it on January 6, “Fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence. Shoot to kill.”

Perhaps January 6 will come to seem like merely a pilot episode. In The New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole explains:

If it happens again, it will probably not happen like this. The pilot episode was a disaster because it had no coherent script, too many ham actors, too weak a grasp on the difference between gestures and consequences. But there is much to learn from it. Next time, if there is one, the plot will be much tighter, the action less outlandish, the logistics much better prepared, the director more competent.

Consider, then, what happened this week in Brazil, when followers of Jair Bolsonaro enacted their own version of January 6 a couple of days after the second anniversary of the U.S. debacle, as another failed pilot.

In the Brazilian case, the protesters were not trying to interfere in the handover of power from Bolsonaro to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. After all, Lula held his inauguration last week. The insurrection organizers were instead hoping for the chaos to trigger the Guarantee of Law and Order, allowing the military to step in to suspend democracy. Toward that end, and with the tacit approval of many members of the security forces on the scene, rioters cranked up the crazy as they breached government buildings in Brasilia. According to one account, “they seemed beside themselves with hate, like a horde of zombies. They were running down hallways, smashing things, urinating, defecating in the corridors and in the rooms on one destruction spree.”

A hardcore band of protestors had been outside the Brazilian Congress for weeks, not unlike the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers in Ottawa at the beginning of last year. Bolsonaro and allies had been collaborating closely with their friends in the United States. Like Trump, Bolsonaro pressed his claims that the election was fraudulent—and, as in the United States, the courts rejected his claims. Like Trump supporters, Bolsonaro fans claim that “leftist infiltrators” were actually behind the violence in Brasilia. Like Trump, too, Bolsonaro has retreated to Florida, the preferred location of sore losers.

Brazilian authorities arrested more than a thousand people in connection with the storming of the Brazilian congress, presidential palace, and supreme court. More importantly, two top security officials have been ordered arrested for their failure to rein in the anti-Lula protestors. Despite the promise of future pro-Bolsonaro protests, these arrests coupled with huge pro-democracy gatherings throughout the country might be enough to quash efforts by the mob leaders and the self-hating politicians that inspired them to destroy Brazilian democracy.

But don’t make the mistake of underestimating these forces of mayhem. As those 20 recalcitrant Republicans once again discovered last week, it’s relatively easy to throw a spanner in the works. They turned the relatively straightforward election of the House speaker into a travesty. For the next two years, they’ll do whatever they can to stop the U.S. government from working, thus undermining what little remains of public trust in these institutions.

Then, if the 2024 election goes their way, they’ll borrow a page from Putin’s book and turn their attention to the larger task of drowning not just government but democracy writ large.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Greece had a neo-Nazi Problem, too; here’s how Athens dealt with it

The Conversation — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 05:01:14 +0000

By Georgios Samaras | –

When a wave of right-wing extremism hit Greece in 2012, few would have predicted that Golden Dawn, one of the groups involved, would grow to become the third largest party in the Greek parliament. This was the beginning of a long period of turmoil in Greek politics that saw a violent street movement become a viable political force.

But this neo-fascist “fairy tale” ended in what was considered the biggest Nazi trial since Nuremberg. Golden Dawn has been declared a criminal organisation and its leaders jailed, because of their involvement in unlawful activities – including murders, attacks on migrants, illegal possession of weapons and racketeering.

The leadership was also found guilty of ordering the murder of leftist rapper Pavlos Fyssas.

Prior to that, another murder attempt on Egyptian fisherman Abuzid Embarak in 2012, showed that the party was deliberately trying to incite violence, something that has been previously described by a number academics and journalists as an attempt to target minorities.

The trial lasted more than five years due to numerous delays and setbacks that turned the whole process into a never-ending chaos. In the meantime, the party was free to stand candidates in general and local elections without restrictions.

In total, 37 members of Golden Dawn were convicted – including leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos and 17 MPs – who have now been convicted and sentenced by the Greek court. Ioannis Lagos, Golden Dawn’s only remaining member of the European parliament, is likely to have his parliamentary immunity revoked any day now. Lagos is best known for ripping up a Turkish flag during a debate.

