David Parnham, an open white supremacist who called himself the “Muslim Slayer” and who sent packages of fake anthrax to his enemies, has been sentenced to a little over 12 years in prison for his “Punish a Muslim Day” campaign that he helped spread in the UK last year.
A 36-year old IT systems analyst from Lincoln, Parnham sent out a series of anonymous letters to the public early last year, including to numerous British mosques and MPs, that there would be a “Punish a Muslim Day” on the 3rd of April, in which he hoped to encourage a day of attacking Muslims.
Claiming that the West was being “overrun” by Muslims, Parnham created a scoreboard for participants to compete against different types of attack, ranging from pulling off women’s hijabs to acid attacks, torture and bombing mosques, and even “butchering” Muslims with knives and guns.
Parnham also sent letters to numerous British mosques, which included drawings of Muslims being beheaded with a swastika-covered sword. He signed these letters as “Muslim Slayer”.
While the actual day passed without major offences, the trauma felt by both the Muslim community and other minorities were severe. Tell Mama research showed that the “Punish a Muslim Day” did in fact rise the levels of Islamophobia in the country, with 37 offline Islamophobic incidents directly referencing Parnham’s campaign.
The head of the Counter-Terrorism Policing in northeast London, Detective Chief Superintendent Martin Snowden, stated about Parnham’s affect on the Muslim community:
This case has affected a substantial number of victims and its impact has been felt across the country and overseas…the abusive, racist, and threatening language used in the letters was deeply concerning and created considerable distress which cannot be underestimated.”
During the trial of Parnham, it was revealed that he was both radicalized and inspired by the American white supremacist and terrorist Dylann Roof, who shot to death nine African-American worshippers in a Charleston church in 2015.
Writing a fan letter to Roof in 2016, Parnham wrote:
I just wanted to thank you for opening my eyes. Ever since you carried out what I’d call the ‘cleansing’, I’ve felt differently about what you’d call ‘racial awareness’. My main reason for disgust is Muslims.”
Parnham has now admitted to 15 different offences, ranging from soliciting murder to the involvement of hoaxes that included bombs, and will sit behind bars for 12.5 years.
While the sentencing of one white supremacist and Islamophobe sets an important precedent for future acts of violence and terrorism from right-wing extremists, it still remains as one of the most pressing issues in our world today. With blatant Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric on the rise, it becomes more important than ever to properly persecute and respond to the rise in neo-fascist acts of violence.
“Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another.” —Holy Quran 49:13
On Saturday, August 3, 2019, a young American male entered a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas and opened fire, killing 22 people, eight of whom were Mexican nationals. The rampage, which was one more mass shooting on an ever-lengthening list of such abominations, elicited a predictable outpouring of heartfelt grief, sympathy and concern for the victims and families, but few dared to suggest that this tragedy was merely symptomatic of a tenacious and longstanding American societal malignancy.
This malignancy has two virulent components: gun violence and white supremacy. White supremacy stems from the white Euro-colonizers who originally established the U.S. on the blood of millions of Native Americans. Author and lecturer Barbara Alice Mann has not exaggerated when she refers to the colonization of North America as “a 500-year organized crime spree.” The capitalists who descended from the original white Euro-colonizers amassed their fortunes by the trading in and using slave labor. As Professor Julia Ott of the New School for Social Research writes, “Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism.”
Native People’s scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. explains how the whites viewed the Native and African Americans. “Because the Negro labored, he was considered a draft animal,” explained Deloria, “Because the Indian occupied large areas of land he was considered a wild animal.” Highlighting the tenacity of white supremacy, Deloria writes, “Whites have always refused to give non-whites the respect which they have been found to legally possess.” He goes on to point out that when it comes to the legal rights of non-whites, there is a contemptuous disregard exhibited by the whites.
The same contemptuous attitude is often exhibited by whites towards Mexicans and Latin Americans, as is exemplified by the current U.S. president and his racist remarks on social media and at rallies. Last October, he wrote of an “invasion” of immigrants at the U.S. - Mexico border and even sent troops to stop them. Oddly enough, the White House resident even accused Mexico of “abusing” the United States and must “stop the invasion of our Country by Drug Dealers, Cartels, Human Traffickers, Coyotes and Illegal Immigrants.” The U.S. president denied any connection between his racially inflammatory rhetoric and the admission by the El Paso Walmart gunman that he wanted to shoot as many Mexicans as possible in “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
If there is a “Hispanic invasion” the U.S. itself is primarily responsible for creating it. After the American war on Mexico, tens of thousands of immigrants began to enter the U.S.; the numbers rose due to increased demand for agricultural workers after the Civil War and again after the First World War. Likewise during the Second World War, the Bracero program brought migrant workers from Latin America to fill the labor gap. The Latinos, 75 percent of whom may be undocumented, work hard at agricultural and other jobs that whites refuse to fill. These workers, most native to Mexico, are frequently targets of injustices and abuse by their employers, and live and work in constant fear of deportation by U.S. immigration authorities.
