White right-wing terrorism is a trend in the US, says political activist Anthony Rogers-Wright. Journalist Julio Rivera says the demonization of white men is aimed to cast a negative light on Trump and majority of US population.
A CNN anchor Don Lemon stirred controversy by claiming that the biggest terror threat in the US comes from white men.
Lemon said “we have to stop demonizing people” adding that in the US the biggest terrorist threat “is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.”
His comments come after three recent hate crimes involving white suspects. Last Saturday, 11 Jews were massacred at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. The same week, two black people were killed in a shooting at a supermarket in Kentucky and pipe bombs were sent to high-profile opponents of the US president.
RT heard contrasting views from inside the US from political activist Anthony Rogers-Wright and editorial director of Reactionary Times.Com Julio Rivera on whether the statement by Lemon is demonizing white men. Is this adding to the already huge racial tensions in the US and should public figures be saying things like this on air?
According to Anthony Rogers-Wright, Lemon was stating facts rather than demonizing.
“We know from the Nation Institute Investigative Fund between 2008-2016 there were twice as many terrorist incidents from white right-wing terrorists than those [by] people who submit to al Islam,” he pointed out.
“And if we really get deeper, Mr. Lemon was further stating a trend that we’ve been seeing in this country since, unfortunately, the 19th century – the first organized terrorist group in the US was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – which was a white Christian terrorist group,” he continued.
Julio Rivera insists though that Don Lemon is wrong and the main threat to the US is radicalized Islamic terrorism.
“According to the Department of Homeland Security document on Executive Order 13780, 402 of the terrorists that were actually involved in the crimes in the US from 9/11, 2001 to January 2018 were born outside of the US.
Only 147 terrorist plots were carried out by people who were actually natural-born US citizens. Part of that issue is because we have visa diversity lottery, we have a lot of people coming in Middle Eastern countries, Pakistan in particular, a lot of these people who came here were naturalized and they carried out acts of terrorism … Radicalized Islamic terrorism is the main threat to the US here domestically,” he argued.
Rogers-Wright suggested looking at the recent hate crimes and who the perpetrators of crimes were.
“Radicalized white people who were sending pipe bombs to the people of the opposing party, who just killed 11 Jewish people, who just killed 2 black people in Kentucky because they couldn’t get into a black church. Look at the resulting deaths and look at the perpetrators.”
According to FBI statistics for 2016, 46 percent of hate crime offenders where White. RT asked whether that means that Don Lemon does have a point.
In Rogers-Wright’s view, the root of the problem is: “White supremacy founded the USA, white supremacy exists in the USA, and white supremacy is rising across the world.”
Rivera thinks that CNN is just doing everything “to cast a negative light against anything Trump; and obviously, the majority of the voting bloc in America is working class white men. These incidents …are painted as being Donald Trump’s fault but it is not true.”
In his opinion, Don Lemon’s statement is “a furtherance of the division that was created in America under the eight-year administration of Barack Obama.”
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