Cruel reality of living with failed Trumpzi leadership

Opinion echo published in the Madison, Wisconsin newspaper Capital Times - by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The country was rocked by two mass killings this past weekend. The first was in El Paso, Texas. The slaughter of 22 people in El Paso's Cielo Vista Walmart was an act of a white supremacist. A manifesto he allegedly posted online shortly before the massacre echoed President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric. "This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas," the alleged shooter wrote.

Late that night in Dayton, Ohio, throngs of people were enjoying the Oregon entertainment district when another white man in his 20s opened fire, killing nine people in about 30 seconds before police killed him. Among those he murdered was his sibling. Unlike the El Paso killer, the Dayton shooter left no "manifesto" to explain his motivation for the rampage, but had in the past expressed violent fantasies, an obsession with mass shootings, and classmates said he kept a rape and kill list while in high school. Misogyny is often linked to mass killers.

Trump read a speech from a teleprompter Monday, rambling on about mental health and violent video games, largely toeing the NRA line. While he did suggest support for a national "red flag" law, allowing court-ordered confiscation of guns from a person deemed a threat to others or to him- or herself, Trump said, "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun." In fact, people who suffer from mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence than perpetrators of it. He also called for the death penalty for mass shooters.

While the Dayton shooter is dead, the El Paso shooter turned himself in to a police officer not far from the scene of the crime. His online declaration began, "I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto." In fact, how New Zealand's elected leader, and society at large, responded to that massacre last March of 51 Muslims should be the model for what happens in this country.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the world's youngest elected leader. After the Christchurch massacre, committed by a single gunman armed with an arsenal of legally purchased semi-automatic weapons, Ardern immediately pushed a ban on almost all semi-automatic and military-style weapons through Parliament. "Fifty people died and they do not have a voice. We in this house are their voice," she said. In less than a month after the massacre, the assault weapons ban became law in New Zealand.

Trump did call Ardern to express condolences. Ardern said of the call: "He asked what offer of support the United States could provide. My message was sympathy and love for all Muslim communities." When addressing her nation in response to the massacre, Ardern said: "Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand."

Before departing from the White House to visit survivors in Dayton and El Paso Wednesday, Trump refused to take back his use of the word "invasion," which he has repeatedly used to describe the arrival of immigrants and asylum seekers at the southern border. According to Media Matters for America, "Between January and February, President Donald Trump's Facebook page ran about 2,200 ads referring to immigration as an 'invasion.'" His use of the word "invasion" was invoked as justification by the killers in El Paso, Christchurch and in Pittsburgh last year. There, the shooter entered a synagogue and gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers who he believed supported "invaders."

These horrific events have spurred political momentum for a change in the broken gun laws that have for far too long made the United States a virtual free-fire zone.

The response in New Zealand was to ban assault and semi-automatic weapons, and to embrace diverse immigrant communities. In the United States under Trump, the opposite is happening. Next month, laws will take effect in Texas loosening gun restrictions -- for example, forbidding the banning of guns in schools and churches. Then, on Wednesday, the day Trump was ostensibly consoling wounded survivors in Dayton and El Paso, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted the largest single-state workplace enforcement action ever, arresting 680 people at several Mississippi food-processing plants, accusing them of being undocumented.

The scourge of guns and the war on immigrants continue.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations, including WORT here. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the newly published New York Times best-seller "Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America."

Right Wing extremism is terrorism

A forensics official works at the al Noor mosque after the white supremacist massacre attack.
Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images

Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to the media during a news conference in Wellington New Zealand. Bush said two improvised explosive devices were attached to a vehicle as part of the attack. One device was disabled and authorities were working on the other.
Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Echo opinion published in the Central Maine newspaper Kennebec Journal by Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

The deadly attacks on two New Zealand mosques should draw attention to an obvious fact: Terrorists linked to the far right are no less murderous than the Islamist groups that get more headlines and attention from politicians.

Western governments shouldn’t be fooled by the skewed headline count; watching white supremacists should be a priority — alongside preventing the radicalization of Muslim minorities. This is not just a moment to grieve the 50 dead in Christchurch. It’s time to review the data and make a conscious policy shift.

Islamist terrorists killed hundreds of people in Western Europe and the U.S. between 2014 and 2016, the heyday of the Islamic State. That drew attention away from far-right terrorists, but they have kept on killing: 66 people in 113 attacks around the world between 2013 and 2017, according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace.

The Australian think-tank’s count is, however, too low. It includes only expressly politically motivated killings accompanied by white supremacist manifestos or preceded by racist social media posts – like those perpetrated by Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot 77 people in 2011, or Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. There are other murders that aren’t always confessed so clearly. They are often mixed in with everyday thuggery and violent psychosis in police statistics.

The U.S. Anti-Defamation League attempts a broader count, stressing murderers’ links with far-right organizations rather than their stated motives. According to the group, right-wing extremists were responsible for 70 percent of the 427 extremist-related killings that occurred in the U.S. in the past 10 years. In 2018, every one of the perpetrators of the 37 extremist-related murders in the U.S. had ties to at least one far-right movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism, the ADL says.