Why Golden Dawn was different

Every European country has fringe groups like Golden Dawn. They are often part of larger right-wing extremist networks with small but loyal bases.

Golden Dawn went mainstream soon after announcing its first major election campaign. Timing was crucial. The growing political instability in the country meant three general elections were held between 2009 and 2012. All major parties were losing public approval over their handling of the fiscal crisis.

On top of that, the only active far-right party in parliament back then (the Popular Orthodox Rally) had agreed to participate in a provisional coalition government organised by Lucas Papademos to get the country out of crisis. This move was seen as a betrayal by supporters.

The Greek far-right scene seemed weak, allowing Golden Dawn to step in and fill that gap without facing competition. Its monopoly allowed it to act in the most politically aggressive way. It embraced national purity, anticommunism, and promised mass migrant deportations. This rhetoric and an obsession with the refugee crisis started to pay off very quickly.

Calls for more aggressive migration policies became central to its election campaigns. Recent academic findings showed that exposure to the refugee crisis in rural Greece increased support for Golden Dawn.

The party secured a shocking 9.4% of the vote in the European Parliament election of 2014, while in September 2015 it peaked nationally with 7%.

Who fills the void?

During the early years of the Greek economic crisis, it looked as though the public was trying to punish the political system through the ballot box. It is widely believed that this age of anger had passed by 2017, which was when Golden Dawn’s downfall began. Greece rejected populism and abandoned fringe politics, allowing mainstream parties to become popular once again.

In the general election of 2019, Golden Dawn lost all its parliamentary seats and had to shut down most of its branches to survive financially.

However, the party casts a long shadow and continues to shape Greek politics. The more mainstream New Democracy, for example, has opened its doors to a number of far-right politicians, who ran successful campaigns in the recent election. Some of them had previously expressed strong xenophobic and antisemitic views.

Kyriakos Velopoulos’ ultranationalist party Greek Solution, meanwhile, won ten seats in the Greek parliament after a long period of campaigning against migrants. Golden Dawn’s spokesperson Ilias Kasidiaris has formed a new movement called Greeks for the Fatherland – even though he, too, is now in jail.

Kasidiaris has attempted to distance himself from neo-Nazi ideology in the wake of the Golden Dawn trial but his commitment to that change is yet to be tested. The same voters who embraced violence and legitimised Golden Dawn for its violent practices could support a similar movement. We might expect any such party to be less aggressive and neo-Nazi than Golden Dawn, but its values will be similar.

Greece has shown us how to deal with neo-Nazis. But when it comes to extremism, it is important to recognise the years of antifascist activism during Golden Dawn’s rise. It was a fight that, at times, seemed like a lost cause.

Democracy managed to pass an important test in the prosecution and sentencing of this criminal organisation. The court ruling was enough to eradicate Golden Dawn, but fascist remnants are still out there, reorganising and planning their next move.

Georgios Samaras, PhD Research Associate, Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Greece: Golden Dawn found guilty of running criminal organization”

Top 5 Most Horrible things Trump said in his Abnormal Debate

Juan Cole — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 05:10:01 +0000

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –

The “debate” was an unfortunate and distasteful spectacle, largely because of Trump’s bullying and mendacious behavior. But let us resist the cable-tv temptation to focus only on personalities and the horse race to consider some actual policy issues. And the true horror lay in what Trump had to say about them.

1. When pressed by Chris Wallace to denounce white supremacists and the neo-Nazi Proud Boys, Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back, stand by.” Trump never did denounce white supremacy. That’s pretty much the most horrible thing he “said.” Or his silence was disgusting. Trump knows that the white nationalists, championed by misshapen rags like Breitbart, are part of his constituency and he cultivates them with his racist rhetoric.

Here is what the Southern Poverty Law Center says about the Proud Boys:

Other hardcore members of the so-called “alt-right” have argued that the “western chauvinist” label is just a “PR c— term” McInnes crafted to gain mainstream acceptance. “Let’s not bullshit,” Brian Brathovd, aka Caeralus Rex, told his co-hosts on the antisemitic The Daily Shoah — one of the most popular alt-right podcasts. If the Proud Boys “were pressed on the issue, I guarantee you that like 90% of them would tell you something along the lines of ‘Hitler was right. Gas the Jews.’”