Then there is the pandemic of gun violence in a country that has an estimated 390 million firearms, the highest in the world. The United States has the highest rate of murder and manslaughter in the so-called developed world. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. citizens own firearms, a right attributed to the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It is not clear and has been a matter of debate whether the amendment was intended to grant a collective right to the state or an individual right for gun ownership. In fact, the individual right to possess firearms was not confirmed until 2008 in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller.
The gravity of the societal malignancy in America is illustrated by the unconscionable statistics. Guns are the second leading cause of death for white children and teens, and the leading cause of death for Black children and teens. In an average month 52 women are shot to death by an intimate partner and some 4.5 million have been threatened. An astounding 3 million children witness gun violence every year. Rather than protect, access to a gun increases the risk of death by homicide twofold. Strangely enough, as if inflicting hatred upon themselves, white men commit 74 percent of the suicides by firearms.
Band-Aid fixes are proposed for the gushing wound of American gun violence. Politicians promise to pursue “responsible legislation” for gun control. Yet no one dares to ask why the sale of military assault weapons is permitted in the first place. No one connects the gun violence on an individual level with the cultural violence perpetrated by the American government. A casual review of American history will convince the reader that violence is the American solution to all problems, even the problem of inadequate diplomatic skills.
Such violence began with the much lauded founding father, George Washington, who was a slave owner, and viewed Native People’s claims to their land “as an obstacle to easy and fluid commerce.” William Henry Harrison considered “the murdering of Indians in the highest degree meritorious.” Of course the “merciless Indian Savages,” as Native Americans were referred to in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, honored their Law of Innocents, which forbad the killing of women, children and elders, and dated back to at least the 12th century.
At the heart of all the vigils and gatherings, outpourings of sympathy and empathy, speeches by politicians and pleas for love and forgiveness by clergy, lies a failure to address the depth of the societal malignancy driving mass shootings: namely, the futility and abject pointlessness of the American way of life. “The shooter is just a momentary concentration of everything else grinding the dignity and meaning out of American lives,” explains American author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. Appearing to confirm this analysis, the shooter in the El Paso massacre reportedly has written, “I'm not really motivated to do anything more than what's necessary to get by. Working in general sucks…”
What, then, is the cure, if there indeed is one? For starters, Mann suggests, “Open admission of past transgressions must be required.” She continues by giving the example of Germany, where the U.S. organized tribunals at the end of the Second World War, as a possible paradigm to follow in setting up what she refers to as Truth and Justice Tribunals. Similar tribunals were established in South Africa following the long-awaited collapse of the apartheid regime there.
“We await a restructuring of American life into real communities of people working together at things that matter,” writes Kunstler, “and it will require the demise of the things that have worked so hard to destroy all that, namely, the tyranny of the giants, the town-killing Walmarts, the suffocating monster of government, the media manipulators of reality, the too-big-to-fail banks.” Concurring while urging more definitive action, scholar and activist Ward Churchill notes, “The U.S., at least as it has come to be known, and in the sense that it knows itself, must be driven from North America.”
The racially-motivated massacre in El Paso is, as are all such abysmal acts, the antithesis of what the Holy Quran recommends: that we should come to know one another—not kill one another. Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains that the verse points to the diversity of humanity, which should cause people to gain a deeper appreciation of one another. By dividing human beings into diverse peoples of different colors, customs and languages, God has placed us under perhaps the greatest test of all; a test that white America is failing miserably.
It’s become an almost every day occurrence in America. Mass shooting incidents has become so normalised in the country with staggering statistic of 251 shootings in just 2019.
El Paso, Texas was the scene of the 252nd mass shooting. One of three in that day alone, but El Paso stood out for a number of key reasons.
One was the scale of the massacre. 20 were confirmed dead and another 24 injured. The suspect, Patrick Wood Crusius, wrote a manifesto that was published on 8CHAN 20 minutes before going out with an assault rifle. It was filled with White supremacist rhetoric and had clear language expressing hatred towards immigrants and Latinos in particular.
