What Happened Today: May 16, 2022

Ten dead in Buffalo; Antisemitic attacks, again; Memetic terrorism

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The Big Story

Ten people were murdered and three others wounded in the year’s deadliest mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday. The alleged gunman, an 18-year-old from upstate New York, wore body armor and a livestream camera, broadcasting on the platform Twitch both the shooting and his surrender to police at the crime scene. Investigators say the shooter was motivated to kill Black people at the supermarket in east Buffalo, where approximately 85% of the city’s Black population resides, after posting a 180-page manifesto that celebrated the so-called “replacement theory,” a conspiracy popular among White nationalists that holds white Americans are being deliberately “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities. Many versions of the theory point to Jews as the masterminds behind the replacement. (The gunman who killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, as well as the shooter who murdered 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019, were also proponents of replacement theory.) Investigators say the Buffalo shooter had undergone a mental health evaluation the previous summer after he’d made what he described then as a joke about his intention to commit a murder-suicide, but the comment wasn’t seen as a threat by police, and he was subsequently released. Pleading not guilty on Saturday night, the suspect allegedly told police he had intended to continue the shooting spree at another store. According to the Gun Violence Archive, the Buffalo shooting was the 201st shooting this year in which at least four people had been hurt or murdered. The weekend saw multiple other shootings nationwide, including one at an outdoor flea market in Houston, others across several sites in Chicago, where 33 people were shot and five killed, and one in a Southern California church, where purportedly a Las Vegas man  murdered one person and severely wounded five others before members of the predominantly Taiwanese congregation overpowered the shooter and tied him with an extension cord until police arrived. It remains unclear if the Las Vegas suspect had a motive. 

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/16/nyregion/shooting-buffalo

In The Back Pages: The Rise of Memetic Terrorism

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The Rest

→ For anyone keeping score, in New York City’s ongoing game of “kick the Jews in the teeth,” last week was a busy one for the Jew haters. Last Tuesday, an 18-year-old Jewish student was walking in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, home to a large Orthodox Jewish community, when he was punched in the face by an attacker who, he told authorities, first demanded he say “free Palestine.” Déjà vu, right? Yes, indeed, something similar happened just weeks earlier when a man holding an Israeli flag near an anti-Israel demonstration in the city was punched, knocked down, and kicked while he was on the ground. The assault last week came days after two other antisemitic incidents in which religious Jews were attacked in the Williamsburg and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn. We can’t imagine how such appalling hatred could become normalized in a great city like New York. In other news, the City University of New York School of Law selected Nerdeen Mohsen Kiswani as one of two student speakers to give a commencement address this year. Kiswani heads an organization called Within Our Lifetime that advocates keeping “Zionist professors” off campus and barring “Zionist students” from spaces where Palestinian students are present. Just last week, on her Instagram account, Kiswani “liked” a post celebrating the murder of three Israeli civilians in an axe and gun attack with the text “The independence of their soul from their body is the only independence they will celebrate today” over an image of a man holding a bloody axe. The CUNY speaker also “enthusiastically shared a video of Muna El-Kurd referring to Israelis as ‘Zionist dogs’ who must be cleansed from ‘Palestine,’ while also dehumanizing Zionists as worse than the disease Listeria,” according to reporting from Camera on Campus. - JS 

→ There is a “very, very high risk” of a U.S. recession: That is the frank assessment of Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and the company’s current senior chair, who appeared on “Face the Nation” on Sunday to discuss the U.S. economy and his company’s decision to cut its previous assessment for projected U.S. growth in 2023. China, meanwhile, is already seeing its economy stumbling. With its zero-Covid policy shuttering factories and drastically slowing production, China reported a 11.% decrease in retail sales in April compared to the same time last year. The Chinese government is planning to spend more stimulus money to help offset the weakened economy, and hopes to end its mandated lockdown policy by June.

→ According to the latest data from the CDC, at least 107,000 people died from drug overdoses last year in the United States, a 15% increase from 2020 that’s largely attributed to the prevalence of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that’s 50 times as strong as heroin and appeals to drug cartels that distribute it because it can easily be made from widely available chemicals. Approximately two-thirds of all of last year’s overdose deaths were attributed to fentanyl, though many people who overdose on the drug do not realize they’ve taken it. “The diversifying fentanyl market—from its expanding geographic reach to its appearance mixed in with stimulants and fake pills—makes it difficult to see the end of the growing crisis,” said Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “I do believe that there has to be a ceiling. … But I do not know that we’ve achieved this.”

