Is the radical right on the rise in the US?

2012-08-09T23:45:38.120Z

Vigils are being held across the US mourning the six members of the Sikh community killed in a shooting rampage in Oak Creek in suburban Milwaukee in the state of Wisconsin on Sunday.

"The one key thing that's missing in this entire debate is the term "terrorism"… we haven't heard many American media and socio-political leaders echo that same sentiment [as the authorities]. Imagine if a brown, bearded man walked into a Wisconsin church and killed six white people, would anybody in America even pause to call it an act of terrorism? Absolutely not.

Five men - Prakash Singh, Suveg Singh, Ranjit Singh, Satwant Singh Kaleka and Sita Singh - and one woman - Paramjit Kaur - were killed in the shooting.

The alleged gunman, 40-year-old Wade Michael Page, was also killed after he opened fire on a police officer. Page was an army veteran who was discharged from the military in 1998. He was also a white supremacist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights group that tracks hate groups in the US, says it has been tracking Page with concern for more than a decade.

Page, who reportedly described himself as a member of the 'Hammerskins Nation', was trained in psychological warfare and served in the US army from 1992 before being demoted and discharged in 1998.

US law enforcement says it is treating the attack as a possible act of "domestic terrorism", which implies a political agenda.

A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security warned of the rise of right-wing groups fuelled by a struggling economy and the election of Barack Obama, the country's first black president. The report was criticised by Republicans and later pulled by the department.

But the latest shooting has reignited fears about right-wing extremism.

Pete Simi, the author of American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate, spent an extensive amount of time with Page in 2001 as part of his research into white supremacism.

Earlier he told Al Jazeera: "Page was part of the much larger movement of white supremacists. At that time he was an independent, neo-Nazi skinhead. He shaved his head, was starting to tattoo his body with different symbols. He definitely endorsed a variety of different beliefs such as anti-Semitism, was antagonistic to anything so-called non-white, in particular most of his rhetoric on a regular basis was directed toward blacks."

"There's a long-standing precedent in this country of these sorts of acts of white supremacist terror, starting with the founding of this country … exterminating the indigenous population, slavery, Jim Crow, lynching being an American past time … why are we not talking about that?"

Sikhs in the US have faced widespread harassment since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The SPLC and the Department of Homeland Security have also reported that extremists have been joining the US military.

Inside Story Americas asks: What questions should Americans be asking in the aftermath of this latest shooting?

Joining the discussion with presenter Shihab Rattansi are guests: Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College and author of the book Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today; Sonny Singh, a social justice activist; and Arsalan Iftikhar, an international human rights lawyer and founder of the blog The Muslim Guy.

All Videos Tagged sikh (Atheist Nexus) - Atheist Nexus

Is the radical right on the rise in the US?