The Proud Boys would have popped he cork on their champagne if they had champagne instead of rotgut, celebrating what Trump said about them. Some even made a new logo, “Stand back, Stand by” alongside the initials PB.

2. Trump would only admit that human burning of gasoline, coal and natural gas is responsible for global heating “to an extent.” It literally is the only thing that is causing the climate emergency. There was no climate emergency in 1750, and it was cold, when parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were 270 instead of today’s 415. Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas. The sun rays hit the earth and then radiate back out to space. The more CO2, methane and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the more of the sun’s heat the earth retains. The reason for which there is so much more CO2 in the atmosphere now is that for the past two hundred and seventy years, humans have been intensively burning coal and then petroleum and natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide when burned.

3. Trump alleged that environmental regulations intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions were making energy expensive before he intervened. This is not true. Here is a graph of retail gasoline prices in the US over the transition from Bush to Obama. The prices fell dramatically. Natural gas prices track with petroleum prices.

Moreover, fossil fuels are fossils. Why burn coal, as Biden pointed out, when wind and solar are now cheaper than hydrocarbons?

Author and technologist Remez Naam illustrates the dramatic plummeting of solar energy prices in this graph:

And here is a graph from Statista showing falling wind turbine prices:

4. Trump called social distancing decrees to fight the coronavirus “almost like being in prison” and slammed Democratic governors who implemented them.

Wearing masks, social distancing, and closing down hotspots when cases spike are among the more powerful tools government has to limit cases and deaths. These techniques have been used in other countries with great success. The US has one of the worst coronavirus death and case rates in the world, in part because Trump and his supporters among governors have opposed mask-wearing, social distancing and selective business closings.

The irony is that some of the economic shutdowns would be unnecessary if the US had a national testing and contact-tracing program, which Trump has neglected to implement. South Korea, through these methods plus mask-wearing, has largely avoided major shutdowns.

5. Trump alleged that “Antifa” is the main source of violence in our streets. The FBI director has said that Antifa is more an attitude than anything else, and is not an organization.

As for the white supremacists and fascists, they are a bigger threat for domestic terrorism in the US than anything else.

The Department of Homeland Security has produced a draft report concluding that white supremacy is “the most lethal threat” to the United States of America.

Geneva Sands at CNN writes,

The lead section on terror threats to the homeland is changed in the latter two drafts to replace “white supremacist extremists” with ‘Domestic Violent Extremists presenting the most persistent and lethal threat.’

The reports, however, all contain this language: ‘Among DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists], we judge that white supremacist extremists (WSEs) will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland through 2021.'”

A handful of Antifa activists are not in the same league.

The Church of QAnon: Will Trumpian conspiracy theories form the basis of a dangerous new religious movement?

The Conversation — Wed, 20 May 2020 04:01:13 +0000

By Marc-André Argentino | –

Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.

I have been studying the growth of the QAnon movement as part of my research into how extremist religious and political organizations create propaganda and recruit new members to ideological causes.

On Feb. 23, I logged onto Zoom to observe the first public service of what is essentially a QAnon church operating out of the Omega Kingdom Ministry (OKM). I’ve spent 12 weeks attending this two-hour Sunday morning service.

What I’ve witnessed is an existing model of neo-charismatic home churches — the neo-charismatic movement is an offshoot of evangelical Protestant Christianity and is made up of thousands of independent organizations — where QAnon conspiracy theories are reinterpreted through the Bible. In turn, QAnon conspiracy theories serve as a lens to interpret the Bible itself.

Trump vs. the ‘deep state’

The QAnon movement began in 2017 after someone known only as Q posted a series of conspiracy theories about Trump on the internet forum 4chan. QAnon followers believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.”

OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube.

The website of Omega Kingdom Ministries mixes QAnon theories and biblical references.

The resource page of the HCW website only links to QAnon propaganda — including the documentary Fall Cabal by Dutch conspiracy theorist Janet Ossebaard, which is used to formally indoctrinate e-congregants into QAnon. This 10-part YouTube series was the core material for the weekly Bible study during QAnon church sessions I observed.

