On Sept. 15, 2001, a racist gunman murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi at Sodhi’s gasoline station in Mesa, Arizona.
Sodhi, a 52-year-old Sikh man who immigrated to the USA from India in 1989, was killed in a hate crime by a Frank Roque. The shooter, a white man, opened hearth on Sodhi in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults, prosecutors mentioned. Roque apparently mistook Sodhi’s turban and beard as an indication of the Islamic religion and thought he had gunned down a Muslim man.
After killing Sodhi, Roque went on to shoot at a Lebanese American clerk who labored at one other gasoline station, and the house of a household of Afghan descent. Thankfully, they weren’t injured.
Roque was unabashed about his bigotry when he was arrested.
As The Guardian reported:
He [Roque] was arrested and reportedly shouted: ‘‘I stand for America all the best way,’’ as he was positioned in handcuffs. Former colleagues testified at trial that Roque had lengthy made racist remarks in public and, on the day of 9/11, had advised a co-worker utilizing racist slurs that he deliberate so-called reprisal assaults.
“We should always spherical all of them up and kill them. We should always kill their kids, too, as a result of they’ll develop as much as be like their mother and father,” Roque mentioned.
Word how related Roque’s phrases sound to the sentiment we hear from present-day hate criminals (and their political associates). It’s not onerous to think about, for instance, related rhetoric being spewed by nationalistic supporters of former President Donald Trump. And for that motive, it strikes me that the USA has successfully vanquished the terrorism the nation witnessed on Sept. 11: the so-called radical Islamic extremism we’ve raised hell to struggle. However we’ve executed a a lot poorer job of hunting down the terrorism that exploded within the wake of that assault: xenophobic assaults. And never simply by particular person gunmen, however on the highest ranges of presidency, too, which has surveilled and preyed upon Black and brown people disproportionately.
The concept that racial and ethnic minority teams pose an existential risk to the U.S. could have appeared like a fringe idea to some within the wake of the Sept. 11 assaults. However it’s arguably some of the unifying beliefs within the conservative motion right this moment. We see it in the appropriate’s embrace of the racist “substitute principle,” which alleges Jewish folks, Black people and immigrants are engaged in a plot to destroy the American lifestyle. Trump has overtly sowed racist hate towards Muslim folks — whether or not that was earlier than his presidency when he lied about “Arab” folks cheering the Sept. 11 assaults, or throughout his presidency, when he sought to ban folks from a number of majority-Muslim nations from getting into the U.S.
Because the conservative motion’s standard-bearer, Trump has helped carry racist extremism to the fore of the Republican Occasion.
And that’s heavy on my thoughts as I mourn the 1000’s misplaced to terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001, and lots of others harmed by or misplaced to xenophobic terrorism within the aftermath. In 2022, the Senate launched a report concluding that home terrorism poses the best risk to U.S. nationwide safety. Within the identify of Balbir Singh Sodhi, the U.S. would do nicely to mirror on how narrow-minded the nation’s idea of terrorism has been within the aftermath of the Sept. 11 assaults. Bearded brown males have been scapegoated because the faces of terrorism. However the numbers don’t lie: Bigoted white extremists are the larger threats.