It also expressed ideas that are regular soundbites for Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Republican Party, such as “Hispanic invasion“, Democrats are using “open borders“, and “free healthcare for illegals” to attract new voters.
His social media praised Trump and, in particular, his effort to build a wall across the border. El Paso is also known to be a place along the Mexico-US boarder that is frequently visited by Mexicans.
Everything points towards this being a targeted terrorist attack. His motive and act of violence was designed to maximise terror and was deeply ideological and political. Yet Crusius is not being charged as a terrorist, but rather as a murderer who committed a hate crime. Why?
Media outlets have been shy in calling him a terrorist as well. Despite the information about his support of Trump and the contents of the manifest being made known by Sunday morning, majority of outlets including UK media did not report them. CNN reported that same morning that the FBI is investigating the incident as “domestic terrorism”. A piece of information that didn’t make it to the BBC or any other media outlet for the rest of the day. Again, why?
The Fox And The Wolf
Malcolm X talks about his concept of “the wolf and the fox”. The wolf is unashamed of their hatred towards you, whilst the fox pretends to be liberal, modern and compassionate. In reality, they both harbour the same hatred and are after the same thing, upholding a system of exploitation via discriminating minorities.
The liberal media is not much different from the fox. They spend a lot of the time denouncing and condemning Trump and others for his overt racist views, but their subtle coverage during terrorist attacks has been clearly discriminatory, both in terms of focus and the manner of coverage. And despite social media pointing this out every time, little has changed.
They helped generate the noise that made the public believe Muslims were the major cause of terrorism and the cover for the growing White Supremacist threat is now undeniable.
Till this day, the same media outlets have whitewashed the coverage of White terror incidents. They’ve described them as mentally ill or lone wolves rather than focusing on the clear ideological underpinnings of their actions as they have done with terrorists of Muslim background.
Doesn’t Western media understand that this kind of discriminatory coverage led to the rise of Trump and his White Supremacists?
After all the white washing, they have given hate preachers in power a free pass. How else could Trump get away with deflecting blame from himself by saying Crusius was “mentally ill” if western media, across the board, did not already cement that narrative? The liberal media in the US and generally across the West may be against Trump but have hardly been on the side of minorities.
It’s All About The Benjamins
The NRA had been lobbying the government to pull the US out of an International Arms Trade treaty, which as signed by Obama in 2013, is to help prevent the use arms for war crimes and human rights abuses. This stopped the US selling arms to the likes of Syria, North Korea and others. Trump realised the NRA’s goal and took the US out of the treaty.
The NRA opposed this because it cuts the main revenues for the US arms trade: autocratic militarized states and areas of the world where conflict is proxy and escalating. Nations such as North Korea and Syria essentially.
But it’s not just the US. The NRA has financial ties to companies that operate globally such as Beratta and Glock and work globally. The NRA are also actively lobbying countries such as Brazil and One Nation in Australia.
The NRA…serves as a spiritual godfather to gun groups around the world.”
Foriegn Policy, Oct 19th 2009
All the lobbying the NRA does makes guns more available in those countries, but it affects countries that do have gun laws in place.
According to the US Government Accountability Office, 70% of traceable guns that were seized in Mexico between 2009-2014 were sourced from the US, smuggled into the US, and used across the country. In 2017, the total number of deaths due to gun violence in Mexico reached 30,000.
On top of that NRA has lobbied for laws to stop collecting data on where the guns and who the guns are going to. Any accountability and transparency, much like the International Arms Trade treaty, is just bad news for their bottom line.
Responsible Gun Laws Anywhere Are A Threat to Gun Markets Everywhere
As soon as ethical standards for selling of guns are legitimised and in force domestically, of course conversation of similar global standards will be legitimised too. And vice versa. This will invariably lead to less sales. The NRA and others say it is a threat to their freedom and it’s a narrative works well among White (and pro-Trump) Americans. But really, it’s a threat to their bottom line.
It’s also clear they are willing to use racism and Islamophobia to their advantage. Whether it’s the War of Terror or demonising Black Lives Matter or protecting the biggest buyers of arms in the US, white people, from feel guilty in buying a gun, its all good. Sales must only go up.
In short, the same vampiric greed of the US arms industry and the NRA, that has caused needless wars and destroyed countless lives beyond US borders, is the same force that refuses to allow needless killing to stop by introducing reasonable gun control.