The Sunday service is led by Russ Wagner, leader of the Indiana-based OKM, and Kevin Bushey, a retired colonel running for election to the Maine House of Representatives.

Bible and QAnon narratives

The service begins with an opening prayer from Wagner that he says will protect the Zoom room from Satan. This is followed by an hour-long Bible study where Wagner might explain the Fall Cabal video that attendees had just watched or offer his observations on socio-political events from the previous week.

Everything is explained though the lens of the Bible and QAnon narratives. Bushey then does 45 minutes of decoding items that have appeared recently on the app called QMap that is used to share conspiracy theories. The last 15 minutes are dedicated to communion and prayer.

At a service held on April 26, Wagner and Bushey spoke about a QAnon theory, called Project Looking Glass, that the U.S. military has secretly developed a form of time-travel technology. Wagner suggested to e-congregants that time travel can be explained by certain passages in the Bible.

On May 3, the theme of the QAnon portion of the service was about COVID-19. Bushey spoke about a popular QAnon theory that the pandemic was planned. (There is no evidence of this.) And when an anti-vax conspiracy theory documentary called “Plandemic” went viral , the video was shared on the HCW websites as a way for e-congregants to consume the latest in a series of false theories about the coronavirus.

Leveraging authority

What is clear is that Wagner and Bushey are leveraging religious beliefs and their “authority” as a pastor and ex-military officer to indoctrinate attendees into the QAnon church. Their objective is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement.

Followers of the QAnon movement regularly show their support for Donald Trump at his political rallies, including this one held in Pennsylvania in 2018.
(Shutterstock)

OKM’s ministry is rooted in Taylor’s prophecies. Wagner regularly mentions that if it wasn’t for Taylor, he would have never started this ministry.

On its website, OKM references the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence. Seven Mountains utilizes the language of Dominionism — a theology that believes countries, including the United States, should be governed by Christian biblical law. Its goal is to attain sociopolitical and economic transformation through the gospel of Jesus in what it calls the seven mountains or spheres of society: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. This blends QAnon’s apocalyptic desire to destroy society “controlled” by the deep state with the need for the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Wagner and Bushey have taught their congregation to stop listening to any media —even Fox News — because they’re are all “Luciferian.” What they provide instead is a road map to QAnon radicalization comprised of QAnon YouTube channels for the congregation’s daily media diet, the Qmap website that lists new QAnon conspiracy theories and Twitter influencers.

‘Deep state church’

They further insist that as Trump continues to “drain the swamp” in Washington, it’s “our” responsibility to drain the deep state church swamp. They believe the same deep state that controls the world has also infiltrated traditional churches. As Wagner stated in his April 12 service: “I am here to focus on the deep state church. This goes beyond our church and involves our culture and our politics. Kevin is here to talk about QAnon and the military operation to save the world.”

Like any church, they also run outreach ministries. OKM is currently raising funds for something called Reclamation Ranch, which Wagner describes as a safe place for children rescued after being held underground by the deep state. Children at risk is an ongoing theme in many QAnon conspiracy theories, including the famous fake “Pizzagate” theory.

As of May, OKM moved from Zoom to YouTube to accommodate the growth in attendees. At last count, approximately 300 accounts participated in the recent services.

While that’s not a lot of followers, we should be concerned about these latest developments. OKM provides formalized religious indoctrination into QAnon, a conspiracy movement that is both a public health threat by spreading false information about the coronavirus pandemic and a national security concern.

Marc-André Argentino, PhD candidate Individualized Program, 2020-2021 Public Scholar, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Other Acts of Terror get Media Anniversaries, but not White Terrorists like Dylann Roof

contributors — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:15:42 +0000

By Bryan van Hulst Miranda | ( TeleSur) | – –

A year after Roof was charged over the mass-killing of nine Black people in an African Methodist church, it is worth remembering him for what he was.

The domestic act of terror at a historic African-American Church in South Carolina on June 17, 2015, was quickly branded a “hate crime” by U.S. officials, and the white man who perpetrated it a “troubled” person who was otherwise “sweet and quiet.”

