The consequences of ignoring hate speech
Trump's abusive language against immigrants is in line with hate speech from public figures that have historically led to hate crimes, mob violence and ultimately, genocide.
Last weekend, one of my closest mom-friends sent a voice note in our Whatsapp group of her four-year-old daughter singing “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs.” A catchy, remixed version of Trump’s inaccurate and abhorrent comments about the Haitian-American community in Springfield, Ohio eating “their pets” is trending on TikTok, which is most likely where her kids heard it.
This is the viral power of hate speech.
In a CNN interview, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance admitted that Trump and Vance have been pushing false tales about Haitian immigrants eating pets for media attention.
But, this isn’t the first vile thing that’s come out of Trump’s mouth at a public event—Americans have been to this rodeo before. As President, he vilified South American migrants, labeled the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and openly perpetuated anti-Muslim sentiments.
“The president’s rhetoric has helped to shift discourse norms in our country such that it is more acceptable among more people to denigrate and attack other groups of human beings. People feel emboldened to chant those things publicly, which is a specific example of a shift in public discourse in the country,” said American University professor Susan Benesch who studies the link between dangerous rhetoric and mass violence in an interview with The Washington Post in 2018.
Trump’s approach to stoking public anger and feeding into fear is not unique. From European colonizers who dehumanized indigenous communities to Hindu nationalists who spread misinformation on the Internet against Muslims in South Asia—venomous political rhetoric has existed for ages.
According to the United Nations, hate speech coupled with disinformation can lead to stigmatization, discrimination, large-scale violence
And genocide.
The Fascists That Got Away With It
According to Genocide Watch, there are ten stages to genocide, and two of those stages—dehumanization and polarization—rely on hateful propaganda.
One of the precursors to the Holocaust was the suppression of independent German media and using state-controlled journalism to disseminate anti-semitic rhetoric which normalized the death of six million Jewish people in Europe.
The 1994 genocide of approximately 800,000 members of the Tutsi tribe and some moderate Hutus in Rwanda was a direct result of hateful propaganda on Radio Libre des Mille Collines—a popular radio station run by Hutu extremists that used music and explicit language to direct listeners to kill the Tutsi.
In 1995, Serbian forces killed over 8,000 Muslim Bosnians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the nation in the single largest massacre in Europe since World War II. Nationalist fear-based propaganda through party-controlled media demonized the Bosnian Muslim population, portraying them as outside invaders.
Cut to the most popular form of news consumption today—social media.
In 2018, Reuters investigated over 1,000 hate speech-filled Facebook posts in just one week against the Rohingya—a Muslim minority that had been systemically persecuted in Myanmar for decades. According to Amnesty International, an uptick in violent rhetoric on social media led directly to the killing and rape of hundreds and thousands and the displacement of over a million Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh. Amnesty International also placed blame on Facebook for not taking action promptly and focusing instead on advertising revenue. Activists had rung the alarm to its parent company Meta on the connection to real-life violence perpetuated via social media but it fell on deaf ears for many years.
In a speech on the Cambodian genocide ( an estimated two million people were killed by a radical communist political group in the 70s) Professor the Hon. Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister of Australia explained, “the potential for genocidal violence is not confined to fragile developing countries: in an age of authoritarian populism and crude identity politics – think Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, even Trump’s America – the potentially deadly virus of group hatred can emerge almost anywhere in the world.”
It’s not just former President Trump who has spread misinformation and harmful rhetoric in the United States. Just a few days after the attack on October 7th in Israel, U.S. President Biden claimed that forty Israeli babies had allegedly been beheaded and burned by Hamas. The claim was unverified and later proven to be false.
But a seventy-one-year-old man in Illinois who obsessively followed conservative media and perhaps had heard Biden’s speech took it upon himself to retaliate against Palestinians by stabbing a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy twenty-six times and ultimately killing him.
What’s even more astonishing is that Joseph Czuba was not only friendly with Wadee Alfayoumi, but also built the kindergartener his own tree house at some point. Czuba was once a grandfatherly figure to the little Palestinian boy he hated to death.
Denouncing hate speech isn’t enough to stop this kind of violence from happening again, addressing it through a legal framework is also important.
In March, U.S. Senators Durbin, Duckworth and Ramirez introduced ‘The Wadee Act’—a resolution honoring Alfayoumi and condemning hate crimes against Palestinians.
Yesterday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the rise of hate crimes in the U.S. Alfayoumi’s mother, who attended the hearing to support the lawmakers who wished to honor her son, was not asked to speak about the horrendous hate crime that took her son’s life. However, Arab American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry was given a platform at the hearing and ironically became a target of hate speech during the hearing. She was verbally attacked by Sen. John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana and told to “stick her head in a bag.”
What was it that the Genocide Watch said about dehumanization again?
Learn more about hate crimes, hate speech and genocide:
WATCH: Mehdi Hasan interviews Wadee’s mother for Zeteo
Trump’s Bogus Claims About Haitians Are Part of a Bigger Agenda by Charles M. Blow for The New York Times
Social Media platforms aren’t equipped to handle the negative effects of their algorithms abroad by Tiffany Ng for Vox
Rwandan Gen Z’s combat lingering hate speech by Senanu Tord for Voice of America