RAP Blogs

  “You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon … He is a terrorist,’” Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia speaking in response to violence in Charlottesville, VA.   

On Saturday August 12th, during demonstrations protesting a white nationalist and Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, an Ohio man drove his car into the demonstrators who were peacefully protesting the white nationalist racist gathering, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19. This was an act of terror committed by a white nationalist and it should be called as such! Kudos to Gov. McAuliffe for calling him a terrorist, other media outposts should follow!   Conflict has been brewing in the southern states over the removal of statues of confederate generals and other figures in the past few years. Removal of four such statues in New Orleans earlier in the year caused similar gatherings by white nationalists and demonstrations by anti-hate and anti-racist groups. It looks like this time the white nationalists wanted to display a show of force. Emboldened by Trump’s election, they sought to bring racist terror and violence back. They chose Charlottesville as a place of conflict because of its historic status and the brave act of the city council to order the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue (the Civil War commander of the Confederate Army). They showed up with helmets and shields ready to fight and engage in acts of violence. According to New York Times, the White Nationalist leaders David Duke (former “Imperial Wizard” of KKK) said in an interview on Saturday that the protesters were “going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump” to “take our country back.” Another ‘prominent’ White Nationalist, Michael Spencer said in an online video titled ‘A message to Charlottesville’ on Saturday: “You think that we’re going to back down to this kind of behavior to you and your little provincial town? No,’’ he said. “We are going to make Charlottesville the center of the universe.”    White Nationalists can’t say it any clearer that this, they are here to take America back to the days of lynching terror and they see Charlottesville as their own ‘center of the universe’. There is no irony here. Charlottesville has become a center of progressive movements in the provincial south. It has voted consistently Democratic for decades and has a progressive mayor, Mike Singer, who said to Trump on Saturday: “I do hope that he looks himself in the mirror and thinks very deeply about who he consorted with during his campaign.”    It is fascinating that when ISIS sympathizers commit similar acts of terror; the media is more than ready to call it as such. In numerous occasions in the past 13 months, big media outlets have been more than ready to call out the acts of terror in Nice, France and in London as such, but there is a reluctance to call this one what it is. In fact media bias goes back to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 when for the first 24 hours, before it became clear that McVeigh and his cohorts with clear white nationalist links had committed the bombing, kept pointing to ‘middle-eastern terror’ groups.    For us in the middle-eastern immigrant community that has long been the subject of stereotyping when it comes to terrorism, this is a moment of truth. We should express our solidarity with the victims of white nationalist terrorism in Charlottesville and stand firm in calling this action what it is. The intolerance of white nationalists impacts our community in the same way. In fact there has been a a significant increase in hate attacks on middle-eastern and Muslim communities of color in the past six months. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States rose 91 percent in the first half of the current year compared with the same period in 2016. Without uniting against racial terror that is anti-Muslim, anti-sematic, anti-middle-eastern and xenophobic, right now and with urgency in Charlottesville, the racist violence will only grow!    I end by leaving you with a simple question: How do you think this act would have been covered by the media if it had been committed by a middle-eastern man or a black man, and what do you think the police response would have been?