On Sunday 11th of October, Police arrested a 19 year old in a small village in Illinois who was charged with planning a mass shooting at a local Hindu Temple. Earlier that day, the suspect had messaged a colleague, telling him that he had been at the Temple but that his gun had jammed, and so he had subsequently fled. The colleague then contacted authorities, who apprehended the suspect at an apartment he shared with his mother. There were reportedly thousands of people at the Temple throughout the day the attack was planned, as it was the start of Navaratri; a major Hindu festival. CCTV confirms that the suspect’s car was at the temple on that day, and a police raid of the apartment found a rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and tactical equipment.
Since then, officials have reported that the suspect shared a manifesto with the same colleague that he contacted after the attempted shooting. In it, he described himself as a ‘sociopathic white supremacist Neo Nazi filled with hatred, fantasizing about mass murder nearly every day’. He also referred to people who aren’t white as ‘subhuman’.
This event parallels other attacks in which religious minorities were targeted at their place of worship, often also during religious holidays. There was a recent shooting at a Synagogue in Ontario, Canada on Yom Kippur, and a few months prior we saw a shooting at a Mosque in San Diego in which three people were killed. Pardeep Kaleka, whose father Satwant Singh Kaleka was killed at a mass shooting at a gurdwara in 2012, said that the purpose of these attacks is to instill fear within the targeted community; ‘Their belief is if you can attack people in the space they hold most sacred, it plants a deep terror in communities.’
In response to the attempted shooting in Illinois, a representative of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, Pushpita Prasad, drew a connection between the incident and the high volumes of anti-Hindu and anti-Indian hate that we see online. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a US Congressman who worships at the temple (and was there at the time when the attack was attempted) also made this connection, stating ‘We know this type of hate is coursing through social media online, it’s exploded’.
When discussing the recent attempted shooting in Illinois, Pushpita Prasad said ‘You see vitriolic posts associating Indians with dirt and creating disgust about their appearance, food and cultural practices’.
Last year, the Online Hate Prevention Institute reported on the high volumes of anti-Indian hate that we had observed on social media, and identified specific trends that could help explain the explosion of this kind of online racism. In that briefing, we too noted that much of the anti-Indian sentiment seemed to be designed to elicit feelings of disgust towards Indian people. This is important because multiple sources have connected the feeling of disgust with prejudicial beliefs. It is possible that the feelings of dehumanisation that the attempted shooter evidently felt towards Indian people had been influenced by the barrage of online content that seeks to portray them as physically repellent. If this is the case, then it constitutes another case in which online hate-speech has real world, and potentially deadly, consequences.
OHPI has observed the online reaction to a number of attacks on racial and religious minorities. While they typically contain a majority of well-wishing and unproblematic comments, a significant minority are reliably hateful. These problematic responses typically include content that glorifies the attacks, as well as content that casts doubt on the attack by implying that it either never occurred, or did occur but was orchestrated by someone other than the attacker. We observe this same pattern of response in relation to this recent attempted shooting on the Hindu Temple.
Below are a number of posts that were made in response to news stories about the attempted attack and which, in various ways, celebrate it. These posts constitute incitement to violence against Indians and Hindus, and are an extremely serious form of hate-speech.
The following comments all attempt to deny or distort the facts surrounding the attempted shooting. They imply either that the attempt never really took place (and was ‘staged’), or that it was ultimately orchestrated by someone other than the actual perpetrator. This is offensive to the victims of the attempted attack because it downplays the reality of the hostility towards them. The fact that someone got so close to carrying out a mass-shooting against them, and was only foiled because their gun jammed, speaks to extreme anti-Hindu and anti-Indian sentiment in society that needs to be acknowledged and addressed. By claiming the incident was faked, commentators undermine the plight of the Hindu and Indian community.
Note that in this context, the claim that the attack was staged makes little sense; the attack never actually took place, and there is no video footage of the events other than the CCTV of the suspect’s car at the Temple. As such, it is difficult to imagine what it could mean for this attempted shooting to have been ‘staged’.
The following user describes the attempted shooting as ‘another psyop’ which was intended to distract the ‘goyim’. The word ‘goyim’ is a Hebrew word often used to describe non-Jews. In some online spaces, it has become associated with antisemitic conspiracies about Jews running the world and trying to subvert non-Jewish society. In this context, the commenter is not only claiming that the attack was a false-flag, but also that it was conducted by Jews. This comment is therefore deeply offensive both to the Indian community who were the target of this attempted shooting, and also to Jews who are now being unfairly blamed for it without evidence.
Many of the problematic comments that we see in response to this incident engage in specific anti-Indian narratives that OHPI has identified previously. The user below jokes that the suspect ‘just got tired of the SMELL’, while another responds ‘No Doedorant huh’. This plays into racist tropes about Indians having bad hygiene, and which can elicit feelings of disgust from social media users exposed to this material.
Other users took this event as an opportunity to express the view that Hindus were incompatible with Western Society. These comments engage in a persistent form of online anti-Indian hate according to which Hindus and/or Indians make for poor members of society, and should therefore be deported from the West.
The nature and quality of racist abuse differs depending on its target. Anti-Indian racism is different from anti-black racism, which is different to antisemitism. Despite this, there are some recurring themes that we see online whenever a minority group is attacked. The recent attempted shooting against Hindus suggests that these patterns will re-occur regardless of the victims, and regardless of whether the event was thankfully botched before any physical violence could occur. There will always be those who glorify the attack, and those that seek to deny it. Responses of this kind are always deeply offensive, and can signal a lack of empathy that ultimately makes violent attacks possible. The hostility towards Hindus and Indians online is real and virulent, and this incident serves a stark reminder of how devastating its ramifications can be. IT also highlights the important need for platforms to proactively remove such hate from their systems, before it leads to violence.