→ To learn more about “replacement theory,” the paranoid, racist worldview that inspired the Buffalo shooter and other recent mass killings with visions of Jews as the sinister agents engineering “white genocide,” read through Tablet’s archives exploring the history and development of the idea and its migration from France to the United States.

• https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/renaud-camus-great-replacement

• https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/berenice-rome-replacement-theory

• https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-loneliest-hatred

• https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-new-jews

• https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/steve-bannon-jean-raspail

→ NATO is now poised to expand along 810 miles of Russia’s border, with Sweden and Finland’s applications to join the military alliance. It looks like yet another example of how President Putin’s war served to strengthen Europe and NATO and weaken Russia; Putin, however, has dismissed such claims. “NATO expansion is artificial,” he said today. “Russia has no problems with Finland and Sweden, so their entry into NATO does not pose an immediate threat. Russia’s response to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO will depend on the expansion of the alliance's infrastructure.” The two Nordic countries saw their NATO applications briefly imperiled by 11th-hour demands from Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan laying out a series of requirements for Sweden and Finland to join—demands largely tied to Turkey’s efforts to squash the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization that Turkey, the European Union, and the United States all consider a terrorist group. PKK leadership met in Sweden over the weekend, a timely example of the behavior Turkey finds intolerable from its NATO allies. Turkey is also demanding that all arms sales embargoes against Turkey—some of these official, like the United States’, and others unofficial, such as Germany’s—be dropped. “I’m confident that we will be able to address the concerns that Turkey has expressed in a way that doesn't delay the membership,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Sunday.

→ “It’s a full-scale, complete puke of tech,” according to one financial analyst, as a massive sell-off of tech stocks continue and tech companies announce layoffs to compensate. The online car retailer Carvana watched its stock drop by 84% before laying off 2,500 employees. With investors worried about rising inflation, the possibility of an economic downturn, and the underwhelming products coming out of Silicon Valley (see: the Metaverse), even established tech companies Amazon and Alphabet have seen their stocks slide by as much as 50%. Indeed Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Meta alone have lost more than $2 trillion in market valuations since January. 

→ The Ukrainian military reclaimed territory in the critical northeast region of Kharkiv, battling Russia back to its own border before airbombing a bridge that the Russian military had been relying on for its incursions into Ukraine—the second such bridge Ukraine had bombed—giving rise to hopes that the Kharkiv region has successfully been recovered. With Russia still shelling Kharkiv, however, and with especially heavy attacks in the region’s namesake city—Kharkiv is the second largest city in the country, now reduced to ruins—Ukrainian officials are still cautioning residents to take shelter. These officials are also cautioning global leaders about the dire food shortages that Ukrainians are suffering and that much of the world might soon suffer from as well. Russia has blockaded Ukrainian ports, completely halting Ukraine’s exports of grains and oils, threatening the global food supply. “Russia’s war of aggression has generated one of the most severe food and energy crises in recent history,” officials from the Group of Seven said in a recent statement, concluding that the crisis “now threatens those most vulnerable across the globe.” 

→ England’s National Union of Students (NUS), a 100-year-old organization that represents 7 million British college and graduate students, will no longer be formally recognized or given a “seat at the table” by the British government due to “antisemitic rot” at the heart of NUS. The charges of antisemitism focus primarily on statements made by the organization’s former president, Shaima Dallali, who once tweeted a Muslim battle cry against Jews and whose old Twitter profile featured a quote attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. An internal study conducted by the NUS in 2017, meanwhile, found that 65% of Jewish students “either disagreed or strongly disagreed that NUS would respond appropriately to allegations of antisemitism if they arose.” NUS is now working with the Union of Jewish Students to conduct an internal investigation of the organization’s antisemitism.

→ In the wake of the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden declared that “it is time to end the forever wars,” but apparently that time is not quite yet. Today the president signed off on an order to redeploy hundreds of U.S. special force troops to Somalia. President Trump had made liberal use of the U.S. troops stationed in Somalia during his presidency, increasing air strikes and combat activity in the region before pulling out most of those U.S. soldiers in his final weeks in office—a decision based, in part, on the death of a U.S. soldier in Somalia in 2018. Now citing the growing threat of the Al-Qaeda-influenced terrorist organization Al Shabab in Somalia—which currently targets U.S. bases in the region but could grow to pose a larger problem for the United States—the Biden administration will return troops to Somalia with the aim, as one senior official said, of keeping “the threat to a level that is tolerable.”

