The translators promised visas but made into refugees by the U.S. Army

Julius Motal reports: Working for the US Army in Afghanistan can get you killed, but there’s a silver lining.

The US Army offers its Afghan translators the right to request the Special Immigration Visa (SIV). It’s a program initiated by the US to help certain foreign employees leave their home countries and get on a path to permanent residency in the states—usually for protection from groups like the Taliban. For the last four years, the program has been renewed in the National Defense Authorization Act. This year, however, both the House of Representatives and the Senate failed to vote for the allocation of more visas, which could imperil remaining applicants.

Through that program, Muhammad, a former US Army translator in Afghanistan that I met in the port of Piraeus, Greece, should already be in the US. But like several other forgotten Afghan translators who served the United States, his visa has not come through. After being laid off by his army base in 2014, Muhammad fell into a bureaucratic gap between the United States’ promises to its employees in Afghanistan, and its rocky attempt to withdraw from the country.

Muhammad applied for the SIV in 2014. He was rejected in May 2015. According to the rejection email, his application was ruled invalid on the grounds of “Lack of faithful and valuable service.” Muhammad says that’s because he was fired—but not for lack of faithfulness or value. 2014 was simply the year that the Obama administration started closing army bases, in an early phase of withdrawal from Afghanistan. With fewer bases and fewer troops, fewer translators were needed. Muhammad was downsized by government contractor Mission Essential.

So in January 2016, he decided to make a go of it on his own. He paid $5,500 in smuggling fees to be trafficked from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, and then from Turkey to Greece. By the time he arrived in the port of Piraeus in March, the 22-year-old’s life had been reduced to the phone in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and a sheaf of papers from his job with the United States Army.

His service and his perfect English together, in theory, put him in a better position than most refugees, but because he is Afghan, he isn’t even eligible for any of the expedited European relocation measures that the Syrian and Iraqi refugees sheltering in the port can claim. [Continue reading…]

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Jo Cox was working on report on anti-Muslim attacks before her death

The Guardian reports: Jo Cox, the MP who was killed outside her constituency office on Thursday, was going to warn of an increase in anti-Muslim attacks – particularly against women – it has emerged.

She was planning to address parliament later this month to introduce a report she had been working on with the Islamophobia watchdog Tell Mama (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), the group’s director said. The study is expected to conclude that there were about 80% more attacks on Muslims in Britain in 2015 than the year before.

“She met us to talk about how people could report attacks; particularly women in her constituency,” said the founder and director of Tell Mama, Fiyaz Mughal, on Sunday.

The report is the latest in an annual series on the prevalence of Islamophobic attacks. “We were hoping she would highlight the impact on Muslim women; particularly given the targeting [that exists],” Mughal said. “The majority [of incidents] at street level were [on] women and she was going to raise that.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Sayeeda Warsi, the former chair of the Conservative party, has said she will no longer support the campaign to leave the European Union just days before the referendum, accusing it of “hate and xenophobia”.

Warsi said the positive case for leaving the EU had been neglected by the official campaign, though leading leave campaigners have denied she was ever an active participant in the campaign.

“Why is it people like me, instinctively Eurosceptic who feel the EU needs reform … feel they now have to leave leave?” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “Because day after day what are we hearing? The refugees are coming, the rapists are coming, the Turks are coming.”

Warsi’s intervention came amid a slew of news around the referendum campaign, with car manufacturers, Richard Branson and premier league football clubs urging a vote for remain. [Continue reading…]

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For Muslims like me, Trump’s words are toxic

Bim Adewunmi, a journalist from the UK now living in America, writes: I am Other, and the worlds I know most intimately are becoming increasingly uncomfortable, but I still have the luxury of the option of packing my bags and returning to the also-troubled land from whence I came (London, for the obtuse). I think about that option when I see Americans say that they are not going to vote, either in protest at what they call a rigged process, or more worryingly, because Trump is “what we deserve”, a slap in the face to shock America into a corrective overhaul of its cultures and systems.