It was a predictable media narrative to many for whom the racist and white supremacist motives behind the killing were immediately transparent.

Hate crimes are defined and categorized by U.S. state institutions as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”

Following this definition, the killings were not explicitly recognized as being racially-motivated, which allowed some media outlets like Fox News to turn it into a religious dispute.

“There does seem to be a rising hostility against Christians across this country because of our biblical views ,” said Bishop E.W. Jackson on Fox News.

If a “hate crime” can be so openly interpreted it becomes easier to deviate from the more obvious reasons behind the killing of Black people by a white man parading flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

If it is at all understood as a race-related hate crime, its very categorization by U.S officials as such can also make the terrorist act appear as an isolated event that has nothing to do with the very racist foundations of the United States. In fact, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose director James Comey recently confessed that law enforcers are racist, claims to work with the state to combat hate crimes since the emergence of the Skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan. In other words, the racial hatred that needs to be fought is displaced onto some radical far-right extremists.

Race-related hate crimes are thereby disassociated from the very culture and institutions that have continued to dehumanize, kill, and dispossess Black and brown people in the U.S. for centuries.

If the shootings are an isolated case and a deviation from the norm, the shootings demand meticulous inquiry. Why would a white man kill these people? Who is this white man?

“I don’t know what was going through his head,” a woman who knew the killer told CNN. “He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.”

Stories detailing the killer’s personal characteristics abound, which paradoxically function to empathize not with the victims of racial violence, but with the perpetrator.

It didn’t take long either before the killer was pathologized and mental illness seen as the cause of the terrorist act. For instance, an MSNBC anchor said on Thursday morning, “we don’t know his mental condition.”

As people on social media have been quick to point out, this not only erases racism and white supremacy as the instigating motives behind the crime, but it also contributes to the vilification and stigmatization of people who in fact have mental illness.

In this light, the brutal killing of nine people at a historic African-American church by a white man is removed from the historical legacy of the enslavement of Black people, the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous populations and the ongoing destruction of Black and brown lives in the U.S.

In a culture that divides people as “good guys vs bad guys”—with white people often represented as embodying the former and people of color the latter—it simply cannot be fathomed that white people in this story might possibly be “villains.”

It is this delusion of white people’s exceptional greatness that instigates in-depth investigations to understand how “one (of) our own kin” could commit this “random act of violence.” It is easier to say the killer is “troubled” than to look in the mirror and acknowledge that white supremacy runs in the DNA of White America.

In this rehearsed story of “good” white people and “evil” Black and brown folks, there is no similar questioning or investigation when acts of violence are committed against white people by people of color.

However, in violent cases where the perpetrator is Muslim, it is automatically assumed the person is some backward terrorist without any political motive but the blood-thirst drive to kill innocent white Americans and attack their exceptional “freedoms.” The attack translates into “Muslim terrorism” that the 1.57 billion Muslims around the world must condemn and apologize for.

Of course , no such thing is ever demanded from white people , the mainstream media or society .

As long as white people continue to run away from the reality of racial violence, to invent new myths and lies so as to cover up their past and present crimes and displace collective accountability, Black and brown lives remain in peril.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Fusion: “Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen Is A Terrorist But Dylann Roof Isn’t?”

After Paris, Rights Groups warn against Police State Tactics

contributors — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 07:30:22 +0000

By Nadia Prupis, staff writer | (Commondreams.org) | – –

‘Whilst closed oppressive societies breed hatred and barbarism, open reflective states built on rights, freedoms and the rule of law ultimately prevail.’

As some European leaders pitch a reactionary response to Friday’s brutal attacks in Paris, human rights and civil liberties groups are warning against the expansion of surveillance and other government powers under the guise of “national security.”

On Monday, French President François Hollande announced that he would propose a bill to extend the country’s state of emergency by three months as the manhunt for suspects spreads across Europe. The bill would also implement changes to the French Constitution that would strip citizenship of convicted terrorists, increase surveillance, and employ “more sophisticated methods” to curb the weapons trade.

