PECCATO CHE POCHI LO LEGGERANNO PERCHE’ E’ INTERESSANTE MOLTO
E TRA L’ALTRO SI NOTA LA DIFFERENZA FRA ISLAM E CRISTIANESMO, ANCHE
Terrorism in Charleston
By Jelani Cobb
During the second debate of the 2012 Presidential campaign, Mitt Romney repeated the frequently levelled Republican charge that it had taken Barack Obama many days to refer to the attack upon the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi as terrorism. Obama disputed that, and the two men argued back and forth until the moderator, Candy Crowley, intervened to say that the President had in fact referred to the incident as an “act of terror” the day after it happened. In the ensuing partisan scrum, conservatives and liberals debated the nuances between an “act of terror” and “terrorism,” proper. Beneath this philological fracas lay a truth evident to political speechwriters, eulogists, and news anchors: in times of tragedy, language matters.
The Charleston police were quick to label what happened in the sanctuary of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last Wednesday night a “hate crime.” Many crimes are motivated by hatred, yet we reserve the term “hate crime” for an act motivated by an animus that has been extrapolated beyond any single individual and applied to an entire segment of the populace. The murder of nine black churchgoers during Bible study is an act so heinous as to be immediately recognizable as a hate crime. But it was not simply this. We should, for all the worst reasons, be adept by now at recognizing terrorism when we see it, and what happened in Charleston was nothing less than an act of terror.
Yet the term was missing from early descriptions of the incident. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, in his initial assessment, said, “I just think he was one of these whacked-out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that.” On Thursday, Governor Nikki Haley posted a statement on Facebook noting that “while we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” As a matter of morality, the actions of Dylann Roof, who confessed to the murders, may be a conundrum, but his motivations are far from inscrutable.
The Patriot Act defines “domestic terrorism” as activities that:
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended—(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.
At a minimum, the murders were intended to intimidate and coerce the black civilian population of Charleston, and beyond. A friend of Roof’s said that he had talked about wanting to start a “race war”—something that Roof also reportedly confessed to investigators. And he apparently based his acts on vintage rationalizations for terrorist violence in American history.
When Tywanza Sanders, a twenty-six-year-old man who was in the church, urged Roof to spare the lives of the congregants, Roof stated that his actions were necessary. “You are raping our women and taking over the country,” he reportedly told Sanders, before killing him. A century ago, the film “The Birth of a Nation” exalted the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction as the necessary deeds of men committed to defending white women from the sexual menace of newly emancipated black men. American anti-terrorism law has its legislative roots in the Klu Klux Klan Act of 1871, which broadly empowered President Ulysses S. Grant to prosecute Klan members for abrogating federal law regarding black rights. Nine counties in South Carolina were so deeply suffused with Klan influence that they were placed under martial law. The Klan emerged not solely as an expression of concern for women but also in response to the growing political power of blacks in the postbellum South—people who, from the Klan’s vantage point, were taking over the country. In “The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government,” published in 1873, the journalist James Shepherd Pike described a set of circumstances in which the white population was imperilled by the presence of black elected officials in the state legislature. The practice of lynching—there were more than a hundred and fifty lynchings in South Carolina between 1877 and 1950—facilitated the disenfranchisement of blacks and the retention of political power in white hands.
Twenty years ago, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people, the act was quickly understood as terrorism. We tend not to recall, however, that McVeigh was trying to realize the plot of “The Turner Diaries,” an apocalyptic novel that details a white man’s war against a federal government under the control of minorities and their white enablers. The F.B.I. Web page on the Murrah bombing lists it as “the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.” That designation overlooks the Tulsa riots of 1921, in which a white mob, enraged by a spurious allegation that a black teen-ager had attempted to assault a young white woman, was deputized and given carte blanche to attack the city’s prosperous black Greenwood section, resulting in as many as three hundred black fatalities. From one perspective, the Murrah bombing was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, but, as the descendants of the Greenwood survivors know, it was likely not even the worst incident in Oklahoma’s history.
Another word has remained absent from the discussion of the events in Charleston: Obama. The President is an unnamed but implicit factor in the paranoid assertion—attributed to Roof but certainly not limited to him—that blacks are taking over the country. In January, 2008, Barack Obama won the South Carolina Democratic primary, largely on the strength of African-American votes; a state in the Deep South gave a black candidate a crucial push in his campaign for the White House. The recalcitrant pledges to “take our country back” that began after the Inauguration were simply more genteel expressions of the sentiments that Roof articulated.
The fact that Roof appears to have acted without accomplices will inevitably be taken as solace. He will be dismissed as a deranged loner, connected to nothing broader. This is untrue. Even if he acted by himself, he was not alone. ♦
http://linkis.com/www.newyorker.com/ma/mAcfI
Murders in Charleston
By Jelani Cobb
A week that began with public grappling with race as absurdity has concluded with shock, yet again, with race as the catalyst for tragedy. The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black. The people for whom this new tableau of horror is most rooted in American history are black as well. The people whose grief and outrage over this will inevitably be diminished with irrelevant references to intra-racial homicide are black people. There are other, more pertinent questions, not all of them answerable. The most immediate: Who did this? Was it the act of an individual or was it an organized effort? What motivates someone to commit such monstrous acts and how do they rationalize such evil? How much longer can we live like this?
