U. Michigan Professor Blames ‘Far Right Wing Jews’ for Charleston Shooting

[leftynyc]

University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole wrote a blog post Sunday blaming “Islamophobes” and “far right wing Jews” for shaping the racist views of Charleston shooter Dylann Storm Roof, despite no evidence that was the case.

“The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine LePens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller, and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto,” Cole writes.

The problem is, Roof’s (alleged) manifesto doesn’t actually say anything about Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Daniel Piper, or even Muslims for that matter. Rather, Cole seems to just assume that because the Roof came across racist European sites, he must have been influenced by them in some way. But there’s simply no evidence of that.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/u-michigan-professor-blames-far-right-wing-jews-for-charleston-shooting/



I'm loathe to find out just how many DUers agree with this moron.

[hobbit709]

1. That merits a major WTF?

[leftynyc]

2. Not really

Some of us always thought Cole was an asshole.

[leveymg]

3. If there's evidence "Roof came across racist European sites" then he was influenced by Islamophobes

On certain subjects, the LePens and Daniel Pipes and Geller and the NeoConfederates run around in the same rutted path, and they do influence each other. Mr. Pipes is a widely influential Far Right Winger who happens to be Jewish and Islamophobic.

Seems to be a connect-the-dots sort of interpretation. It also seems that meiaite.com focused on one little corner of what prof. Cole wrote and makes a point with too broad a brush.

[guillaumeb]

4. Perhaps you are oversimplifying.

If Cole is saying that all of these people and sites are contributing to and promoting an atmosphere of ethnic and racial intolerance. Having read a bit from the people he cites I would agree.

But even if Roof's manifesto does not credit or footnote his influences, his use of commonly used terminology and symbolism could argue that he has read and been influenced by these sources.

[leftynyc]

6. Roof is a disgusting KKK type racist

Nothing special about him at all. If you twist yourself into enough of a pretzel, I would bet anyone could blame violence on whatever they want. Cole just wants to whine about Islamophobes and Jews so here it is. He's an imbecile.

[guillaumeb]

11. Read reply number 8 and it might change your opinion of Cole. eom

[notadmblnd]

5. Did you actually read the blog or did you just read the headline?

http://www.juancole.com/2015/06/islamophobic-influenced-charleston.html

The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine LePens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller, and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto. These same hatemongers helped whip Norwegian white supremacist and terrorist Anders Brevik into a homocidal fever pitch in July of 2011, when he killed 77 Norwegians for allegedly being soft on Muslims.

\

It was apparently similar writings and web sites that made Roof “completely racially aware.”

Unhinged millionaires and bigoted gadflies have a network funded by tens of millions of dollars. It is aimed at disenfranchising Muslim Europeans and Muslim-Americans and putting them under social pressure.

Ironically, some groups connected to the Islamophic Network are, like Geller and Pipes, Jewish. But their anti-immigrant, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric backfired on them in Roof’s case, since he went on heartily to hate Jews, as well. Many American Jews, he held, are pro-African-American, and so he abhorred them, as well.

That far right wing Jews would be trying to teach white people to hate non-Christians boggles the mind, since nothing could be more injurious to the American and European Jewish communities.

But the biggest irony is that their agitation against European Muslims should have helped inspire Roof in South Carolina to kill 9 African-Americans.

[leftynyc]

7. I read the entire disgusting thing

And I read Roof's manifesto also. Not one world about Muslims and only more racism about Jews.

[leveymg]

8. Well here's the rest of Cole's column, and it doesn't support your cherry-picking

http://www.juancole.com/2015/06/islamophobic-influenced-charleston.html

Back in South Carolina, Roof wrote that he first became politically aware with the Trayvon Martin case, in which he strongly took the side of George Zimmerman. He continued:

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

Where would he have found allegations that white Europeans are being victimized by immigrants? Here is what I wrote about Anders Breivik:

“Breivik’s passions were whipped up, according to his diary, by reading anti-Muslim hatemongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes (whose “Campus Watch” is an Israeli settler-oriented attempt to deny tenure to American academics critical of Israel’s oppression of the stateless Palestinians, and to harass more senior professors with character assassination).”

It was apparently similar writings and web sites that made Roof “completely racially aware.”

Unhinged millionaires and bigoted gadflies have a network funded by tens of millions of dollars. It is aimed at disenfranchising Muslim Europeans and Muslim-Americans and putting them under social pressure.