Also on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the UK would add 1,900 new security and intelligence staff—and that he would consider speeding up a vote on the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, introduced to Parliament earlier this year, which would allow unprecedented mass surveillance of internet users.

“I am determined to prioritize the resources we need to combat the terrorist threat,” Cameron said.

In the U.S., meanwhile, CIA director John Brennan warned that the Paris attacks should serve as a “wake-up call” to surveillance opponents and criticized “a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists.”

But as critics pointed out, Friday’s attacks were carried out despite the fact that France passed an expansive surveillance law earlier this year following the January shootings at Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters and other sites. Further, French police stated over the weekend that at least one suspect in Friday’s attacks had been known to them for some time—yet these safeguards were apparently insufficient in thwarting those plans.

As British human rights lawyer David Allen Green explained on Twitter, “Not a single person calling for more legal powers for security…can explain how those powers would actually prevent atrocities.”

“France *already* had the state surveillance powers which the UK security lobby are now urging. The Paris atrocities still happened,” Green wrote.

European human rights group Liberty added, “The French authorities are no doubt right to look to the country’s security and there must be unity and cooperation amongst all democratic nations of our shrinking planet. But that unity ultimately comes from shared values and security from the knowledge that whilst closed oppressive societies breed hatred and barbarism, open reflective states built on rights, freedoms and the rule of law ultimately prevail.”

The Investigatory Powers Bill, which has been dubbed a “Snooper’s Charter” by its opposition, would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to keep records of every website visited by users for up to a year. It would also explicitly legalize bulk collection of user metadata and remote hacking of computers and cell phones worldwide in cases of threats to “national security.”

Digitalcourage, a German privacy rights organization, criticized the use of tragedies such as Paris to push for surveillance measures. “Already the first voices are raised that are trying to exploit the attacks for their own political agenda,” Digitalcourage said. “Grief and anger are understandable emotions. But they must not be abused.”

Immediate calls for “retention and more monitoring is not only irreverent, it also [puts] us and many others in a difficult position. We find the knee-jerk demands for more control and supervision inappropriate,” the group said.

Open Rights Group, a UK-based civil liberties organization, told Wired on Monday, “Our response to these attacks is utter horror but our actions must be well thought out and considered. The Investigatory Powers Bill is one of the most important Bills that this parliament will pass and it is vital that it is scrutinized and debated properly.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Via Commondreams.org

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

France 24: “Paris Attacks: François Hollande asks lawmakers to extend state of emergency to 3 months”

Turkey’s Snap Elections: Erdoğan is forcing his people to take sides

contributors — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 04:21:25 +0000

By Bahar Baser and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk | (The Conversation) | – –

Ever since the June 2015 elections, which thwarted the proposed presidential system that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long craved, Turkey has been hurtling into one of its most turbulent periods in decades. And with a snap election called for November 2015, the country’s political factions are facing off in an ever more violent and bitter fashion.

Polarisation has been a problem for Turkey for a long time: right versus left, Kurd versus Turk, Alevi versus Sunni, secular versus non-secular. But now, the division between supporters of the AKP – Erdoğan’s party – and their rivals has become one of the country’s biggest fissures.

All against all

As the country grapples with the threat of Islamic State just across the Syrian border, Turkey’s low-intensity civil war has been ramped up again with the Kurdish PKK mounting attacks on security personnel and the state responding with violence of its own. Recent fighting has claimed the lives of more than 60 military personnel, 400 PKK fighters and a considerable number of civilians, who are treated as casualties of war.

The so-called peace process has entirely stalled, although it’s debatable whether it was really going anywhere in the first place. Restrictions on movement in eight provinces have been introduced, raising fears that the state will enact “emergency laws” to allow a heavy crackdown. A district of Diyarbakir called Silvan was attacked by the Turkish military in mid-August; it was seriously damaged, and many residents had to flee to survive. Kurdish people are forced to live in an environment of insecurity as if they are being punished for not voting for the AKP, which also meant Erdogan’s way to the presidential system.