Here’s what I think: His usefulness as the most “necessary” jolt back to common sense is severely limited and/or massively overrated. To be “sitting this election out” reeks of a repugnant sort of privilege. The damage that life under would-be President Trump would introduce does not lie in the not-too-distant Future; it is in the Right Now, under Presumptive Presidential Candidate Trump.

It is the noxious idea of a fictitious Great American past, which allows citizens to incite hatred and fear, and stoke it to such a tempo that it leaves those most at risk in a state of constant terror. [Continue reading…]

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Trump has ripped the mask off the GOP pretense on racism

Sasha Abramsky writes: eight years after Obama’s extraordinary electoral victory, Donald Trump is stoking a racial violence, a seething, bubbling, street-violent animus last whipped up so overtly by a presidential candidate in 1968, by the segregationist George Wallace.

Trump has repeatedly re-tweeted, thus endorsing, White Supremacist tweets, launched a vicious verbal assault on Mexican-Americans, made sweeping anti-Muslim statements that, if one were to substitute “Jew” for “Muslim,” would not have been out of place in early Nazi propaganda, and has, in the process, racked up endorsements from a who’s who of white nationalists and neo-fascist groups.

It’s not that that animus hasn’t long been there; it’s just that, since the civil rights era, politicians have calculated that subtlety wins out over naked bigotry, that it’s somehow more palatable to the great mass of middle-of-the-road voters. Hence the rise of what came to be described as “dog whistle politics,” a coded appeal to racial hatreds that could be heard and clearly understood by those it was aimed at while being plausibly denied when politicians were publicly called out for it.

Neither party can claim to have been immune to this. On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton, for example, despite his great popularity amongst African American voters and his reputation as a post-segregationist, liberal Southern governor, sought to shore up his conservative credentials with tough-on-crime policies and welfare reforms that disproportionately impacted black Americans.

But, by and large, once the national Democratic Party broke with its southern segregationist wing and embraced Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda in the mid-1960s, it was the GOP, employing what Richard Nixon termed “the Southern Strategy,” that utilized race-resentment politics in the crudest, most personal, of ways. After all, millions of white Americans were largely unreconciled to the civil rights revolution, and for a party willing to pander to their bigotries, there were rich electoral pickings to be had. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s baseless assimilation claim about Muslims in America

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza, and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza, and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

FactCheck.org reports: Donald Trump made a baseless claim that assimilation among Muslim immigrants in the U.S. is “pretty close” to “nonexistent.” Trump offered no support for his claim, but the Pew Research Center, which conducted detailed surveys in 2011, concluded that “Muslim Americans appear to be highly assimilated into American society.”
Scholars on Islam that we spoke to also dismissed Trump’s claim as “bizarre,” absurd” and inconsistent with their observations of a Muslim community that they say is — for the most part — well integrated into American culture and identity.

Let’s dig into the highlights of some of Pew’s specific findings:

  • Muslims are more likely than other immigrants to become U.S. citizens. Four out of five Muslim Americans are U.S. citizens, including 70 percent of those born outside the U.S. That is a much higher rate than the broader immigrant population in the U.S., as 47 percent of all foreign-born are citizens.
  • Nearly three-quarters of Muslim Americans (74 percent) believe that “[m]ost people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard.” That rate of optimism is higher than the general public, 62 percent.
  • A roughly similar percentage of Muslims and Christians in the U.S. say they think of themselves first as either Muslim (49 percent) or Christian (46 percent). Among white evangelicals, 70 percent said they identify first as Christian. A higher percentage of Christians as a whole say they identify as Americans first, 46 percent, compared with 26 percent among Muslim Americans. But Muslim Americans were more likely (18 percent versus 6 percent) to say they considered themselves Muslim and American equally.
  • A majority of Muslim Americans (56 percent) responded that most Muslims who come to the U.S. want to adopt American customs and ways of life, while 20 percent said those Muslim immigrants want to be distinct from the larger American society (16 percent said they wanted to do both).
  • About half of Muslim Americans say that only some or hardly any of their close friends are Muslims, while half say most or all of their close friends are Muslims.
  • More than six in 10 Muslim Americans see no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society, almost identical to the rates among U.S. Christians.
  • Half of Muslim immigrants say they display the American flag at home, at the office or on the car, and 33 percent of native-born Muslims reported doing so as well. Overall, displaying the American flag is less common among Muslim Americans (44 percent) than among the population as a whole (59 percent).