The same media and US citizens that supported those illegal wars with all their national fever allowed their benefactors to grow so big, those same benefactors are now feeding off the blood of their own countrymen. It’s the same benefactors that have profited from White Supremacy and supported the rise of Trump. The chickens have come home to roost.
The violence we see in the US is directly linked to the violence it exports abroad. Its media is just as united on narrative when it comes to US foreign policy as it is when it comes to domestic terrorism.
Will their liberal factions and their media realise their role in all of this or will they continue to be in denial? Perhaps they are in on the deal. Who knows? But if Trump’s and his racist movement cannot make them look at themselves critically, then nothing will change and US violence will continue to plague themselves and the world.
Two Mosques were hit in a deadly terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday, March 15, leaving 50 people dead and more than 40 injured.
One gunman has been charged and is said to have acted alone in the massacre. However, one other suspect has been charged with inciting racial hatred and another faces firearms charges. The name of the shooter has been released but I have decided not to include it in the article because to me, it does not matter. Instead, I would like to use this piece to highlight the growing threat of white nationalists.
A day before the attack, the suspected shooter posted a manifesto on a forum site and a link to his Facebook page where he would live stream the attack; there are people out there in this world that saw the post and knew what was going to happen. The manifesto includes anti-immigration and Islamophobic writings. According to the manifesto, the shooter had been planning the attack for two years, this man had two years to contemplate his actions. Despite what some on the mental health defence may think, the attack was not something that happened in the “spur of the moment”.
Many Canadians are horrified over the New Zealand attack, as the shooter had fellow mass murderer Alexandre Bissonnette’s name scribbled on his weapon. Bissonnette had opened fire at a Mosque in Quebec in 2017 before the incident he was seen as nothing more than an online troll with right-wing views, who often stood up for Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Bissonnette and the New Zealand shooter both used their presence online to express these right-wing ideologies, arguably, the New Zealand shooter glorified Bissonnette and was inspired by his actions.
Despite the gunman bearing white supremacist symbols and slogans on the firearms used to slaughter 50 people, American President Donald Trump has declared White Nationalists are not a growing threat to society. Donald Trump has refused time and time again to admit that the alt-right are dangerous individuals.
The riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division. We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!
This tweet was from August 2018 after Unite the Right 2 in Charlottesville. Donald Trump seems to have a knack for ignoring white supremacy, even when it’s in his own backyard.
According to other sources, white supremacist groups are on the rise and are being fed by their growing internet platforms in countries all around the world, including Canada. In the United States alone there are 1,000 active hate groups.
In the documentary, Alt Right: Age of Rage we are shown that neo-Nazi groups such as the American Renaissance have been around since the 1990s.
This particular group started out as a magazine publication that held conventions, now they have moved to the medium of the internet and YouTube. If we have known about the existents of these groups for so long and have now seen the terror they incite, then why aren’t the governments stepping in on their operations?
In short, no matter how hard our government officials close their eyes, White Nationalist groups will not just go away. They aren’t neutral parties. They use YouTube and online forums to advocate the inferiority of other races and when people associated with them carry out violent acts, the groups themselves face no repercussions. After 9/11, the American government incited the war on terror and tightened airline security to an extent no one had ever seen before, now my question is, why can’t domestic terrorism spark this kind of reaction?
The names and pictures of the victims of the New Zealand attacks have now been published on social media and a LaunchGood project has been opened to help the victims and their families.
In the wake of last Friday’s terror attacks in Christchurch, it has become embarrassingly clear that Muslims haven’t really understood the multi-faceted nature of white supremacy, writes Dr Sadia Habib.
After the grief of Friday’s terror attack at two mosques in Christchurch, Muslims around the world have been mourning, reflecting and processing how this atrocity occurred.
More than ever before, we must urgently read and learn about the basics of how race, racism and white supremacy operate.
What is white supremacy?
The opening words of Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract introduce us to the meaning, function and nature of white supremacy as an ‘unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today’ (p1). Mills details at length which theories you will encounter in your politics and philosophy textbooks, and it won’t be about the system of white supremacy.
Moreover, what we must never forget is that this ‘omission’ is ‘not accidental’: ‘standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination’ (p1).
What is the function of racism?
Where, why and how is white supremacy pervasive in our world?
These are core questions we should be visiting and re-visiting.
Beyond far right racism
There are different ways we might begin to try and understand how Christchurch could have happened. Comprehending what happened is incumbent on us all who yearn for a world without Islamophobia. We can’t simply bury our heads in the sand, and leave the few to speak up against rising Islamophobia. That’s not the Islamic way.
