By Brigitte L. Nacos
President Trump who doesn’t miss any opportunity to condemn “radical Muslim terrorism” could not bring himself to condemn yesterday’s white nationalist terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia. Instead, he condemned hatred and bigotry “on many sides.”
The white supremacists with confederate flags and the neo-Nazis with the Third Reich’s swastika flags came to Charlottesville equipped with guns, rifles, baseball bats, and an assortment of other weaponry—not to peacefully “Unite the Right” but to meet counter-demonstrators with violence.
When a 20-year old man from Ohio drove deliberately into a crowd of people, it was an act of vehicular terrorism—similar to jihadist attacks in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. Terrorists learn from each other; they copy what they perceive as successful act of terrorism regardless of their ideology, their grievances, and their causes.
Interestingly, the perpetrator’s mother told reporters that she thought the event her son attended had “something to do with Trump.”
It did. The alt-right movement that has finally consolidated the various strains of white supremacy, white nationalism, and Neo-Nazi groupings was during the campaign and remains squarely on the side of fierce Trump supporters. On the eve of the violent demonstration, White supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said,
“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”
Some of the white nationalists wore Trump’s red caps with the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Even though, Trump did not call the vehicular attack “terrorism” nor did he distance himself from the Alt-Right.
For a good reason: He is morally impotent with respect to the dangerous Alt-Right ideology with its ugly takes on domestic politics and foreign policy as long as he has prominent Alt-Righters among his advisers in the White House starting but not ending with the ex-Breitbart boss Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.
Even if his chief-of-staff or someone else convinces Trump to condemn alt-right terrorism, the president cannot be believed as long as the Bannon contingent remains in the White House.
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