[Continue reading…]

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Trump thinks Muslims don’t ‘assimilate.’ He should have met my grandfather

Huda Al-Marashi writes: My Iraqi immigrant grandfather used to have a small novelty shop where he sold hair accessories, lipstick-shaped erasers and noisy, battery-operated toys. He soon learned enough English phrases to complete a business transaction. All other communication he handled with gestures and the warmest smile.

During his many hospital stays in the last years of his life, his nurses would always tell me he was their favorite patient. They’d pat his hand and say he was just the sweetest. They understood this about a man who said no more to them than “How are you” and “Thank you.”

Last week, Sean Hannity posed a question to Donald Trump about how to vet the hearts of Muslims coming to the United States. Trump replied: “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation — for some reason there’s no real assimilation.” (Maybe this explains Trump’s support for profiling Muslim, which, on Sunday, he called “common sense.”)

Assimilation is a contentious concept among those who study immigration. (How does one measure assimilation, especially when most of the qualities associated with being assimilated have more to do with assuming aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture than with actual social integration?) Sociological considerations aside, the suggestion that Muslims in the United States have not assimilated is simply not correct. [Continue reading…]

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The Trump campaign is becoming an outright catastrophe

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Paul Waldman writes: While he could manage a stunning turnaround, at the moment Trump seems to have put together one of the worst presidential campaigns in history. Let’s take a look at all the major disadvantages Trump faces as we head toward the conventions:

A skeletal campaign staff. Trump succeeded in the primaries with a small staff whose job was to do little more than stage rallies. But running a national campaign is hugely more complex than barnstorming from one state to the next during primaries. While the Clinton campaign has built an infrastructure of hundreds of operatives performing the variety of tasks a modern presidential campaign requires, the Trump campaign “estimates it currently has about 30 paid staff on the ground across the country,” a comically small number.

Not enough money, and little inclination to raise it. Trump hasn’t raised much money yet, and he doesn’t seem inclined to do so; according to one report, after telling Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus that he’d call 20 large donors to make a pitch, he gave up after three. Fundraising is the least pleasant part of running for office, but unlike most candidates who suck it up and do what they have to, Trump may not be willing to spend the time dialing for dollars. Instead, he’s convinced that he can duplicate what he did in the primaries and run a low-budget campaign based on having rallies and doing TV interviews. As he told NBC’s Hallie Jackson, “I don’t think I need that money, frankly. I mean, look what we’re doing right now. This is like a commercial, right, except it’s tougher than a normal commercial.” It’s not like a commercial, because in interviews Trump gets challenged, and usually says something that makes him look foolish or dangerous. But he seems convinced that his ability to get limitless media coverage, no matter how critical that coverage is, will translate to an increase in support.

Outgunned on the airwaves. As a result, Democrats are pouring money into television ads attacking Trump and promoting Clinton with no answer from the other side. As Mark Murray reported yesterday, “So far in June, Clinton and the outside groups backing her have spent a total of $23.3 million on ads in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.” And how much have Trump and his allies spent on ads in those states? Zero. Nothing. Nada. [Continue reading…]

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Control and fear: What mass killings and domestic violence have in common

Amanda Taub writes: One of the first things we learned about Omar Mateen, the gunman in the nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla., was that his ex-wife said he had beaten her severely until she left him in 2009.

If it sounds familiar that a gunman in a mass shooting would have a history of domestic violence, it should.