On the Kurdish side, the leader of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, Selahattin Demirtaş, has called on the PKK to end its violence, but everyday funerals are being held for Turkish soldiers killed during clashes with the PKK. These funerals have become a way for Turkish voters to show their rage not only at the PKK for its attacks, but also at the AKP and its MPs for putting their countrymen in harm’s way.

At the funeral for his brother, who was killed in a PKK attack, Lieutenant Colonel Mehmet Alkan demanded: “Who is his murderer? Who is responsible for this? Why are those who were saying ‘peace process’ before now demanding ‘war till the end’ right now?”

Alkan was a lieutenant colonel in the Turkish army, and spent a good part of his life protecting Turkey’s territorial integrity against the PKK. His anger was directed at the government, and at its representatives at the funeral who were trying to make election propaganda of his brother’s death.

The cynicism around the civil war has reached the point where no side can even mourn its dead without being exploited for political ends.

Alkan soon found out the hard way what happens to those who speak out. Immediately after his tirade was reported, pro-AKP Twitter users began smearing him as a member of one or all of the groups designated as enemies of the Turkish state: the Alevists, the pro-Kurdish HDP, and the Hizmet Movement – a huge transnational Islamic movement some regard as a parallel state.

More chaos, more votes?

This sorry state of affairs is not just an unfortunate collision of circumstances. It has been nourished by the current AKP government, which was put in a corner by the HDP’s biggest-ever electoral haul and entry into parliament.

It is now trying desperately to gather the nationalist and conservative votes it needs to win its longed-for parliamentary majority. The AKP’s calculation appears to be that more chaos will mean more votes, with people turning to the devil they know in hope of stability.

On the face of it, the latest PKK-Turkish army clashes have driven many groups on both sides back into their traditional corners. But things are changing as well – and it is clear that many Turkish voters are anything but won over by this new strategy. And the public’s reaction to the deliberately contrived chaos has so far defied the AKP’s expectations.

People all over Turkey are now questioning what intentions lie behind the resurgent violence. Kurds have always been suspicious, but this is new to the Turkish population at large. While polarisation and unrest are in themselves hardly new to Turkey, the current division of Turkish political and social life is more intense than it has been for decades.

As HDP MP Gülten Kışanak recently mentioned, this is a very different era. In the 1990s political killings were executed in secret, and violence was covert; nowadays, they are carried out without any shame or pretence.

In this deeply polarised climate, the obvious reaction is to take sides. That’s exactly what the AKP wants Turks to do, and it’s highly dangerous. It not only harshens the tone of political discourse; it exacerbates all the deeper, long-existing divisions that undermine Turkish civil society.

The run-up to the snap election will be a very dangerous time not only for the HDP, but for all opposition groups, who must now mount election campaigns in a deliberately cultivated environment of violence and fear. To be sure, this began a long time ago – the HDP’s party buildings were constantly coming under attack even before the June elections – but it is getting substantially worse.

As things stand, Turkey offers no promise of a better future to any of its warring groups. And with the campaign for the newly declared elections already sinking into a factional brawl, the signs are ominous indeed.

Bahar Baser is Research Fellow at Coventry University and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is PhD Candidate/Research Asistant at University of Ljubljana

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Aljazeera English: “Inside Story: Would new elections in Turkey serve AKP?”

Turkey: As Violence hits Istanbul, southeast, Can Pres. Erdogan turn it to Political Advantage?

contributors — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 07:12:40 +0000

By Alpaslan Ozerdem | (The Conversation) | – –

Armed attacks on the US consulate and a police station are the latest in a wave of bloody violence in Turkey that has now reached Istanbul. They are just two violent incidents to take place in the past few weeks, all of which appear to have been carried out by one armed non-state group or another.

Islamic State, Kurdish separatists the PKK, and the radical left group the DHKP-C are all suspected of carrying out attacks. But until now, most of the violence had taken place in the conflict-prone south-east region. The most recent incidents bring insecurity to Turkey’s commercial capital.

On average, up to three security personnel have been killed every day in Turkey since IS attacked the province of Suruç on July 22, killing 32 and wounding more than 100 people.

Before this point, a fragile peace process was making progress. Both the Turkish government and the Kurds appeared on the path to negotiating a settlement on the Kurdish issue.

