Another vicious hate crime was recently committed by a violent extremist, this time by a White man in Buffalo, NY against Black people. After killing ten people in a grocery store, his online ‘manifesto’ was found which featured racist and anti-Semitic smears as well as a warning about the United States being transformed into a country dominated by non-Whites.
This notion of “Replacement Theory” can be found in a number of communities and is treated very differently by the media.
White Supremacists’ Replacement Theory
Anti-immigrant fervor picked up in Europe in 2015, as Muslims fleeing civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) began to flood the continent, and committed a number of terrorist attacks including in Paris, France. Accused of not participating in resettling the MENA refugees, President Obama accepted tens of thousands of additional refugees into the United States that year. In June 2015, Donald Trump seized on public fear of potential Islamic terrorism and announced his candidacy for president with anti-immigrant comments. Just two days later, a White man burst into a Black church and killed nine people. The murderer’s stated motivation was a racist and anti-Semitic perception of the fall of America, after seeing BlackLivesMatter protests:
“I hate the sight of the American flag. Modern American patriotism is an absolute joke. People pretending like they have something to be proud while White people are being murdered daily in the streets…. How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews as well.”
Trump took office in January 2017 and issued an Executive Order to limit the influx of refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries where border controls were considered lax and pushed for building a wall on the southern border to stem the flow of immigrants from Central America. A few months later, White supremacists marched in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 with shouts that “Jews will not replace us!” decrying liberal Jewish groups like HIAS that facilitate non-White immigrants coming to the US. In October 2018, a White supremacist took up that cause and shot 11 Jews to death in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA. His ‘manifesto’ said that HIAS “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.”
The media has sharply criticizes the rhetoric of the White supremacists’ “Replacement Theory.” PBS describes the theory as “a plot to undermine the influence of white people. Believers say the goal is being achieved both through the immigration of nonwhite people into societies that have long been dominated by white people, as well as through simple demographics, with white people having lower birth rates than other populations. The conspiracy theory’s more racist adherents believe Jews are behind the so-called replacement plan.“
What is interesting in the media’s coverage of White supremacists’ Replacement Theory, is that it blends fiction and fact together to make everything appear as racist fiction. In truth, White people DO have fewer children than non-Whites (but birth rates for non-Whites are declining much faster than for White people). Projections by impartial groups like Pew Research estimate that the United States WILL decline to 47% Whites by 2050, from 67% now. The fictional component of the replacement theory is that these developments are part of a concerted plot hatched by Jews, as opposed to natural trends with a variety of causes.
Radical Islamists’ Replacement Theory
The fear of changing demographics is not limited to White Supremacists. It is prevalent among radical Islamists, especially Palestinian Arabs. Similar to their racist brothers-in-arms, they also kill Jews because of their perceived plight.
Arabs began to fear Jews moving to Palestine in 1920, after four global powers – Britain, France, Italy and Japan – convened the San Remo Conference to divide the defeated Muslim Ottoman Empire. The various mandates included the Mandate for Palestine (1922) which came under the British control, that included a call to facilitate the immigration of Jews to their ancestral homeland. Arabs rioted, slaughtered Jews and protested to the British to block the arrival of Jews, even though Jews were the only people moving to Palestine during the last 100 years of Ottoman rule.
Islamic radicals massacred Jews in the holy land in 1921, 1929 and during the multi-year pogroms from 1936 to 1939, in an attempt to maintain a Muslim-majority population in Palestine. During the European Holocaust, Palestinian Arabs effectively lobbied the British to limit Jewish refugees into the land, facilitating the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews. When Holocaust survivors came to Palestine after the war, Arab armies descended upon them to wipe them out for good. In the areas where the Islamists seized land – Gaza and the ‘West Bank’ – they ethnically-cleansed all Jews from the area.
Palestinian Arabs still commemorate the ‘Nakba’ in 1948 when they failed to destroy the Jewish State at its founding and were only able to wipe out Jews from a portion of the land. To this day, Arab leaders ask the British to renounce the Balfour Declaration.
But the media does not remark on the Islamists’ Replacement Theory as being inherently anti-Semitic. When Muslim extremists axe Jewish civilians to death the media adopts the killers’ narrative that they are “resorting to violence” because Muslims are “frustrated.” The Hamas Charter – the worst of all anti-Semitic ‘manifestos’ – and Palestinian leadership incitement to violence are deliberately omitted from the media’s anti-Semitic narrative.
The demographic makeup of most of the world continues to evolve, especially as people migrate to places which offer freedom and opportunity. The United States has long been a destination for immigrants, with the makeup of the home countries pivoting from Europe to Asia and Latin America with the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. In the 1950’s the makeup of immigrants to the US was 75% European, 5% Asian and 9% from Latin America. By the 1980’s those percentages changed to 23%, 26% and 44%.
The changing demographics happened in Palestine as well, where Muslims accounted for 60% of the population and Jews were a minority at 31% in 1945. Today the land is bifurcated, with Israel being 74% Jewish and 21% Muslim, while areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority are 100% Arab, in their ongoing quest for a Jew-free country. Jews moved to the land before the Jewish state was reestablished because it is the center of Judaism, and since 1948, as a safe haven from anti-Semitism.
The fear of racist Whites and Muslims are not unfounded, as it relates to changing demographics. However, the toxicity of their emotions emerges in believing that their new neighbors are inherently problematic, and that the former majority are victims who require protection.
- For White Supremacists, the victims are White people suffering from a non-White invasion; for radical Islamists, the victims are Arab Muslims who must deal with Jewish “European colonialists” (even though Jews from Europe account for less than one-third of Israelis).
- White Supremacists kill Blacks and Jews in an attempt to protect their vision of a White America; Jihadists kill Jews in an attempt to “free Palestine from the River to the Sea” of Jewish invaders.
- The media calls out the racism and anti-Semitism of White Supremacists; HOWEVER, the media and United Nations lambast Jewish victims and protect Palestinian racists, fearing that calling out the obvious evil would hinder the possibility of a two-state solution.
The Great Replacement Theory is portrayed incorrectly in the media. The basic premise that the majority is becoming a minority is true. What is false is that: such dynamic is inherently a problem; is a concerted ‘plot by Jews’; is only limited to White Supremacists; and that the toxic hatred is only fed in social media, as the mainstream press and United Nations promote anti-Semitism and the Islamic Great Replacement Theory all of the time.
Related articles:
In San Francisco Schools, Anti-Zionism is Anti-Racism
Pelosi’s Vastly Different Responses to Antisemitism and Racism
Anti-Semitism Is Harder to Recognize Than Racism
{Reposted from the author’s blog}
