Today, Explained - American hate

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

The Christchurch shooting took place thousands of miles from the United States, but for Muslims in America, the threat of white supremacy remains very real. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NYU Stern wants to help you gain core business knowledge plus analytical savvy with its new online MS in quantitative management. You can learn more at stern.nyu.edu slash business ready. That is once more stern.nyu.edu slash business ready. so far 50 dead and the number we told will go up they were killed because they were muslims they were killed because they were praying. Their story must not be only told on TV. We must not become numb as we hear the story again and again and again. The attacks on an African-American church must not be repeated. The attack on a synagogue must not be repeated. An attack on a mosque must not be repeated. There's a pretty good chance you live far, far away from New Zealand.

But this weekend, everyone felt a little closer to the country. There were vigils held for victims of the Christchurch shootings across the world, from Australia to Israel to Washington, D.C. Noam Hassenfeld, you went to the vigil here in D.C. last night, and it sadly wasn't your first time reporting on a vigil after a shooting for the show. It wasn't, unfortunately. I was in the exact same place for a vigil

after the Tree of Life shooting. Back in October, at that vigil, people told me they weren't shocked. And this time, people were saying they felt the same way. I mean, it's very sad to say, but we've been through so many of these that things kind of stay the same. People move on, unfortunately, fast. This is Reza Bagayi. He's a Muslim youth leader who organized the vigil. I mean, unfortunately, you know, we live in a constant state where every day is a threat.

I mean, my mosque has had bomb scares and people have came in, you know, tried to break in and try to, you know, hurt people. And that's a sad reality. I don't think anything's going to change. But Reza says politicians can help change the inevitability that he and others have been feeling. I mean, if you look at the prime minister in New Zealand, her action was, you know, it's amazing. She went to the funerals, the vigils, and she wore a headscarf, right? Like, that's setting an amazing example of world leaders. Immediately, right after she said, this is a terrorist attack, it was fueled by white supremacy. It was fueled by a nationalistic hate, right? We don't accept that. Immediately, she said, we need to take action for gun laws, right? That's how you set an example

for other world leaders. How do you take action in response to horrific events? Haji Dawood Nabi, Naeem Intalha Rashid, Hosni Arafarvin, Abdallah Hidiri, Muqad Ibrahim, and 45 other beautiful souls taken from us. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Somalia, India, all parts of the world. But they were also New Zealanders. At the vigil, I also spoke with Imam Yahya Hendi. He's a Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University.

And he's also the voice we heard at the top of the show. He said he felt let down by American politicians. The voice of President Trump has not made Muslims feel safe. It has not made Muslims feel safe. It has not made Jews feel safe. It has not made immigrants feel safe. He said that if politicians don't step forward, people will have to. We, the people, have the power to vote out those who speak a language of hate.

I have enough faith in America. I have enough faith in the power of the people to come together and honor what Muslims have done and continue to contribute to the United States of America. Imam Hendi says this isn't just an attack on the Muslim community. What happened in New Zealand is an attack on our human family. It is an attack on every Jew, on every Christian, on every Buddhist, on every Hindu, on every Sikh. It is an attack on our very humanity. And therefore, to come together with a united voice, saying we are all united in our fight for peace, is what this is all about. You know, after the Tree of Life shooting,

I started feeling a little scared to go to synagogue. I wonder if going to a mosque feels different at all. I have heard from Muslim youngsters that language of fear. They're afraid of going to the mosque. My message to them, that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do. That's exactly what white supremacists want us to do. They want us to stop going to our mosques, our synagogues, our temples and our churches.

Not going gives them the voice that they have won. We must continue to go and more than ever before. YASMINE AL- My name is Yasmine Al-Hassan, and I am a student at Georgetown University. I am a Palestinian American Muslim. Did you go to mosque on Friday? Yes, I did go to Jum'ah at Georgetown. And what was the scene like? What were you feeling? On Friday, I felt very numb and not shocked. And so in that moment, I wanted to be in a space where I don't have to pretend or feel this need to prove myself.

I have found that wherever I am in the world, if I am in a mosque, I am welcomed as if it is a homecoming. I cannot speak the language. I can speak it poorly. I can literally just walk in and they will welcome me as if I am a sister. And so mosque, it's more than just a place of worship. It's a place of community, which is why when I mourn, when I am hurt, I want to be in a place of community. Was there any discussion of fear, of safety, of being reluctant to go to mosque? I have never felt fully safe here. Like this horrible, horrible tragedy in New Zealand just perpetuates that.

And so, no, I don't feel safe, but I never have. For as long as I can remember, and I was born here, I'm 20 years old right now, I have always felt like the other. I am not Arab or Muslim presenting. I don't wear the hijab. My skin is lighter than that of my brothers and sisters. My middle name is Muhammad. And when I was younger, I hid that because I was ashamed of that. I was ashamed that there's this distinguishing mark. But after all of this time, I am unapologetically, openly Palestinian Muslim because I am fortunate enough to be able to do that without the guarantee of getting killed or hurt. Not all the ones I love can say the same. But I have never not felt like an other here. of getting killed or hurt. Not all the ones I love can say the same,

but I have never not felt like an other here. Do you feel American? When I am in the United States, I am not made to feel American. I have lived here my entire life. I was born here. I was raised here. English is my first language. I carry an American passport.

