ADL Center on Extremism Staff Updates Executive Committee

  • May 8, 2017

Joanna Mendelson, Senior Investigative Researcher & Director of Special Projects, with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism presented to the Executive Committee of the Pacific Southwest Regional Board, Climate of Hate:  The White Supremacist Narrative, at the May 2 meeting.

Mendelson exposed the group to the “dark side” of ADL investigations into the labyrinth of white supremacist activity and subculture.  She also told the group, “Incidents of anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry have never been so unleashed” as she discussed an uptick in hate incidents and crimes across the country.  She gave examples of xenophobic violence including an engineer shot and killed in Missouri by a man who allegedly yelled, “get out of my country” as he believed the Indian men were “Middle Eastern.”  A Sikh man was shot in Washington State after reportedly being told “go back to your own country.”

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As part of the overview of different types of white supremacists, she discussed those whose beliefs inspired sometimes murderous actions including (pictured on slide in photo) Dylann Roof (convicted of murders at Emanuel AME Church,Charleston,South Carolina), Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell (accused of ranting against Jews, inspired by Dylann Roof, and hoping to attack Jews), and James Jackson (indicted for wanting to kill black men in New York).

Learn more about white supremacists in this new ADL Center on Extremism glossary and check out other related reports including ADL’s assessment of the State of White Supremacy and ADL’s primer on the New White Supremacy: The Alt-Right