‘Fanning the Flames’ exposes the West

A new report by watchdog groups claims that major technology platforms, Wall Street businesses and right-wing media corporations are complicit in enabling white supremacist and anti-Muslim bigotry across the world. The paper, “Fanning the Flames: How Big Tech, Wall Street and right-wing media corporations were complicit in Christchurch shootings, and continue to enable anti-Muslim violence and bigotry “, which was published on October 31, 2019 by the Action Center on Race and the Economy’s Crescendo Project in partnership
with the Public Accountability Initiative. It stated that Google-owned YouTube plays a key role in radicalizing young people by exposing them to white supremacist ideology and anti-Muslim propaganda. Amazon’s recommendations algorithm also points customers who search for white supremacist books. The Christchurch killer’s manifesto shows that he was heavily influenced by the white supremacist terrorist group, The Order, which took its name from a novel called The Turner Diaries.
Wall Street firms are greasing the wheels of bigot through donor-advised funds. “Corporations with global reach in the tech, finance, and media sectors especially have resourced anti-Muslim individuals and groups both domestically and internationally and have created the infrastructure for anti-Muslim messages and bigotry to spread and thrive,” the report states. The report calls companies including Facebook, Amazon, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, iHeartMedia and Sinclair Broadcast Group “the unindicted co-conspirators of the Christchurch shooter,” who massacred 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in March. According to the report, Facebook has also refused to remove posts by lawmakers explicitly calling for the murder of Muslims, and partnered with right-wing news sites that distribute anti-Muslim content and has allowed anti-Muslim organizations to fundraise through its platform. On Amazon, customers can readily purchase books including the notorious novel “The Turner Diaries.”
The experts say that this novel has inspired over a dozen hate crimes and terrorist plots, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. ACRE previously published a report which focused on how Amazon has profited from the sale of anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and white supremacist products and facilitated the spread of these ideologies. “Anti-Muslim bigotry is on the rise because corporations like Google, Amazon and Fidelity have decided they are OK with white supremacy and anti-Muslim bigotry as long as they can make money out of it,” Saqib Bhatti, ACRE’s co-executive director, told Religion News Service. Wall Street firms including Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, and Goldman Sachs have funneled millions of dollars to anti-Muslim hate groups. The biggest media culprit in spreading anti-Muslim bigotry is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – the corporation that owns Fox News, the New York Post, and many other right-wing media outlets in the US and abroad.
On March 15, 2019, a white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a 28-year-old man from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, walked into two different mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and killed 51Muslim worshippers and injured another 50. The gunman live-streamed the gruesome attacks on Facebook Live and prefaced the attacks with a 73-page manifesto he distributed immediately prior to the attacks. The manifesto was littered with white supremacist rhetoric from books such as The Turner Diaries, anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and neo-Nazi symbols, and it specifically cited Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity Anyhow, Brenton Tarrant was also inspired by Anders Behring Breivik, a Christian antagonist of Norway and mass killer, in this book attacked multiculturalism and the threat of Muslim immigration to Norway, as well as Marxism and the Norwegian Labor Party. Hours before the 9/11 attacks, Breivik had e-mailed his 1,500-page book to 5,700 people, titled “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence”.