Importantly, the number of incidents of violence perpetrated by the far-right is on the rise. The Institute for Economics and Peace noted in its 2018 Global Terrorism Index report that the number of such killings increased from three in 2014 to 17 in 2017.

Meanwhile, Islamist-inspired terrorism appears to be on the wane, with the attempt to create a caliphate in the Middle East roundly defeated and the ideal of pure Islamic statehood losing its attractiveness to the assorted misfits among the West’s Muslim minorities. 

According to Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s Global Attack Index, fatalities linked to Islamic State declined by 51.5 percent in 2018.

The far right has never killed on the same scale as the Islamic State. But it has grown by feeding off white supremacists’ fears of Muslim immigration and the public perception that terrorism is Islamist by nature. That process has been helped by the fact that Islamist-linked attacks receive disproportionate media coverage. 

A recent paper by Erin Kearns of the University of Alabama and her colleagues showed only 12.5 percent of the 136 terrorist acts that occurred in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015 were linked to such groups — but they received more than half of the news coverage. If the perpetrator is a Muslim, the number of stories about the attack increases by 357 percent, the academics calculated.

In a separate paper, Kearns showed that giving people more data about terrorism doesn’t necessarily change their minds about its prevalence and nature. Policymakers, though, should be more willing to put their biases aside. While it would be foolish to ignore militant Islamist groups, governments must pay close attention to right-wing extremist organizations.

In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution already monitors all such groups (or 25,250 people at the last count in 2017, up from 9,600 in 2012). The authorities don’t just make a special effort to track right-wing crime by motivation, they also try to assess how many of their members are capable of violence through monitoring and infiltrating radical groups.

Though the German record of fighting right-wing violence is far from spotless (and the growing membership of radical groups is evidence of that), the approach itself is correct. Western governments must make an effort to keep a close eye on the far right just as they do on potentially dangerous Muslim groups.

And they should adopt the approach to recording crime used by the Anti-Defamation League. This means assuming the specific motives of a violent crime are less important than the perpetrator’s links to a white supremacist group. 

Such assumptions, after all, are already being made about Islamists.

The mechanisms of radicalization are similar regardless of religion and ethnicity. Anti-terror policies should be based on that fact and be equally tough on every kind of murderous radicalism. The Christchurch killings are a reminder that this is not yet the case.

Leonid Bershidsky 

Evil in Kansas City on the eve of Jewish Passover - Congress Must Act

Evil infects hate mongers like viruses attack healthy cells in polio or the deadly influenza. When people who harbor evil fueled by hate, and then access guns, the results are as deadly as any lethal disease.

It makes virtually no sense to see gun violence killing more innocent people than some infectious diseases. Consequently, it's incredulous for the US Congress to remain politically paralyzed, being unable to pass laws to regulate the sale of weapons or the ammunition used to kill people.

Tragically, the evil cocktail of hate, racism antisemitism and guns took hold of Frazier Glenn Cross 73, a white supremacist, when he shot and killed innocent Christians at Kansas City, Kansas Jewish Community Centers, on the eve of Passover. 

CNN is reporting that Cross opened fire at two Kansas City-area Jewish centers. But the three people he killed were Christian.

The suspect, Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, faces charges of first-degree murder. Organizations that track hate groups describe Cross, who is also known as Frazier Glenn Miller, as a long-time white supremacist.  At a news conference on Monday, Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said that investigators had "unquestionably determined...that this was a hate crime."

What's also unquestionable is that Cross (aka Miller) had access to guns. In the absence of deadly weapons, the three innocent Christians, one being a 14 year old young man, who were killed in Kansas City, couldn't have become the victims of this violent hate crime. If the white supremacist had infected the three innocent victims with the plague or a nerve paralyzing toxin, the US Congress would, no doubt, be calling for ways to prevent people from gaining access to deadly biochemical weapons. But, guns are protected by the US Constitution under the Second Amendment so they  don't qualify as being as deadly as biochemical toxins. Although the intention of guns in the hands of a hate filled white supremacist are the same as access to deadly biochemical weapons, the US Congress will, nonetheless, do absolutely nothing to prevent gun deaths, while it's highly likely outrage would ensue to prevent the latter.

We feel tremendous sympathy for the victims of the Kansas City white supremacist killings.It's impossible to understand how evil can so easily overcome innocent people on the solemn occasion of Passover eve. Nevertheless, the mother of the 14 year old killed, who is also the daughter of a second victim, and who found both of their bodies, asks for prayers for herself and the others. As a survivor, she expressed tremendous faith, saying that the killings of her father and son will somehow lead to a spiritual community awakening, by bringing people together in shared grief. She's obviously a lady strengthened by her extraordinary faith.

By continuing to allow guns and ammunition to remain unregulated, our US Congress is behaving irresponsibly. Congress has the means to pass laws to prevent many gun violence deaths but remain unable to act - like they just don't get it....guns cause preventable deaths, it's as simple as that.

Meanwhile, political inaction permits evil, harbored by hate mongers consumed by delusions of power, to access guns for the purpose of infecting harm on innocent people.  

Our sincere sympathy to the innocent Kansas City victims of the Passover eve gun killings.