In the aftermath of the
shooting attack at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a
suspect seemingly influenced and radicalized by online hate propaganda, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued a comprehensive report looking at the
state of white supremacy in the United States in 2015.
The new report, “With Hate in their
Hearts: The State of White Supremacy in the U.S.,” puts the shooting spree by
the suspected gunman, Dylann Storm Roof, into focus as one of a number of
violent attacks by white supremacists, including major shooting sprees on three
different types of religious institutions. The
report describes a dramatic resurgence in the extreme right since 2000 that has
led to a significant increase in violence – especially major plots, acts and
conspiracies – almost matching that of the era of the Oklahoma City bombing two
decades ago.
“White supremacists are
alive and well and they are operating both in groups and as lone wolves,” said
Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “They engage in every type of
ideological violence, from hate crimes to acts of terrorism, and represent one
of the most serious extremist-related threats in the United States today.”
Among the key findings of
the report from ADL’s Center on Extremism:
– Unaffiliated or independent white supremacists like
Dylan Storm Roof far outnumber white supremacists who belong to specific
organizations.
– Most white supremacists are ideologically motivated by
a series of racist beliefs, including the notion that whites should be dominant
over people of other backgrounds, that whites should live by themselves in a
whites-only society, and that white people have their own culture and are
genetically superior to other cultures.
– Anti-Semitism is also a central component of the belief
system of the majority of white supremacists, who believe that Jews constitute
a race of their own with parasitic and evil roots.
– The tremendous growth of the Internet and social media
has allowed many white supremacists to engage with like-minded people without
having to actually join an organization. Discussion forums like the
racist and antisemitic “Stormfront” allow huge numbers of white supremacists
to network and converse with each other without belonging to a group. Some of
the violent acts conducted or plotted by white supremacists in recent years
originated with online interactions.
– Within white supremacy there are a variety of
sub-movements, each of which contains its own constellation of groups and
individual adherents. Thus, the white supremacist movement has a sort of
perverse “diversity” of its own. These include neo-Nazis, racist
skinheads, “traditional” white supremacists including Ku Klux Klan groups,
white supremacist prison gangs, and Christian Identity adherents.
– White supremacy often goes hand-in-hand with criminal
activity. White supremacists in recent years have been responsible for various
violent criminal acts, including hate crimes, murders and acts of terrorism,
with major attacks in Charleston, South Carolina, Overland Park, Kansas, Oak
Creek, Wisconsin and Austin, Texas, among others.
– White supremacists are in fact the single greatest
source of domestic extremist-related violence in the U.S., surpassing
right-wing anti-government extremists, domestic Islamic extremists, and
left-wing extremists and anarchists.
“White supremacists engage
in a wide variety of activities to promote their ideas and causes or to cause
fear in their perceived enemies,” said Mark Pitcavage, ADL Director of
Investigative Research and the lead author of the report. “But most white
supremacists do not belong to organized hate groups. The size of the
movement is considerably greater than just the members of hate groups.”