In February, Cedric Ford shot 17 people at his Kansas workplace, killing three, only 90 minutes after being served with a restraining order sought by his ex-girlfriend, who said he had abused her. And Man Haron Monis, who holed up with hostages for 17 hours in a cafe in Sydney, Australia, in 2014, an episode that left two people dead and four wounded, had terrorized his ex-wife. He had threatened to harm her if she left him, and was eventually charged with organizing her murder.

When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed F.B.I. data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, it found that 57 percent of the cases included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims — and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence.

Social scientists have not settled on an explanation for this correlation, but their research reveals striking parallels between the factors that drive the two phenomena.

There are, of course, a tangle of factors behind every murder, especially terrorism inspired by foreign groups. But research on domestic violence hints at a question that often arises from seemingly inexplicable events like Mr. Mateen’s massacre of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub — what drives individuals to commit such mass attacks? — and sheds light on the psychology of violence. [Continue reading…]

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Venezuelans ransack stores as hunger grips the nation

The New York Times reports: With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed. [Continue reading…]

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How did Brazil go from rising BRIC to sinking ship?

By Steven M. Helfand, University of California, Riverside and Antônio Márcio Buainain, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Most of the headlines in recent weeks have focused on Brazil’s troubling political crisis. But the country is also in the midst of a deep economic recession.

The economy has been shrinking since the second quarter of 2014. It contracted by 3.8 percent in 2015 and is expected to shrink by a similar amount this year. Earlier this month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said it sees the recession continuing into 2017.

Yet it was only in 2009 – in the middle of the global financial crisis – that the Economist magazine featured a story entitled “Brazil takes off,” with a photo of the Corcovado – the iconic statue of Christ that overlooks Rio de Janeiro – launching like a rocket. That article emphasized why Brazil deserved to be one of the “BRICs” – the rapidly growing economies including Russia, India and China that now account for nearly 25 percent of global GDP.

How could the outlook for Brazil have changed so rapidly? Is this sort of boom and bust unprecedented or a recurring theme in Brazil’s history?

In this article, we provide a historical perspective on the current economic crisis, relying on our own scholarship and years of analysis of the Brazilian economy.

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Why the Western-backed assault on ISIS in Iraq and Syria is failing

Shiraz Maher writes: The first signs of a Western-backed attempt to recapture Raqqa, ­Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, came a fortnight ago when fighter jets dropped leaflets over the city telling residents to leave. “The time has come,” the warnings read, alongside an illustration of residents evacuating the city as incoming forces overran IS fighters.

Although up to half of Raqqa’s residents fled when IS first took control of the city in 2014, the militants have made it ­increasingly difficult for the people who stayed behind to leave. Following the US-led coalition’s warnings of an impending attack, however, the jihadis relaxed their restrictions on movement. Citizens were allowed to disperse into the nearby countryside. The idea was to spare them whatever onslaught was planned against Raqqa while keeping them within IS territory.

Ever since the latest offensive against IS began in Syria and Iraq in late May, it has become clear that the group will not concede territory easily around Raqqa – or elsewhere. It might lose small villages from time to time, but all of its major urban centres remain well fortified. Few observers expect them to fall any day soon. IS has too much invested in Raqqa, as well as Mosul in Iraq. Occupying the cities fuels the group’s prestige by projecting the impression of ­viable statehood and by allowing it to house fighters and military equipment. [Continue reading…]

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Decades later, sickness among airmen after a hydrogen bomb accident

The New York Times reports: Alarms sounded on United States Air Force bases in Spain and officers began packing all the low-ranking troops they could grab onto buses for a secret mission. There were cooks, grocery clerks and even musicians from the Air Force band.

It was a late winter night in 1966 and a fully loaded B-52 bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol had collided with a refueling jet high over the Spanish coast, freeing four hydrogen bombs that went tumbling toward a farming village called Palomares, a patchwork of small fields and tile-roofed white houses in an out-of-the-way corner of Spain’s rugged southern coast that had changed little since Roman times.

It was one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history, and the United States wanted it cleaned up quickly and quietly. But if the men getting onto buses were told anything about the Air Force’s plan for them to clean up spilled radioactive material, it was usually, “Don’t worry.”