When I'm in the United States, I don't feel American. When I'm anywhere else in the world, I feel American. Do you have any hope that at any point in the next couple decades, your children's generation, at some point, someone will feel fully and wholly unambiguously American? You can't not have hope. As cheesy as that sounds, and I hate when people say that, but if I'm fighting for something, then I have to have hope that it's going to matter.

What Yasmeen said sort of echoed throughout the vigil. There was this tension. The obvious fact of hatred, the threat of violence, and the reality that it probably won't change anytime soon. And then, this shift. An understanding that there needs to be some kind of hope. Even if it doesn't always seem that reasonable. I have been told time and time again that I, an American born and raised, do not belong here.

I am a Muslim woman of color who has engraved her Palestinian roots into every breath and every word that rolls off this tongue. So I'm sorry that I will never be sorry. And that sorry was not an apology to you, but an apology to younger me looking at myself in the mirror wishing that it looked like just every single one of you. So when I tell you I belong here, it is a fact, it is truth in its entirety. So peace be upon you. And upon you may there be peace. That last voice you heard was a DC poet named Mariam Abu Hazala.

Before that, you heard Noam Hassenfeld from Today Explained. We'll take a look at the rise in white supremacy in America after the break. NYU Stern is the only top-ranked business school offering the flexibility of an online management master's and applications are now being accepted. So here's a bit about the program. It offers core business knowledge with an emphasis on analytics.

Students learn from the same passionate educators, scholars, and business leaders who teach on campus at NYU in New York City. Join a close-knit virtual community of faculty and peers. I've always wanted to belong to a close-knit virtual community. You can find out if you're a fit for the Masters of Science in Quantitative Management from NYU Stern School of Business. It's an online course. Learn more online at stern.nyu.edu slash business ready. One more time, that is stern.nyu.edu slash business ready. On Friday, after the attack in New Zealand, a reporter asked President Trump if he thought white nationalism was a rising threat. I don't really. I think it's a small

group of people that have very, very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that's a case. I don't know enough about it yet. They're just learning about the person and the people involved. But it's certainly a terrible thing, terrible thing. AC Thompson covers right-wing extremism for ProPublica, and I asked him if he agrees. No, I don't think that's true at all. I think if you go back to about 2008, 2009, with the election of Barack Obama, in the US, we started seeing an increase of violent white supremacist activity at that time. And the movement was sort of galvanized and brought back from the dead by the election of the first African American president, by his concern about firearms and interest in gun control, by sort of other issues that motivated them. And so since then, we have seen a steady uptick in violent incidents connected to white extremists. And we've seen a big surge, I believe, in the last couple of years. Yeah, in the last couple of years, of course,

the Unite the Right rallies and the Tree of Life shooting come to mind. But has there been an increase of the smaller stuff too, the things you wouldn't hear about? Yeah, I mean, I think there's several things going on. And one is that the Trump candidacy and Trump election sort of catalyzed a new generation of white supremacist activists, most of them young men under 30. And there was a real new energy in the movement that you hadn't seen for a long time. So there had been this uptick that was slow and steady after 2008. And suddenly, 2015, 2016, you see this explosion of activity. And a lot of that is linked to Donald Trump, that people are saying, hey, this is our guy.

We finally have our moment. The things that he's saying are resonating with me in a way that nobody else ever has. And he was a real sort of driver for the new white supremacist movement. And though we're focusing on the United States here, we should mention that the shooter in New Zealand who was an Australian also made references to Donald Trump, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can see in the writings of the alleged New Zealand shooter that he's drawing from a grab bag of influences, including many American influences. And in the United States, are we talking about like mostly young white men with very sharp, short haircuts? Who is this group that we're talking about?

You know, it has been really interesting. In the last couple of years, what you have seen are many, many young white men who come from middle-class backgrounds, who are college-educated, who are plugged into the mainstream of society, who are drawn to these movements and are getting involved in these movements. And I think there's sometimes this sense that, oh, these white supremacists are a bunch of idiots. They're a bunch of rednecks. And that's just not true. Like, these people are very bright.

