US Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of a mother from Tamil Nadu, left no doubt where some of the blame belongs for violence in Atlanta, Georgia, that killed six Korean-American women in a shocking shooting incident. Without directly naming former president Donald Trump, she said: “For the last year, we’ve had people in positions of incredible power scapegoating Asian-Americans. People with the biggest pulpits spreading this kind of hate.”
Like Covid-19, domestic terrorism has many variants, all of them dangerous, but it cannot be cured with a vaccine. This is not a US-only phenomenon. Recent years of demagogues in political leadership has encouraged “anti-OTHERS” in multiple nations. The Atlanta shooter is a 21-year old man with some serious mental health issues, who told police the victims were targeted at a spa because of his anger at having a “sexual addiction” in conflict with his evangelical Christian family beliefs. He claimed the attacks were a way to eliminate temptation. In three different locations he killed a total of eight people with a gun bought the same day. One police officer described him as “having a bad day,” inappropriate in a nation where non-white suspects get shot for far less.
Both Harris and Biden had travelled to Atlanta to express empathy for the victims. “Because our silence is complicity,” he said: “We cannot be complicit. We have to speak out. We have to act.”
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