Sikhs hold up placards with photos of six mass shooting victims after a candlelight vigil in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, August 7, 2012. The killings of six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin has thrust attention on white power music, a thrashing, punk-metal genre that sees the white race under siege.
Photograph by: JOHN GRESS , REUTERS
by Moustafa Bayoumi, The Nation, August 10, 2012
The tragedy of the shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, is enormous. Six innocent people were gunned down in a Sikh temple by a white supremacist—but they weren’t innocent because they were Sikh, they were innocent because, well, they were innocent! Had Wade Michael Page walked into a mosque and begun shooting Muslims, the victims of his rampage would have been no more deserving of death.
It’s true that we don’t yet know Page’s precise motivations, but in all likelihood it wasn’t Sikhophobia, a term barely known in the United States. It was Islamophobia [1]. That’s why to say that Page made a “mistake†in targeting Sikhs, as many have reported [2], or that Sikhs are “unfairly†targeted as Muslims, as CNN stated [3], is to imply that it would be “correct†to attack Muslims. Well, it’s not, and even if this is an error embedded in the routine carelessness of cable news, we need to be attentive to the implications.
Over the last few days, there has been a lot of media coverage about the Sikh religion and its origins and practices. Knowledge is always welcome over ignorance, but what we really need to educate ourselves about is the way racism operates in this country and its deadly character. The facts are not consoling. According [4] to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the extreme right wing grew “explosively†in 2011 and for the third year in a row. The SPLC now tracks 1,018 hate groups, up from 602 in 2000, the year that Page is reported to have appeared on the Neo-Nazi scene. The number of hate groups, in other words, has almost doubled in the last twelve years, and that growth has accelerated since the election of Obama. The targets have also expanded. White supremacists have always been obsessed with Jews, blacks and the LGBT community as their objects of hate. And ten years ago, Jews and blacks were Page’s villains, according to Pete Simi, who interviewed him in 2001. But things have changed over this past decade. What continues to be underappreciated is how the hatred of Muslims [5] has become a major motivating and mobilizing force in this putrid scene. Continue reading Did Islamophobia Fuel the Oak Creek Massacre?