Christchurch massacre suspect Brenton Tarrant
Some have been reading through the killer’s manifesto – The Great Replacement – to try and make sense of what led to this unthinkable act of violence against Muslims.
That alone is not enough. It’s far too easy to blame far right extremists for white supremacy.
We need to move beyond focusing on far right racist rhetoric. We need to do more than boycott the tabloid gutter press, like the Daily Mail.
We can’t just keep on sharing those clever memes and infograms that rightly highlight how mainstream media perpetually represents Black people as ‘thugs’, Muslims as ‘terrorists’, and Whites as a ‘lone wolf’.
BBC Newsnight platforming Islamophobes
Of course, we must keep on interrogating how the mainstream media is complicit in emboldening the far right, in normalising far right White supremacists, in readily giving extremist White racists a platform.
On the very day that the Muslim Ummah was grieving globally about Christchurch, popular news and current affairs television programme, BBC Newsnight, invited Generation Identity onto the show.
And that’s how white supremacy works – in the case of BBC Newsnight, we see how whiteness operates to serve and protect white supremacist thinking, ironically under the guise of faux anti-racism. Are savvy enough to recognise this and tackle this?
Invisible Muslims
Where are we failing when it comes to knowing how white supremacy operates? Moving beyond the aforementioned examples of the Islamophobia of far right extremism and the mainstream media, more importantly, we must also dissect the invisibility of Muslims.
White supremacy doesn’t just perpetuate negative representations of Muslims, it also works in cunning and strategic ways to promote the positive representation of white actors, at the expense of Muslims.
Muslims are either painted as villainous, or they are erased. White supremacy isn’t just about Muslims being vilified in the media, whilst whiteness is typically glorified or vindicated. It’s way more than that.
It’s our responsibility to learn what constitutes whiteness and how it reigns supreme in multi-faceted ways.
EggBoy and PM Jacinda Ardern
Think deeply about the humanisation of whiteness – of white terrorists, white racists, white politicians, white pretty-much-everyone. Even that young boy who we can’t help but cheer on – EggBoy.
Of course it’s very easy to commend EggBoy and the NZ PM Jacinda Ardern. Muslims and all seem to be understandably bowled over by the compassion of these two and their actions in our names.
But racism operates in such insidious ways that the media will keep on reproducing these actors as white saviours, again at the expense of the Muslim saviours and Muslim victims.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
Much as we might admire EggBoy and Jacinda, we must continue to ask questions about why Muslims aren’t at the forefront of positive media attention.They very rarely are. If they are, we feel we are expected to feel relieved, excited or grateful.
Why are Muslim victims not humanised in painstaking detail, as White victims of terror and even White terrorists are? Think Manchester. Think Je suis Charlie. Think about the killer of Jo Cox described as a timid man who loved volunteering and gardening.
When Mills refers to the political system of white supremacy that’s made the world what it is today, we can see how this relates to what is erased in media narratives about Muslim lives, communities and deaths. Again, as Mills reminds us, this erasure is never accidental, but reflects, both wittingly and unwittingly, the status quo of white supremacy.
Humanising whiteness
That’s how racism operates at every level. Not just demonising Muslims, but importantly humanising white terrorists, white criminals, white regular folk, white politicians, white everyone.
White supremacy is reproduced everywhere. Seemingly benign words and actions relentlessly repeated by the institutions of politics and media are often not virtuous or harmless. They serve to perpetuate the myth of white innocence, white compassion, white saviours or white fragility. Whiteness as the norm. And construct everyone else as the opposite. As abnormal, and as deviant.
If we don’t educate ourselves on the meanings, practices, and systems of racist oppression, how can we ever even begin to disrupt and dismantle these insidious injustices?
Ask. Read. Reflect.
It’s imperative then that we keep on asking important critical and nuanced questions. We question. We read. We reflect. We write. And we continue until we better understand how racism and white supremacy operate at every level in society to keep us down, keep us ignorant and keep us oppressed.
Dr Sadia Habib is author of Learning and Teaching British Values (Palgrave, 2017). She is co-founder of The Riz Test and co-editor of The Bookslamist. You can follow her on Twitter on @educ_research.
Pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson, center, and his wife Miriam speak with Trump advisor Steve Bannon at the president’s inauguration on 20 January 2017.