“There was no talk about radiation or plutonium or anything else,” said Frank B. Thompson, a then 22-year-old trombone player who spent days searching contaminated fields without protective equipment or even a change of clothes. “They told us it was safe, and we were dumb enough, I guess, to believe them.”

Mr. Thompson, 72, now has cancer in his liver, a lung and a kidney. He pays $2,200 a month for treatment that would be free at a Veterans Affairs hospital if the Air Force recognized him as a victim of radiation. But for 50 years, the Air Force has maintained that there was no harmful radiation at the crash site. It says the danger of contamination was minimal and strict safety measures ensured that all of the 1,600 troops who cleaned it up were protected.

Interviews with dozens of men like Mr. Thompson and details from never before published declassified documents tell a different story. Radiation near the bombs was so high it sent the military’s monitoring equipment off the scales. Troops spent months shoveling toxic dust, wearing little more protection than cotton fatigues. And when tests taken during the cleanup suggested men had alarmingly high plutonium contamination, the Air Force threw out the results, calling them “clearly unrealistic.” [Continue reading…]

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Brexit is being driven by English nationalism

Fintan O’Toole writes: The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly “standing alone”, as it did against the Spanish armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early 10th century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016 when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.

Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.

English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) “ourselves alone”. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead. [Continue reading…]

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Why has the far right made West Yorkshire a home?

The Guardian reports: In late January, a column of demonstrators marched in driving sleet through the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury, chanting: “Britain First, fighting back.”

Although the group has amassed more than 1.4m Facebook likes, greater than any other UK political party, the number of actual boots on the ground for Britain First, a relative newcomer on the far-right scene, was not that impressive. Just 120 supporters assembled to march from the train station to the town hall, escorted by many police and jeered by many residents.

Yesterday Thomas Mair from the West Yorkshire town of Batley, a mile north of Dewsbury, appeared at Westminster magistrates court and was charged with the murder of MP Jo Cox.

There has been considerable speculation that the 52-year-old may have had links to far-right groups. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that an extreme right-wing element has established a disturbing foothold in the post-industrial social landscape of West Yorkshire.

According to experts, at least seven far-right groups united by racist ideologies are active in the region, an area dominated by Leeds and Bradford. Activists pinpoint a hardcore cohort of 100 prominent individuals able to cite the broader backing of thousands of social-media supporters.

Among the far-right organisations in West Yorkshire are the virulently anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL), which claims to have established “divisions” in Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax and Dewsbury, along with the British Movement (BM), a small but ultra-violent group considered extreme even by the standards of the British far right.

Other organisations include National Action, a neo-Nazi nationalist youth movement that openly advocates violence and whose strategy document reportedly makes reference to Hitler.

The neo-Nazi National Front, which advocates repatriation for non-whites, has a presence. Anti-racism activists also point to the Britain Democratic Party, a modest organisation founded by a group of former BNP politicians including Andrew Brons, former MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, who has hosted seminars on racial nationalism. The Yorkshire Infidels belong to a regional network of far-right nationalists whose marches have descended into violence. [Continue reading…]

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Jo Cox, Brexit and the politics of hate

Daniel Trilling writes: The main threat of far-right attacks in recent years has come from men acting alone or in small groups. They may sympathize with fascist ideology, or they may have passed through the ranks of a far-right party at some point, but they are not acting on orders.

An attack like this, or a plot for one, is uncovered every few years — rare, but more common than many Britons would like to admit. In June 2015, a member of the neo-Nazi group National Action was convicted of the attempted murder of a South Asian man at a supermarket in Wales. In 2007, a former B.N.P. candidate was jailed for stockpiling explosives in anticipation of a coming “civil war” caused by immigration. In 1999, David Copeland, a neo-Nazi lone wolf, set off three nail bombs in London, targeting the black, gay and South Asian communities, killing three people and injuring more than 100.