Additional reporting provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman

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The Rise of Memetic Terrorism

What if the standard accounts of terrorism are no longer valid to explain the acts of radical violence being incubated in the chaos-loving message boards online? The assumption—after attacks like the ones in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, and Buffalo, New York, last weekend—is that the murders are inspired by and intended to serve an actual ideology. But what if this is not true? What if the terrorists in these cases are only adopting the language of political struggle to enact the motivations of the arsonist or the suicide? If that’s the case, then political radicalization, as it’s conventionally understood, may not be the best framework for understanding and dismantling the processes driving these attacks.

“I told myself that eventually I was going to kill myself to escape this fate. My race was doomed and there was nothing I could do about it.” The words come from the manifesto written by the 18-year-old resident of Upstate New York who is now in police custody after traveling to Buffalo to ambush Black people at a supermarket. He livestreamed himself killing 10 shoppers before he was stopped. His manifesto reads partly like an elaborate suicide note written to an imagined community online instead of his actual family and partly like an imitation of previous manifestos written by other notable neofascist terrorists, whom he cites in his letter.

“I’ve only been lurking here for a year and half, yet what I’ve learned here is priceless. It’s been an honour [sic],” wrote the 19-year-old who opened fire on the Chabad of Poway in California in April 2019—exactly six months after another fever-brained racist fixed on the idea that Jews are engineering the demise of the white race opened fire on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg, killing 11 people. The honor described by the Poway shooter referred to his time on the message board 8chan, where he had first encountered the “replacement ideology” and became steeped in the lore of other far-right terrorists like the shooters in Pittsburgh and Christchurch.

A political movement in which every member pens their own individualist political manifesto is, needless to say, incapable of accomplishing anything since it contains no common agenda beyond resentment and the will to murder. Yet, ironically, the desire to become the author of a manifesto, which can provide a way of blathering on into near eternity because the media amplifies its message, is proving to be a powerful motivation to murder.

Terrorism evolves. The 19th-century European terrorists who were active in London, Paris, and other cosmopolitan cities, but most of all in Tsarist Russia, were militant secularists, often anarchists, associated with one variety or another of left-wing liberationist ideology. Rather than all being bloodthirsty nihilists, some of these early political terrorists were more like assassins. In the United States, the prominent terrorists of the 19th century did have a religious character insofar as the Ku Klux Klan and nativist groups attacked Catholic immigrants and Jews as well as Blacks. But the religious motivation for the KKK was essentially sectarian. It was not, as it would be for later waves of Islamic terrorists, an absolutist worldview summoning apocalyptic violence.

What the 19th-century anarchist bomb throwers, the KKK, later nationalist movements like the Tamil Tigers and PLO, and Islamist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS have in common is a canonical doctrine that identities the movement’s ultimate goals and its sources of authority. The new wave of white nationalist terrorism, which struck again in Buffalo, has identifiable beliefs and designated scapegoats but no set ideological program or fixed doctrine, let alone a political map for how to achieve its aims.

The killer in Buffalo wrote in his 180-page manifesto that his radicalization came from searching the internet when he was bored in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ideology he concocted for himself is similar to the one espoused by the Christchurch killer and other “memetic terrorists” in that it is devoted above all to the cause of white birth rates but makes its cause using a pastiche of left- and right-wing political tropes.

Rather than being built around zealots steeped in religion or ideology, the new internet-driven “memetic terrorism” of the far-right seems to appeal to marginalized men who see themselves as victims and seek affirmation from the online social networks in which they were radicalized. They kill not to accomplish anything in particular but to imitate the ritualized murder sprees of the racist killers who came before them and achieved “internet fame.”

“I have to do this before I lose my nerve,” wrote the 21-year-old Texas resident who opened fire at a supermarket in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, killing 23 people. “I figured that an under-prepared attack and a meh manifesto is better than no attack and no manifesto.” The audience for the shooter’s missive was his fellow board members on 8chan.

—Jacob Siegel is a senior writer at Tablet and editor of The Scroll.