On 14 May, an 18-year-old white supremacist shot and killed 10 Black people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, about 200 miles away from his home, according to police. The alleged shooter scrawled a racial epithet on the barrel of his gun and live-streamed his killing spree. He (I prefer not to name him) was clearly participating in a long and horrible American tradition of murderous hatred toward Black people, and media coverage and commentary have rightly emphasized the long reach of anti-Black racism that motivated this killer.
But the alleged shooter’s motivations were not only anti-Black racism. He uploaded a 180-page document shortly before carrying out his attack, and even a quick perusal will show the disgusting antisemitism that he also wallows in. Pages and pages of anti-Jewish slurs – including an excerpt from Der Giftpilz, a Nazi-era children’s book published by Julius Streicher of Der Stürmer infamy – fill the document. At one point, the killer writes, “If the Jews did not have connections to Judaism, then I believe that they would be able to live in White countries such as the USA. But because of the irreversible rabbinic teachings they must be removed from all European and White countries.”
