A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates hate, hostility, or violence towards members of a racial group, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or other designated sector of society. The term hate group is a political neologism that is not used by the groups themselves, but rather by those who oppose them, and sometimes by sociologists or historians who study them.citation needed Many groups described as hate groups disagree with the term as misconstruing their motives or goals. Hate groups usually assert that the targets of their attacks are harmful to society. Hate groups generally propagate myths, narratives and rumours, playing upon fear, xenophobia, blame or jealousy, with the aim of harming individuals and groups they target, and inciting others to distrust or hate them. The ultimate aim of a hate group is commonly the delegitimization, elimination, and exclusion of groups, or the harm, deportation, or death of individuals. Hate groups often use their victims as scapegoats.
Violence
The California Association for Human Relations Organizations (CAHRO) asserts that hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, New Black Panther Party, Jewish Defense League and White Aryan Resistance preach violence against racial, religious, sexual and other minorities in the United States. These groups have hotlines, websites, Internet chatrooms, and propaganda distribution networks designed to transform fear into violence, and to brutalize minorities and vandalize their property. Joseph E. Agne argues that hate-motivated violence is a result of the successes of the civil rights movement, and asserts that the Ku Klux Klan has resurfaced and new hate groups have formed.1 Agne asserts that it is a mistake to underestimate the strength of the hate-violence movement, its apologists, and its silent partners.2
Some hate groups may be classified as terrorist groups.citation needed In the United States, crimes that "manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including the crimes of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter; forcible rape; robbery; aggravated assault; burglary; larceny-theft; motor vehicle theft; arson; simple assault; intimidation; and destruction, damage or vandalism of property" directed at the U.S. government, an individual, a business, or institution, involving hate groups and hate crimes, may be investigated as acts of domestic terrorism.3456
Hate speech
- Further information: Hate speech
Dr. Ehud Sprinzak, an expert on terrorism and hate crimes, asserts that verbal violence is "the use of extreme language against an individual or a group that either implies a direct threat that physical force will be used against them, or is seen as an indirect call for others to use it." Sprinzak argues that verbal violence is often a substitute for real violence, and that the verbalization of hate has the potential to incite people who are incapable of distinguishing between real and verbal violence to engage in actual violence.1 Historian Daniel Goldhagen, discussing anti-semitic hate groups, argues that we should view "verbal violence... as an assault in its own right, having been intended to produce profound damage—emotional, psychological, and social—to the dignity and honor of the Jews. The wounds that people suffer by... such vituperation... can be as bad as... [a] beating."2
Hate groups and the Internet
In the mid-1990s, the popularity of the Internet brought new international exposure to many organizations, including groups with beliefs such as white supremacy, homophobia, Holocaust denial or Islamophobia. Since the advent of the Internet, a common tactic by hate groups is the use of Cyberstalking. Several white supremacist groups have founded websites dedicated to attacking their perceived enemies. Targets of such attacks include Ken McVay, founder of the Nizkor Project, and Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Using the Internet, hate groups are promoting a more professional veneer which may appear as more scientific and intellectual than hateful.5
By characterizing speech acts as violence, anti-hate groups have attempted to sideline freedom of speech objections to the silencing of hate groups, particularly on the Internet. In 1996, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles asked Internet access providers to adopt a code of ethics that would prevent extremists from publishing their ideas online. Internet providers that adopt the code would refuse service to individuals or groups that "promote violence and mayhem, denigrate and threaten minorities and women, and promote homophobia." In the same year, America Online Inc. said it may face charges in Germany for permitting German citizens to access neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic material on the global computer network.7
In 1996, the European Commission formed the Consultative Commission on Racism and Xenophobia (CRAX), a pan-European group to "encourage the mixing of people of different cultures" from both inside and outside Europe, tasked to "investigate and, using legal means, stamp out the current wave of racism on the Internet."8
Hate groups and religion
White nationalists and white supremacists have created a number of religions. William Pierce, founder of the National Alliance, also founded the religion of Cosmotheism. The former "World Church of the Creator", now renamed the Creativity Movement, is led by Matthew F. Hale and is tied to violence and bigotry.
Some new religious movements (NRMs) have seized upon anti-cult movement (ACM) critique and what they see as hostile acts of their unfavorable former members, and cited them as examples of religious intolerance, persecution, and bigotry. CESNUR’s president Massimo Introvigne, writes in his article "So many evil things: Anti-cult terrorism via the Internet"9, that fringe and extreme anti-cult activism resort to tactics that may create a background favorable to extreme manifestations of discrimination and hate against individuals that belong to new religious movements. Somewhat in concurrence with Introvigne, professor Eileen Barker asserts that the controversy surrounding certain new religious movements can turn violent by a process called deviancy amplification spiral.10
Psychopathology of hate groups
According to a report published in 2003 in the FBI Law Enforcement bulletin, a hate group, if unimpeded, passes through seven successive stages.3 In the first four stages, hate groups vocalize their beliefs and in the last three stages, they act on their beliefs. The report points to a transition period that exists between verbal violence and acting that violence out, separating hardcore haters from rhetorical haters. Thus, hate speech is seen as prerequisites of hate crimes and as a condition of their possibility. Similar stages have been proposed for genocide.
Classification of hate groups
The classification of other groups as a hate group is controversial and little or no consensus has developed as to whether political, religious or anti-religious movements deserve the label hate group. In the United States, two of the several organizations that claim to address intolerance and hate groups are the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)11 and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).12 The ADL and the SPLC maintain a list of what they deem to be hate groups, to be supremacist groups, anti-Semitic, anti-government or extremist groups that have committed "hate crimes."
Scientologist Bob Lippman called the old Cult Awareness Network a "hate group"13 Gay rights activists and some progressive Christians label Christian conservative groups such as the American Family Association, Family Research Council, NARTH, and Concerned Women for America as hate groups.citation needed The American Family Association is also sometimes considered a hate group for its dominionist, islamophobic and antisemitic rhetoric and campaigns (see article). The Westboro Baptist Church is also considered a hate group by gay rights activists and many others, since this particular hate group is publicly against the Irish, Americans, Swedes, Canadians, Mexicans and many others, although their main platform calls for the demise of gay people.14
Notes
References
- Sprinzak, Ehud. Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: The Free Press (1999)
- Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans the Holocaust (Knopf, 1996), p. 124.
- Schafer,John R. MA & Navarro. Joe, MA . The seven-stage hate model: The psychopathology of hate groups. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, March 20031
- Denning, Dorothy E., and Peter J. Denning. Internet Besieged: Countering Cyberspace Scofflaws. New York: ACM Press (1998)
- Perry, Barbara - ‘Button-Down Terror’: The Metamorphosis of the Hate Movement. Sociological Focus Vol. 33 (No. 2, May 2000): 113.
- Jessup, Michael The Sword of Truth in the Sea of Lies: The Theology of Hate, Google Print, p.165-p.166, in Robert J. Priest, Alvaro L. Nieves (ed.), This Side of Heaven, Oxford University Press US, 2006, ISBN 019531056X
- J. Wayne Dudley, Phylon, Vol. 42, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1981), pp. 262-274 (JSTOR)
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The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the copyrighted Wikipedia "Hate groups" article.