There is a great deal that is still unknown about what transpired last night, but the immediate details—a single white male shooting; a horrific act of desecration; nine people, including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, murdered during worship—are enough to inspire something beyond despair. Two months ago, the country saw video of Walter Scott, an unarmed African-American man, as he was fatally shot by police officer Michael Slager in nearby North Charleston. The two incidents seem like gruesome boomerangs of history until we consider the even more terrible idea that they are simple reflections of the present. The daisy chain of racial outrages that have been a constant feature of American life since Trayvon Martin’s death, three years ago, are not a copycat phenomenon soon to fade from our attention.
At the same time, what happened at Emanuel A.M.E. belongs in another terrible lineage—the modern mass shooting. We have, quite likely, found at 110 Calhoun Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, the place where Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown cross with Baltimore, Ferguson, and Sanford. We periodically mourn the deaths of a group of Americans who die at the hands of another armed American. We periodically witness racial injustices that inspire anger in the streets. And sometimes we witness both. This is, quite simply, how we now live.
For those who know the institution and its history, what happened on Wednesday evening conjures a particularly bitter irony. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1793, is the oldest denomination established by black people in the United States. It owes its origins to white discrimination against black Christians in the eighteenth century, and an incident in which black churchgoers were interrupted while worshipping and directed to the segregated section of an Episcopal church in Philadelphia. For black Christians, the word “sanctuary” had a second set of implications. The spiritual aims of worship were paired with the distinctly secular necessity of a place in which not just common faith but common humanity could be taken for granted. No matter the coming details about the shooting in Charleston, it seems almost inescapable that the assault on a single black church is an inadvertent affirmation of the need for an entire denomination of them.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/church-shooting-charleston-south-carolina
Critics take to Twitter after FBI director says Charleston shooting was not terrorism
By Brittany Levine14 hours ago
Critics pounced Saturday on FBI Director James Comey’s declaration that the fatal shooting of nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina this week is not considered a terrorist act at this time by the national security agency.
The defining line is political motivation, Comey said Friday while in Baltimore.
“Terrorism is [an] act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it’s more of a political act and again based on what I know so [far] I don’t see it as a political act. Doesn’t make it any less horrific … but terrorism has a definition under federal law,” he said, according to news reports.
But when Dylann Roof killed nine black people after an hour of bible study at Emanuel AME Church on Wednesday, he said he did so because African Americans were “taking over our country.” A photo of him on a website registered to his name shows him burning an American flag. A Facebook photo shows him wearing a Rhodesian flag—a defunct African nation which once had white minority rule. He talked about starting a civil war, an acquaintance said. One of the 21-year-old’s victims was a state senator.
All of that has political underpinnings, Comey’s detractors say.
Mercy and a Manifesto in Charleston
By David Remnick
It is an enduring mystery of life how the moral range of humanity can stretch from a twisted young racist such as Dylann Roof, who faces charges of slaughtering six women and three men during a Bible-study class, to a woman such as Nadine Collier, who is the daughter of one of the victims, Ethel Lance, and who was able to find it in her heart to turn to Roof at his bond hearing and say, “I forgive you.”
How many of us are capable of that? Imagine the capacity for grace in Felicia Sanders, who lost her son, Tywanza, in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church massacre, and who said to the alleged killer at the hearing, “Every fibre in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. But as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. But may God have mercy on you.” We enjoyed you. This is a superhuman form of endurance and pity. The world is such a fallen place that it is somehow easier to comprehend the deranged cruelty of Dylann Roof than the unfathomable and uncompromising mercy of Nadine Collier and Felicia Sanders.
And yet this is an old story. To study the history of the black freedom movement is to be astonished by its collective capacity for forbearance. The litany of its great leaders—Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer among them—is vastly outnumbered by the anonymous millions who encountered the noose, the lash, the cattle prod, the attack dog, the laws of Jim Crow, and answered it all, so often, in the spirit reflected by the survivors and the congregation at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Those soldiers of the movement were clear-eyed about their oppressors. They were the least naïve people imaginable and they were hardly weak. But they answered most often not to the understandable urge to vengeance but to the call of a preternaturally elevated form of justice and mercy. Within the black freedom movement, there was always a debate about the tension between nonviolent resistance and the need for resistance and rebellion, between the tactics and rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Black Power movement. But to know the history is to be at once awed and unsurprised by women like Nadine Collier and Felicia Sanders.
