Almost 100 Hate Crime Killings Linked To One Website: Report

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Stormfront.org is linked to close to 100 killings in the last five years, the Southern Poverty Law Center found.

From the Guardian:

The White Nationalist web forum Stormfront.org says it promotes values of “the embattled white minority,” and its users include Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 massacre in Norway, and Wade Michael Page, who shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.
The SPLC said ten murderers had links to Stormfront.

“It’s pretty clear that websites like Stormfront are breeding grounds for people who are just enraged at their situation, it’s there that people find the reasons their lives aren’t as they had hoped and Stormfront helps them find the enemy that is standing in their way – whether it be Jews, African Americans, immigrants and so on,” Heidi Beirich, report author and a director at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project told the Guardian. “Unfortunately it’s not very surprising that people who live in this kind of stew of violent racism eventually pick up a gun and do something about it at some point.”

NBC News reports that Frazier Glenn Cross, the man accused of killing three people at two Jewish community sites in suburban Kansas City on April 13, was barred from Stormfront because of disagreements with the site’s founder.

The report calls Stormfront the “murder capital of the Internet.” SPLC’s research shows the site typically only gets about 1,800 visits a day, half of which are people outside the U.S.

But the site has a core group of very active users, and Stormfront’s “bias-related murder rate” accelerated significantly after Barack Obama became president, the report found.

Earlier this week, CNN reported that, in America, people who follow far-right wing ideologies have been responsible for more killings than Islamic extremists since September 11.

CNN notes that, according to a count by the New America Foundation, “right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11” whereas “terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.”

 

h/t – huffington

 

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