Growing white supremacy jeopardizes US image as democratic country: Egyptian editor

CAIRO - White supremacy has become the largest source of terrorism in the United States, where racial arrogance increasingly becomes the seed of violent destruction, a senior Egyptian newspaper editor said on Wednesday.

The US-led West, over decades, has been blaming Islamic extremism as "the biggest threat facing the world in general and Western societies in particular," Manal Abdul Aziz, the managing editor of The Egyptian Gazette, wrote in an opinion piece published on the newspaper.

Now the mistaken image promulgated for long years by the West about Islamic violence has changed with the escalation of terrorist operations by some racial extremists known as white supremacists, she said.

The Western media has been reporting the mass shootings by the white supremacists, neo-Nazis or other hardline individuals and groups who advocate killing black people as "merely hate crimes," while terming any attack by Muslims, Arabs, African and Asian people as "terrorism," Aziz noted.

In fact, nearly 60 percent of the extremist killings in the US between 2009 to 2019 were committed by white supremacist extremists, Aziz said, citing a report by the Anti-Defamation League.

This "might explain why white supremacy is the number one form of domestic terrorism in the US," she said.

The risk of growing white supremacy was exemplified in a shooting on May 14 in Buffalo, New York, where a white young man killed 10 people at a supermarket in a black majority suburb. The gunman, identified as Payton Gendron, earlier posted online his plan to kill dozens of black people whom he described as "replacers".

Aziz explained that the "replacement theory" was propagated by some US politicians, especially the Republicans who accuse the Democrats of encouraging immigration and risking "extinction of the white race".

The theory "has inspired a steady stream of violent racist gunmen in the world in general and the US in particular," wrote Aziz.

She warned that white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who emerged decades ago in the US society and used to keep a low profile, now are "more brazen" than before.

Before carrying out the Buffalo shooting, Gendron published a 180-page racist manifesto avowing white supremacist beliefs by denouncing the immigrants and black people as "replacers" of white people.

White supremacy is just part of a racial ailment that has afflicted the world for long and targeted different people whether because of their religions or races, Aziz wrote.

In Europe, the neo-Nazis have been directing most of their operations against Muslims and Arabs, while in the US they target the Americans of African and Asian origins, she noted.

Aziz lamented that "the growing phenomenon of white supremacy with support of some political parties is jeopardizing the American image" as a democratic country and the land of dreams for all races to live in freedom.