Dylann Roof does not stand at the head of a movement. He did not enter Emanuel A.M.E. Church with a mob trailing behind him. He is a loner, a solitary fanatic. But he derives his hatreds and obsessions from a history of American racism and a still-existing cultural seedbed of white supremacism. On Saturday, some persistent amateur investigators on Twitter uncovered what appears to be Roof’s Web site. It is called lastrhodesian.com. The F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies have not yet authenticated the site’s grotesque manifesto or its cache of sixty photographs. But both the 2,444-word-long text (“An Explanation”) and the photographs echo in spirit the on-the-record testimonies of acquaintances and family members who have described, to reporters in South Carolina, Roof’s recent turn to racist statements and behavior.
The manifesto reflects a stark and twisted obsession with minorities and race, particularly African-Americans but also Jews and Hispanics. It is drenched in white-separatist racial solidarity; mordant self-pity; and conspiracy thinking. The text moves from blunt hatred (“Niggers are stupid and violent”) to a kind of lunatic auto-didacticism: “In a modern history class it is always emphasized that, when talking about ‘bad’ things Whites have done in history, they were White. But when we lern about the numerous, almost countless wonderful things Whites have done, it is never pointed out that these people were White. Yet when we learn about anything important done by a black person in history, it is always pointed out repeatedly that they were black. For example when we learn about how George Washington carver was the first nigger smart enough to open a peanut.” (I’ve left all of the grammatical and spelling mistakes uncorrected. It seems the least one could do.)
The anti-Semitism in the text is such that it is a wonder the killer did not make a stop at a local synagogue on the way to Emanuel A.M.E. Church with his .45-calibre handgun. (“Just like niggers, most jews are always thinking about the fact that they are jewish. The other issue is that they network. If we could somehow turn every jew blue for 24 hours, I think there would be a mass awakening, because people would be able to see plainly what is going on.”)
Roof’s photographs appear to show his interest in the racially resonant landscapes of his state. There are pictures of a local plantation; the Museum and Library of Confederate History, in Greenville; and a Confederate cemetery. He shows himself both trampling and burning the Stars and Stripes. (“I hate the sight of the American flag.”) But he displays the Confederate flag with a look of enormous self-regard. In some pictures, he displays the numerals 1488 and 88, a set of code numbers well known in white-supremacist circles. The number 14 stands for a fourteen-word separatist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.” George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, used 88 as a code for “HH”—“Heil Hitler.” “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
In one picture, Roof wears a now infamous jacket (with patches of both the apartheid-era South African flag and the Rhodesian flag) while standing next to a plaque marking where he is: Sullivan’s Island, off the coast of Charleston. Sullivan’s Island is where, in the early eighteenth century, four hundred thousand men, women, and children arrived from West Africa to be sold into bondage. Historians estimate that around forty per cent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America arrived at Sullivan’s Island. In 2008, Toni Morrison led three hundred people in a ceremony on the island commemorating the history of slavery in America. We can safely assume that Roof visited the island in a far different spirit.
“The Last Rhodesian” starts out his text by saying that he was not raised in a “racist home or environment.” But an event from three years ago altered his mood.
“The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case,” he writes. “I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”
The Council of Conservative Citizens is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a modern incarnation of a notorious pro-segregation group of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the White Citizens Councils. The C.C.C.’s Web site calls African-Americans “a retrograde species of humanity,” and it has published caricatures of Michael Jackson as an ape. Its newspaper has encouraged whites to vacation in South Carolina in order to “enjoy a civil liberty that has been denied to them for many years at hotels, restaurants and beaches: the freedom to associate with just one’s own people.” The C.C.C. has tried to position itself as more respectable than the Ku Klux Klan. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall called the C.C.C. “the uptown Klan.”
Such was the nature of Roof’s self-education and inspiration. Unlike so many race murderers of another time, Roof felt lonely, unsupported. He writes in the text about the absence of a coherent movement that shares his desire to spark a race war. He seems resentful that his point of view lacks scale, strength, and organization. “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
Most of the Republican candidates for President were reluctant to speak of the Charleston massacre in political terms. Prayers were routinely offered, but there has been little talk of change of any kind. There was a general refusal to speak of racism or of gun control, lest the tragedy be “politicized.” Some denied race as a motive altogether. Rick Santorum, for one, insisted that the attack was on “religious liberty,” not on black men and women.
Outside Emanuel A.M.E. Church on Saturday, hundreds of people gathered to mourn together. My colleague Jelani Cobb, who is in Charleston, told me he thought the crowd was distinctly mixed, “maybe fifty-five to forty-five black.” Beyond that scene of mourning and love, the one thing capable of lifting the spirit was the thought of those remarkable people at the bond hearing. Bethane Middleton-Brown, whose sister DePayne Middleton-Doctor, was killed, was yet another of these. She told Dylann Roof that she was angry for her loss, but that “we are the family that love built. We have no room for hate, so we have to forgive.” How many are capable of such mercy? Nadine Collier, Felicia Sanders, and Bethane Middleton-Brown do not ask to be admired, but still we honor them and take courage from them and join them in their grief and resolution.
http://linkis.com/www.newyorker.com/ma/mAcfI