The cameras and satellite dishes have barely left the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. The confessed culprit, Buford O. Furrow Jr., has turned himself in. Yet conclusions are already being drawn that betray an ignorance of the implications of last week’s tragic incident.
The message to be drawn from Furrow’s rampage is not that extremists are about to overtake America, or that Jewish and other minority institutions ought to become fortresses, or that hate crimes are on the rise, or that anti-Semitism is increasing. The message is these attacks are acts of violent desperation on the part of those who are not succeeding in swaying the world to their views. What we must never do is allow them to dictate how we run our lives and view the world.
Bigotry and hate can warp a person’s perspective to the point that 5-, 6- and 7-year-old children can be seen as enemies to be slaughtered. The prism of religious and racial hate can so distort a person’s perspective that young innocents become the incarnation of evil, deserving — indeed, demanding — elimination.
The connection of the alleged assailant to the Aryan Nations and the Silent Brotherhood makes all too much sense. These are hate groups with an ideology that justifies violence against those whom they view as the “seed of the devil” (Jews) and “mud people” (African-Americans and other minorities). Their track record of violence and inflammatory rhetoric has been well documented and undoubtedly will be extensively explored.
But in a larger context, the netherworld of hate has a very limited and narrowly defined constituency that acts largely out of a perverted and desperate effort to attract media and public attention.
Last week, I testified at the “State of Human Relations 2000” hearings of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission. At that time, I said that the Anti-Defamation League had been monitoring anti-Semitic hate crimes for more than 20 years, and the number over the past several years has been steadily declining, although there have been occasional up-ticks. Our concerns focus mainly on the increased virulence of the individual acts that are being committed.
The hate incidents of 15 and 20 years ago tended to be swastika daubings, cross-burnings and inflammatory graffiti that outrage and hurt a community. Of late, the hate crimes tend to be more violent, more intense and reflective of more than casual racial or religious animosity.
The events of this week, as well as in the past months in Sacramento, the Midwest and Redding, are symptomatic of the qualitative change in the nature of hate crimes.
As our research indicates, members of the Aryan Nations and like groups feel more alienated from society now than ever. Their numbers are stagnant or dwindling. They focus on the extreme fringes who might find their message appealing and on young people who may be too guileless to understand the danger of their facile solutions to complex problems. (The World Church of the Creator’s Web page has a special section for kids.)
Their world is a minutely small, incestuous circle of ideological soulmates who have no compunction about sanctioning violence to make their racist and anti-Semitic points — and who speak mainly to themselves.
They have no potential of being a serious political force or of galvanizing American public opinion — a recent ADL national survey of anti-Semitism found historic low levels of anti-Jewish attitudes. In a society in which tolerance has become a mantra, their message doesn’t play well. The threat posed by these groups is one of isolated violence, not of a meaningful political movement.
We have to redouble our efforts to understand that terror can occur and to take security seriously. But we should not isolate ourselves or build fortresses. And, most important, we must recommit ourselves to educating our children about tolerance, diversity and the dangers of hate so that the potential audience for the bigots, no matter how young, is ever smaller.
Exaggerated fear and predictions of an America overcome by hate are the responses that the Furrows of the world hope to elicit. We must not offer them that victory.