| Dear Reader,
The shooter who killed 21 people in El Paso said that a book called “The Great Replacement” inspired him to act against a “Hispanic invasion.”
You may have already heard about this idea of “replacement.”
It’s why the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us.” It’s why the gunman who killed 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue was obsessed with the Jewish immigration-aid agency HIAS. And it’s why the New Zealand mosque shooter – whom the El Paso gunman and the Poway, California synagogue shooter cited as inspirations – claimed that immigration was leading to “white genocide.”
It’s a far-right conspiracy theory that claims Western global elites are using immigration policy to “replace” white people with racial and religious minorities. The 2011 book, by French white nationalist Renaud Camus, didn’t single out Jews as part of this evil “elite” – but anti-Semites quickly began to claim Jewish people were pulling the strings.
White supremacist websites frequently mention the alleged Jewish role in the Great Replacement. “Most people do not realize that Jews are the driving force behind mass immigration and demographic genocide,” stated the “alt-right” Wikipedia knockoff Rightpedia.
The theory has even penetrated the halls of Congress. Steve King, the Republican congressman who got kicked off his committees for asking why being a white supremacist was bad, claimed last year that Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros was behind the Great Replacement.
President Trump condemned “racism, bigotry and white supremacy” in his remarks Monday on the weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. But as CJ Werleman noted in a Forward op-ed on Sunday, Trump himself has used similar language to the El Paso shooter, saying in March that undocumented border-crossers were “invaders.”
“People hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is,” Trump said then.
Anti-Semitic incidents have dramatically increased in frequency during the Trump administration – and hate crimes against Latinos are up too. The Forward has continually monitored the threat of white nationalism and will keep doing so.
Thank you for reading,
~Aiden Pink
Deputy news editor
@aidenpink Support for the "Need to Know" series comes in part from the 21st Century ILGWU Heritage Fund
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