They are drawn from sort of the center of society, not the fringes of society. And they have skills that make them very dangerous, both when it comes to proselytizing and when it comes to acts of terrorism. And you've spent time with these groups. What do you think is drawing these young men towards these groups? Are they disaffected by multiculturalism in America? What exactly is it? You know, there's a lot of different things that you hear from the young men involved in these movements. And so one thing that you hear is white people are becoming a minority in this country and minorities are not treated well. And we know that. And we don't want to be a minority. And so there's this sort of fear of a

brown planet. And there's this sort of recognition that to be a person of color or minority in the U.S. has not been a good thing oftentimes. I think another thing that I see is a sort of generalized concern with the future of America and the future of the world and a sort of hunt for answers. And these are folks that rather than saying, oh, the way forward is restraining capitalism or a more ecologically centered future, their answer ends up being, the Jews are behind all this. We need to solve all our problems through purging all people of color and people who are not Christians from this nation

and then that will sort of solve our looming economic class problems, our environmental problems. Like, that's the one-stop solution to make things better. Like, for example, I was just listening to a neo-Nazi podcast, And that was the big conversation is like, hey, if we just get rid of Jews, the vast bulk of the problems in the US will go away. Not all of them, but most of them. And so those are the sort of solutions

that people are finding to what are real problems, whether it's the opiate epidemic, class disparities in the US, concern about global warming and other ecological problems. So I think what you see is young men looking at real world problems and finding these sort of magical and toxic solutions to them. You mentioned listening to a neo-Nazi podcast. How much is just access to online forums emboldening these groups and helping them proselytize their messages.

That is a key factor, right? So if you look back at the history of the white supremacist movement in the US, these people were always early adopters of technology. They were in the 1980s, one of the first groups to start using BBS systems on the internet. I mean, well before anyone else. And the white supremacists had a setup called Liberty Net that they used to organize back in the 80s. But if you fast forward to now, the ability to reach a mass audience through the biggest platforms out there is now available to the white supremacist movement. And the ability to have constant, instant communication between people who are spread all over the country

and indeed all over the world, that's a new thing. So if you look at YouTube right now, there's a whole white supremacist and neo-Nazi world on YouTube. And it's basically the same with every different social media platform. And the sort of circles will pop up. There'll be an outcry, they'll get knocked down, but then they'll pop up again. And so the current white supremacists have access to an audience that their forebears couldn't dream of. So are these white supremacists mostly focused on things like rallies and demonstrations and

terrorist attacks are the outliers? One thing that's happened since the Charlottesville rally in the U.S. white supremacist movement is that there has been a turn away from sort of public protest and political action towards terrorism. And so I've interviewed many people who said, I was at Charlottesville, or I was following what happened at Charlottesville. And what I realized is, it's impossible to affect the sort of change that we white supremacists want to affect in the US through legal means. And the only way forward for us is violent, terroristic struggle. And that is a widespread feeling within the movement now. And I think what we're seeing, whether it's in New Zealand,

or whether it's in Pittsburgh, or whether it's in New York City, is an expression of that turn towards terrorism from the movement. There's always been a terrorist current throughout the white supremacist and white power movement for decades. But this current iteration of it, I think has clearly turned from sort of public facing actions like Charlottesville, like rallies and that sort of thing towards underground action and terrorist action.

So what is the United States government doing to police this unprecedented spread of white supremacy online and in our culture? You know, I think that's a question that a lot of people have been asking over the last couple years. And I want to back up a little bit to explain where I think we've been and where maybe we're going. And if you back up and you go back to 1995, we had the Oklahoma City terror attack carried out by Tim McVeigh, as well as accomplices. Tim McVeigh was a member of the white supremacist movement. He was a member of the militia movement. He was inspired by a white supremacist text called the Turner Diaries. He thought he was going to set off a race war and a war against the U.S. government.

And after he killed 168 people, there was a lot of energy devoted at the federal level to making sure that didn't happen again. And I would say at times there was even probably significant overreach by law enforcement. But there was a whole expertise and knowledge from that time period within federal agencies, as well as local and state agencies, about what white extremism looked like and who these people were and how they organized and what they wanted to do. After 2001 and the 9-11 attacks, sort of interest in that particular discipline, that particular world of terrorism dropped off. And the focus at the federal level, as well as at other levels, became really heavily tilted towards so-called Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic extremism. And that sort of knowledge base disappeared. By the time you get to now,

not only are sort of the people that chased the white supremacists of the 80s and 90s gone and their knowledge gone, but the movement today draws from that earlier era, but is very different in many ways and uses different modalities to communicate, organizes in different ways, but has the same apocalyptic end goal. And so I think there has been a lack of expertise in the last couple years to both draw on the lessons of the previous decades and respond quickly to these new developments. And have you seen a shift in how people in law enforcement that you talk to or deal with in reporting on white supremacy are dealing with this? Yeah, I think that you're seeing law enforcement play catch up and start to jump into this arena and pay more attention to it and try to educate themselves about this new wave of white supremacists. And I think that they were slow to move that way, but they are now moving to confronting this threat.

And I would say that's at all different levels. You may not have a lot of support from that from the very top, and you may not have a sense that this matters from people at the very top, but I know the sort of field agents and the detectives that are out there are looking at this very closely. A.C. Thompson. He's an investigative reporter for ProPublica.

I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. The team's made up of Noam Hassenfeld, Bridget McCarthy, Luke Vander Ploeg, Afim Shapiro, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Siona Petros is our intern, and the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder

makes music for us. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thanks to NYU Stern for supporting the show today. Their new online MS in quantitative management is waiting for you. Learn more at stern.nyu.edu slash business ready. That's stern.nyu.edu slash business ready.