In the US there is still dismay over the racist act in Buffalo. The US President gets an idea of the situation on site and finds clear words.
US President Joe Biden has condemned the attack in Buffalo, which killed ten, as racist terrorism and has also made serious allegations against the media and politicians.
“What happened here is terrorism, pure and simple,” said the US President in Buffalo on Tuesday. White supremacy ideology is “toxic” and has no place in America. He called on all people in the country to reject this “lie”. “And I condemn those who spread this lie for power, political gain and/or profit,” Biden said.
On Saturday, a gunman opened fire with an assault rifle in front of and in a supermarket, killing ten people and injuring three others. The 18-year-old suspect was arrested at the scene. According to investigators, the crime was racially motivated – 11 of the 13 victims were black, and Buffalo has a mostly black population.
laid flowers
Biden visited the crime scene with his wife Jill on Tuesday and laid flowers there. The two also met relatives of the victims, first responders, police and local politicians. In his emotional speech, Biden spoke at length about the victims. The shooter is a “hateful” person. “Evil won’t win in America, I promise you. Hatred will not prevail,” said the US President. The shooter “massacred innocent people in the name of a hateful ideology based on fear and racism”.
The ideology of white supremacy is “perverse,” according to Biden. The anti-racism organization Anti-Defamation League writes that “white supremacists” assumed that whites were in danger of dying out. They believed that almost all actions that help “save” whites are justified. Biden now denounced that this hatred is also fueled by “the media, politics and the Internet”. However, he did not say who he meant specifically.
His spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, previously said the US government didn’t want to pay any attention to these people. “So the people spreading this filth know who they are and they should be ashamed,” said Jean-Pierre. After the crime, the focus was on the right-wing and influential moderator Tucker Carlson, who leads an evening program on the conservative TV station Fox News. Carlson has said in the past that Democrats are trying to swap current US voters for “more obedient third-world voters.”
“Big exchange” planned
A 180-page manifesto with racist and violent statements attributed to the Buffalo shooter had surfaced on the Internet. It also talks about the “Great Replacement Theory”, a conspiracy myth of the extreme right. It alleges that non-white members of other faiths are deliberately working to “replace” white Christians of European descent. In the US, this theory is finding more and more proponents on talk shows on right-wing channels and sections of the Republican Party.
Biden also recalled the neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017. At that time, a right-wing extremist drove his car into a group of counter-demonstrators and killed a woman. The then US President Donald Trump did not clearly distance himself from the right-wing extremists afterwards. He spoke of “some very fine people on both sides”. This crime motivated him to run for president, Biden said. “We have seen too many times now the deadly and destructive violence this ideology unleashes.”
Amidst the debate, another crime in the US state of Texas is causing a stir. A gunman opened fire at a hair salon in the Korean district of Dallas last week. The police meanwhile do not rule out a racist motive here either. A deadly attack by a man on predominantly Taiwanese worshipers at a church in the US state of California on Sunday was also apparently politically motivated. The suspect, a 68-year-old US citizen from Las Vegas, immigrated from China years ago, according to investigators.