Ironically, some groups connected to the Islamophic Network are, like Geller and Pipes, Jewish. But their anti-immigrant, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric backfired on them in Roof’s case, since he went on heartily to hate Jews, as well. Many American Jews, he held, are pro-African-American, and so he abhorred them, as well.

That far right wing Jews would be trying to teach white people to hate non-Christians boggles the mind, since nothing could be more injurious to the American and European Jewish communities.

But the biggest irony is that their agitation against European Muslims should have helped inspire Roof in South Carolina to kill 9 African-Americans.

—

[leftynyc]

13. No - it doesn't

(and I had already read the entire thing). Just the way the conservatives are doing everything they can to put the blame on anything other than outright racism, it seems the left wants to do the very same thing. His screed against right wing Jews just gives him his own platform to whine about anything having to do with Israel.

[leveymg]

15. All that separates the neocons and the Neo-confederates is the Mason-Dixon line

and consumption of mayonnaise. Racist hate is the common theme that runs through their veins.

[leftynyc]

17. What does that have to do

with Cole's argument?

[leveymg]

18. It has to do with the reaction to Prof. Cole by the OP.

Cole is saying that Jews and Muslims have a great deal to lose by embracing hatred of each other, a racist hatred that is formented by Rightwing extremists such as Pipes and Geller along with the European anti-immigrant neo-Fascist types, like LePen. It is this racism of the Right that influences potentially murderous people like Roof and Europeans like him. Driving all this are genuine bigots on the Right with genuinely big bank accounts, some of whom are Jewish. Sheldon Adelson comes to mind as someone creating an environment that rewards and applauds hatred. There are others of all religious backgrounds.

The writer at the site that the OP links to seems to be twisting what Cole has written to make it sound antisemitic.

[leftynyc]

19. I am the OP

and it does no such thing and Roof was not moved by Jews or Muslims or anything other than his own hatred of those who do not look like him. Bringing Jews and Muslims into it - by anyone on the right or the left - is just a deflection from what this WHITE CHRISTIAN terrorist did to AFRICAN AMERICANS.

[Comrade Grumpy]

20. Roof's own words:

"From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware."

He's on the same page as the Eurabia types. You know, Geller, Pipes, Adelson, et al.

[leftynyc]

21. Really?

and what Jewish problem was he referring to while he was honoring geller and pipes?

[leveymg]

23. Are you the author of the piece that this links to?

Alex Griswold? My response is to him, really.

Why do you deny that Roof has been influenced by Extreme Right racialist hatred that is generated by Islamophobic extremists, and that strain of fascist speech runs across continents and religions, from France to Charleston, and from neocons to Neoconfederates?

Mr. Roof is a polyglot hater, a NeoConfederate Surf Nazi who identifies with a dead order of Rhodesian and Apartheid white supremacists. You think he's just a demented little Christian church mouse whose interests never ventured outside South Carolina? No, he is the blonde-haired, blue eyed face of the new American Hard Right. At a distance, he may look harmless, but he's an all-purpose Right-wing killer. There are many like him, today.

[leftynyc]

24. You and Cole

want to make this much more complicated than it actually is. With Cole, I'm sure it's because he likes blaming the same people for every ill on the planet. He's become a shell of himself and a caricature worthy of nothing but mocking. This is just his latest bullshit.

[notadmblnd]

10. So you support people like Pamela Geller?

I did not read it as him blaming all Jews.

[leftynyc]

14. Why blame Jews AT ALL?

And I made my feelings about geller quite clear when her story was in the news so you can forget trying to tag me with that bullshit.

[JI7]

9. about as stupid but more bigoted than blaming war on christians

[leftynyc]

16. I put Cole in the same

category as those right wingers that want to blame everything except what this is - plain, out and out, racism. Nothing extraordinary about it, nothing intellectual about it. Just plain racism.

[Angry Dragon]

12. I do believe he may be a moron

I wonder what his classes are like

[frazzled]

22. I'm afraid Professor Cole has jumped the shark

Here is a corrective from excerpts of an op-ed piece Morris Dees and Richard Cohen, of the SPLC (oy vey, they're Jews!), published in the New York Times earlier this week:

A VARIETY of clues to the motives of Dylann Storm Roof, the suspect in last week’s mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., have emerged. First, we saw the patches he wore on his jacket in a Facebook photo: the flags of regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia that brutally enforced white minority rule.

