Ancient Hatreds, Modern Methods: How Social Media And Political Division Feed Attacks On Sacred Spaces

Marc Fisher, Roxana Popescu and Kayla Epstein of The Washington Post wrote:

Inspired by the devastating impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and enabled by the largely unchecked freedoms of social media, individual extremists have launched a steady series of assaults on religious institutions around the world, the latest at a California synagogue.

Chabad of Poway, where a shooter left one woman dead and three people injured Saturday, joins a list of places of worship that have become symbols of the growing ability of lone actors and small groups to kill people, sow fear and leave law enforcement, tech companies and governments looking helpless.

In the most recent wave of assaults, over the past six months, attackers have targeted Jews as they worshiped at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October and at the Chabad of Poway near San Diego during the end of Passover; Christians at Easter services in Sri Lanka; and Muslims praying in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The nature and frequency of these attacks have raised urgent questions about how to fight extremism in a time of political polarization, largely unregulated social media and diminished trust in community organizations, including religious and political institutions.

“The main culprits are social media and the total collapse of any sense of bipartisanship about how to fight hate in America,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. “Evildoers around the world learned from the 9/11 terrorists that you don’t need the backing of a state or a mass movement. And then individuals who are probably psychiatric cases are inspired to do these things because social media spreads a culture of hate in the most public ways, and encrypted communications allows them to go private to discuss the how-tos.”

The suspect in the Poway shooting, a 19-year-old nursing student who was arrested and identified by police as John T. Earnest, apparently published a manifesto online, an increasingly common way for assailants to spread their ideologies and offer their versions of an explanation for the unthinkable. This one is a lengthy, rambling document markedly similar to the one posted by the avowed white supremacist who was charged with killing 50 people in New Zealand last month.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ancient-hatreds-modern-methods-how-social-media-and-political-division-feed-attacks-on-sacred-spaces/2019/04/28/51543e1a-69d5-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html?utm_term=.14c7cac2401b
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ancient-hatreds-modern-methods-how-social-media-and-political-division-feed-attacks-on-sacred-spaces/ar-BBWnJvT

Proverbs 23:7a (NKJV) wrote:For as he thinks in his heart, so is he