The alleged Buffalo shooter was also inspired by Islamophobia. That’s telling
I wrote this essay for The Guardian on the shooting in Buffalo. Few may realize that the alleged shooter copied the manifesto of the New Zealand mosque attacker – showing how easy it is to replace Muslim with Black or Jewish in the logic of the extreme right.
On 14 May, an 18-year-old white supremacist shot and killed 10 Black people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, about 200 miles away from his home, according to police. The alleged shooter scrawled a racial epithet on the barrel of his gun and live-streamed his killing spree. He (I prefer not to name him) was clearly participating in a long and horrible American tradition of murderous hatred toward Black people, and media coverage and commentary have rightly emphasized the long reach of anti-Black racism that motivated this killer.
But the alleged shooter’s motivations were not only anti-Black racism. He uploaded a 180-page document shortly before carrying out his attack, and even a quick perusal will show the disgusting antisemitism that he also wallows in. Pages and pages of anti-Jewish slurs – including an excerpt from Der Giftpilz, a Nazi-era children’s book published by Julius Streicher of Der Stürmer infamy – fill the document. At one point, the killer writes, “If the Jews did not have connections to Judaism, then I believe that they would be able to live in White countries such as the USA. But because of the irreversible rabbinic teachings they must be removed from all European and White countries.”
The document is clearly an expression of replacement theory, a garbage conspiracy theory that believes Jewish and corporate elites aim to “replace” white people from their own countries through mass immigration. To explain “replacement theory”, media reports immediately began citing the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white men in starchy polo shirts carried tiki torches while screaming “Jews will not replace us.”
The main frames of analysis for this attack, in other words, have been thoroughly American. Seen through the domestic American lens, this attack looks very much like a toxic mix of America’s anti-Black racism with a virulent strain of American antisemitism. There’s no doubt that this is true, but it’s not the entire story. Almost completely absent from the discussion is Islamophobia, and how this kind of extreme rightwing violence is in significant part a byproduct of the war on terror and the Islamophobia it spawned.
Consider how the Buffalo shooter acknowledges, in his document, that the person who radicalized him the most was none other than the man who, in 2019, live-streamed himself shooting and killing 51 worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In fact, the title of the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto (“You wait for a signal while your people wait for you”) is a line written in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto, which itself was titled The Great Replacement.
Moreover, the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto lifts many lines verbatim or nearly so from the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto, a move that is quite typical of the genre. A few examples must suffice, but in truth there are many more. Both documents adopt a question and answer format.
New Zealand shooter’s document:
Why did you carry out the attack?
To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.
Buffalo shooter’s document:
Why did you decide to carry out the attack?
To show to the replacers that as long as the White man lives, our land will never be theirs and they will never be safe from us.
New Zealand shooter:
Did/do you personally hate muslims?
A muslim man or woman living in their homelands? No.
A muslim man or woman choosing to invade our lands live on our soil and replace our people? Yes, I dislike them.
The only muslim I truly hate is the convert, those from our own people that turn their backs on their heritage, turn their backs on their cultures, turn their back on their traditions and became blood traitors to their own race. These I hate.
Buffalo shooter:
Did, or do you personally hate blacks?
A black man or woman living in their homelands? No.
A black man or woman choosing to invade our lands, live on our soil, live on government support and attack and replace our people? Yes, I dislike them.
The only people I truly hate are the converts, those from our own people that turn their backs on their heritage, turn their backs on their cultures, turn their back on their traditions and become blood traitors to their own race. They are not completely hopeless however. I believe some can come back, so it’s important to welcome them when they are awoken instead of shaming and ostracizing them.
New Zealand shooter:
Do you consider it a terrorist attack?
By the definition, then yes. It is a terrorist attack. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.
Buffalo shooter:
Do you consider the attack an act of terrorism?
By definition yes. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.
The point of this comparison should not be about plagiarism. All these far-right manifestos freely cut-and-paste texts and images from each other and from around the web. They are, as I’ve written elsewhere, better understood as wikis of the far right, where each person contributes their literary share of hate. Such compendiums are avenues to crowd-source the energy and commitment required for mass murder…
Read the rest here.