Then, a further cache of photos of Mr. Roof — seen in several bearing a Confederate flag — was discovered on a website, Last Rhodesian, registered in his name, together with a manifesto, a hodgepodge of white supremacist ideas. The author (most likely Mr. Roof) calls on whites to take “drastic action” to regain dominance in America and Europe.

These themes, popular among white supremacists in the United States, are also signs of the growing globalization of white nationalism. When we think of the Islamist terrorism of groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, we recognize their international dimension. When it comes to far-right domestic terrorism, we don’t.

...

When, according to survivors, Mr. Roof told the victims at the prayer meeting that black people were “taking over the country,” he was expressing sentiments that unite white nationalists from the United States and Canada to Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Unlike those of the civil rights era, whose main goal was to maintain Jim Crow in the American South, today’s white supremacists don’t see borders; they see a white tribe under attack by people of color across the globe.

The end of white rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, they believe, foreshadowed an apocalyptic future for all white people: a “white genocide” that must be stopped before it’s too late. To support this view, they cite the murders of white farmers in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

...

White nationalist leaders are traveling abroad to strengthen their international networks. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, we have documented more than 30 instances in the past two years. In 2013, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, a group that publishes pseudo-academic articles purporting to show the inferiority of black people, addressed groups of white nationalists in Britain and France on their common cause. “The fight in Europe is exactly the same as ours,” he said.

The movement is bound to produce more violence, not necessarily from organized groups but from lone wolves like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed more than 70 people in his country in 2011 because he wanted “to save Europe from Islam.” Mr. Breivik had ties to American white nationalists as a registered user of Stormfront, a web forum founded by a former Ku Klux Klan leader that has more than 300,000 members (about two-thirds are American).

Europe has also seen the rise of a powerful, far-right political movement that rejects multiculturalism. The anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn in Greece are prime examples. In Germany, there has been a series of murders by neo-Nazis. Britain, too, is experiencing an upswing of nationalist, anti-immigrant politics.

More at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/opinion/white-supremacists-without-borders.html?_r=0

I boldface the statement about Brevik, because it emphasizes that the basis of his Islamophobic sentiments (read, in the context of Norway "anti-immigrant&quot is rooted not in "right-wing Jewish" geopolitical disputes but rather in white supremacist groups such as Stormfront here in the US.

Prof. Cole: shame on you.

[Vinca]

25. "News" not "Jews."

[Dorian Gray]

26. Racist

ideologue searching for more racist ideologies to uphold his views.

Sad sad sad world.

But I think that his world view was perfectly capable of being shaped in SC without having to look abroad at anti-Islamic writings. While I suspect he would hate Muslims, too, this was a crime against Black Americans. They were Christians. He shot them in a Christian church of some great historical significance. I don't know what right wing Jews and anti-Islam have to do with this.

[leftynyc]

27. Exactly my point

There are some here who will not accept the truth. There is nothing profoundly intellectual about this man - he's a stone cold racist. Looks like if some can't blame the US or the West in some way, they simply don't want to talk about this very basic truth.

[Dorian Gray]

28. I also want to point out

that despite saying above that it happened in a Christian church to Christians, I in no way think it was an attack on Christianity. He chose that church and those people to kill because they were members of the African American community in an historical African American place. (I didn't want anybody else who was casually reading to think I thought it was an attack on Christianity. My point was that if he hated Islam he would have attacked Muslims. But he chose Black Americans in a place of African American historical importance.)

I think that people are trying to grasp this horror of what happened in many ways, and they are throwing all sorts of theories out to try to understand where the hatred was bred from. (And the mental illness angle makes it "less scary" in that if you can blame it on illness, then festering hatred bubbling up into society seems less likely.)

[leftynyc]

29. Understood

and I agree 100%.

[DanTex]

30. No he didn't. He correctly pointed out that Roof was influenced by Islamaphobes in Europe.

This is true, since Roof's "manifesto" explicitly talked about problems in Europe with immigrants.

There was exactly one mention of "far right-wing Jews" in Cole's piece, in which he said it was ironic that right-wing Jews like Pamela Geller are preaching hatred towards non-Christians. This is also true: Geller is most definitely preaching hatred.

The article is a cherry-picked hit piece.