These people may act independently, but their behavior and ideas are not shaped in a void. Far more people move through the periphery of far-right politics than formally join a party or organization. The details that have emerged about Mr. Mair’s life place him in this periphery: The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that he was a longtime customer of Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the National Alliance, an American neo-Nazi group. The police have reportedly found Nazi regalia and far-right literature at his house.

Social media has extended the far right’s reach. Sources tell me that Britain First has only a few hundred members. But its Facebook page has more than 1.4 million likes and churns out nationalist, Islamophobic and anti-immigration memes. “Saying UK borders are secure, open to 500 million people,” declares one meme, which displays a photo of the European Union’s flag, “is like saying my home is more secure with the doors and windows left open.” Another shows Muslims praying in the street in London and asks: “Is this what our war heroes died for?” Many of these are widely shared — and they often echo the coverage of immigration and ethnic minorities found in much of the British press.

This points to an uncomfortable truth: Far-right politics cannot be as easily cordoned off from the mainstream as people would like to believe. Fascists attach themselves to popular causes and drag the debate in their direction. Populists and parties of the center take note and then try to appeal to voters susceptible to the far right’s messages by taking xenophobic positions of their own. [Continue reading…]

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Possible link to Jo Cox killing puts U.S. neo-Nazi group back into focus

The Guardian reports: Roaring up the gravel track on a Yamaha Grizzly ATV, Dave Pringle is wearing a long beard, ponytail, a camouflage hunting cap and shorts. His dark blue T-shirt says “Hillary for prison 2016”. His right arm has a tattoo with the words, “molon labe” – the ancient Greek battle cry, “Come and take them”.

Pringle, a gunsmith, is chief of staff at the National Alliance (NA), a fascist group that apparently sold books to Thomas Mair, the man charged with the murder of British MP Jo Cox. On Saturday, speaking to the Guardian over a padlocked gate at the organisation’s 364-acre “campus” in the Appalachian mountains, he denied all knowledge of Mair.

“If he bought the books from Amazon.com, could he be linked to [its founder] Jeff Bezos?” he demanded. “Lots of people buy books. I’ve been buying from New Vanguard [the NA’s propaganda arm] since 1989 and guess how many crimes I’ve committed? Zero.”

Pringle, 47, married with two teenage children, said of Cox’s death: “It’s a terrible thing. She was white, an Englishwoman with two children. What else can I say? Do I agree with her politics? Of course not. Do I think you guys need more Syrians in Britain? No.”

Once the most feared neo-Nazi group in the world, the NA is now something of a spent force. It never recovered from the death in 2002 of its founder, William Pierce, a leading white supremacist who advocated racial apartheid in America and was banned from the UK. His 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, about a survivalist who blows up the FBI and triggers a purge of Jewish and black people to create an Aryan fantasy world, inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and British “nail bomber” David Copeland. It was described by the FBI as “the bible of the racist right”. [Continue reading…]

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The gay rights movement could take on the NRA — and actually win

Jennifer Carlson and David Pettinicchio write: It’s an all-too-familiar routine for Americans: mass shooting, dramatic calls for change, inaction. It happened when 20 schoolchildren were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. When a dozen people were killed in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater. When almost three dozen were slaughtered at Virginia Tech.

But this time, things might be different. Not because of the record number of people killed in Orlando or because this heinous act was a terrorist attack, a hate crime and a mass shooting. It’s because the victims were part of a social movement with infrastructure and political know-how largely unmatched within the gun-control movement. It’s because the attack targeted gays — and their community is organized.

Today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer coalition is made up of powerful groups able to mobilize at a moment’s notice, including the NOH8 Campaign, the Human Rights Campaign and PFLAG. This robust and multifaceted apparatus is one of the most effective political movements in recent American history. It has faced down obscene public indifference to gay lives (peaking with the AIDS epidemic), violence against LGBTQ people (who suffer more hate crimes than any other protected group), laws that criminalized gay sex (Bowers v. Hardwick was overturned only in 2003) and widespread intolerance. [Continue reading…]

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