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The alleged Buffalo shooter was also inspired by Islamophobia. That’s telling | Moustafa Bayoumi
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.”
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.
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.
Did/do you personally hate muslims?
A muslim man or woman living in their homelands? No.
Did, or do you personally hate blacks?
A black man or woman living in their homelands? No.
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.
Do you consider the attack an act of terrorism?
By definition yes. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at Guardian US
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