A much-discussed article in The New York Times about pressure on President Donald Trump to fire his advisor Steve Bannon contains this intriguing sentence:
Mr. Bannon’s ability to hang on as Mr. Trump’s in-house populist is in part because of his connections to a handful of ultrarich political patrons, including Sheldon G. Adelson, the pro-Israel casino magnate who is based in Las Vegas.
As executive chairman of Breitbart News before joining the Trump campaign, Bannon transformed the right-wing outlet into what he described as the “the platform for the alt-right” – the collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists who have been the renewed focus of outrage since their violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.
Israel’s silence
Bannon is widely viewed as the champion of the white supremacists – some of whom were openly parading with Nazi flags – and the reason why Trump did not explicitly condemn them immediately after one of their number, allegedly James Alex Fields, 20, rammed his car into counterdemonstrators killing 32-year-old Heather Heyerand injuring more than a dozen others.
Hence the renewed pressure on Trump to fire Bannon. But if Bannon supports the white supremacist and clearly anti-Semitic far-right, why does he enjoy the backing of Adelson?
The Las Vegas billionaire, as is well known, is a major financier of the US Republican Party and one of the biggest donors to pro-Israel organizations in the United States. Adelson has said he regrets serving in the US army, instead of Israel’s.
He is also a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – and that’s where the answer can be found.
Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, have been conspicuously silent about Nazis rampaging in Charlottesville – all the more strange since Israel is usually quicktoexploit international events to its advantage. (After three days of silence, Netanyahu finally, on Tuesday, tweeted a general condemnation of “anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and racism” without specifically mentioning Charlottesville.)
Why is the “Jewish state” apparently so reluctant to speak out against Nazis?
Israel’s anti-Semitic alliances
While Israel purports to be the protector of Jews all over the world, Zionists historically made alliances with the world’s most lethal anti-Semites. Zionists and anti-Semites, after all, shared the analysis that Jews do not belong in Europe, so why not cooperate to transport them somewhere else – Palestine.
This odious alliance continues in updated form, as journalist Max Blumenthal observed:
A cornerstone of Israel’s policy today is to cement ties with other ultra-nationalist, racist and Islamophobic forces around the world – even if they are also anti-Semitic.
A striking example is Netanyahu’s own embrace of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, despite the latter’s recent praise for Viktor Horthy, the wartime ally of Hitler who oversaw the murder of 500,000 Holocaust victims.
Israel’s interests took precedence over the safety concerns of Hungarian Jews, as Netanyahu ordered his foreign ministry to tamp down criticism of Orban’s anti-Semitic dog whistles.
Notably, Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi ideologue who wants to create an Aryan homeland in North America, has called his mission a “sort of white Zionism.” Spencer has ties to another senior White House advisor, Stephen Miller.
A similar ideological alliance prevails inside the White House. And Israel has guarded it: Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, publicly defended Bannon in the days following last November’s election, after American Jewish groups strongly criticized Bannon’s appointment to a top position.
Ideology and convenience
But the Adelson-Bannon partnership is also one of convenience. The Adelson-backed Zionist Organization of America is waging a campaign against Trump’s National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which aims to portray the army general as “hostile to Israel.”
McMaster also happens to be one of Bannon’s key opponents inside the White House.
Establishment Israel lobby figures, such as the Obama administration’s ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, have leapt to McMaster’s defense:
Choose your war
There are substantive issue at stake. Part of Bannon’s ultra-nationalist “America First” agenda is opposing some US military interventions, particularly a renewed “surge” in Afghanistan that is supported by McMaster and US defense secretary James Mattis.
That is not Adelson’s – or Netanyahu’s interest – however. Bannon and other ultra-right figures including White House advisor Sebastian Gorka – have been key opponents of the international deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program. Blocking or undermining the Iran deal has been Netanyahu’s preoccupation for years.
Bannon and Gorka furiously opposed the State Department’s recent certification that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the agreement.
The Zionist Organization of America’s key allegation against McMaster is that he is too sympathetic towards Iran.
Reporting by The Forwardrevealed that Gorka is a member of a Hungarian far-right group that was controlled by the Nazis during the war, and has given backing to an anti-Semitic militia.
For those who support justice and oppose war and racism, there is no “side” to choose in this battle. On one side, you have the Bannon-Adelson faction pushing extreme Zionism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy and possible war with Iran. On the other, you have have the McMaster faction, backed by the DC establishment, which wants to perpetuate America’s existing imperial wars, starting with escalation in Afghanistan.
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