That hope has been destroyed. Rather than achieving a resolution, Turkey is potentially heading towards a full-blown civil war. This could be avoided, but it may mean enabling Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to become the sole ruler of the country.

Capitalising on fear

Each of the groups taking on the Turkish government has different motives, but the recent attacks seem to have been orchestrated. From the massacre in Suruç to the US consulate, there seems to be a clear objective of creating an environment of insecurity, polarisation and fear.

This environment has brought Turkey into line with the US-led coalition against IS. Immediately after the Suruç attack, the İncirlik airbase was opened to US planes to ease their passage on bombing runs into Syria. Turkish forces are also taking part in aerial bombings – although it seems the main targets so far have been PKK bases rather than IS hotspots.

The violence also seems to be strongly linked to political uncertainty in Turkey too. National elections in June produced an uncertain result – a major blow for Erdoğan, who had planned to use a strong majority to vote in changes that would bolster his own position of power. He intended to amend the constitution to make himself the country’s executive president. Instead, his Justice and development Party (AK Party) failed to secure a big enough proportion of the votes and landed in coalition talks with the main opposition party the CHP.

But Erdoğan is increasingly at odds with his prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu over the formation of a coalition government and it now looks as though an early election is his only hope, if he wants to realise his dream of becoming the most powerful man in the country.

What is happening in Turkey today could be just what Erdoğan needs. If his AK Party can effectively handle the attacks, it could secure the extra 5-6% of the vote that might deliver an overall majority in parliament.

But while he is in some ways profiting from the current instability, Erdoğan might at least seek to get the peace talks with the PKK back on track if the AK Party achieves an overall majority in an early election. It was, after all, he who invested so much of his own political credibility in initiating the talks when he was prime minister.

If Erdoğan becomes the ruler of Turkey, he may well also suddenly become a beacon of peace by seeking to restart negotiations. This would save his tainted political image both domestically and internationally. It would also damage the political career of Selahettin Demirtaş, the co-chairman of the pro-Kurdish HDP party, who was the rising star of the last election. Faced with a galvanised Erdoğan, the latter could have to make tough choices to stay in the political game. The cherry on the cake for Erdoğan, in this scenario, would be if one of those choices was breaking ties with the PKK.

Alpaslan Ozerdem is Chair in Peace-Building, Co-Director of Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

AJ+: “Wave Of Violence Hits Turkey, At Least Three Dead In Istanbul”

European Islamophobic Networks influenced Roof to Kill in Charleston

Juan Cole — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 08:12:35 +0000

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine LePens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller, and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto. These same hatemongers helped whip Norwegian white supremacist and terrorist Anders Brevik into a homocidal fever pitch in July of 2011, when he killed 77 Norwegians for allegedly being soft on Muslims.

Back in South Carolina, Roof wrote that he first became politically aware with the Trayvon Martin case, in which he strongly took the side of George Zimmerman. He continued:

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

Where would he have found allegations that white Europeans are being victimized by immigrants? Here is what I wrote about Anders Breivik:

“Breivik’s passions were whipped up, according to his diary, by reading anti-Muslim hatemongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes (whose “Campus Watch” is an Israeli settler-oriented attempt to deny tenure to American academics critical of Israel’s oppression of the stateless Palestinians, and to harass more senior professors with character assassination).”

It was apparently similar writings and web sites that made Roof “completely racially aware.”

Unhinged millionaires and bigoted gadflies have a network funded by tens of millions of dollars. It is aimed at disenfranchising Muslim Europeans and Muslim-Americans and putting them under social pressure.

Ironically, some groups connected to the Islamophic Network are, like Geller and Pipes, Jewish. But their anti-immigrant, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric backfired on them in Roof’s case, since he went on heartily to hate Jews, as well. Many American Jews, he held, are pro-African-American, and so he abhorred them, as well.

That far right wing Jews would be trying to teach white people to hate non-Christians boggles the mind, since nothing could be more injurious to the American and European Jewish communities.

But the biggest irony is that their agitation against European Muslims should have helped inspire Roof in South Carolina to kill 9 African-Americans.

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