Fact-checking the Antifa International List of Violent Crimes in 2017 — part 1
Antifa (or someone allegedly associated with that group) recently posted a list of things that make them much more worthy than neo-nazi groups. While no-one can deny that neo-nazi groups are evil — or at the very best, if you squint hard and half look in the other direction, fantastically misguided — it always pays to fact check, particularly when stories are running around the internet and being spread on social media.
So rather than take their claims at face value, let’s check them. This is something everyone should do at least a little for every story they read — whether they agree with the point it’s making or not. We live in times of disinformation, trigger fingers, and high emotion. Let’s not get blindsided.
Is the source valid?
So that we’re playing fair, here’s an archive of the page as it stood on the 16th of August 2017:
First, is the poster of this page actually Antifa? It’s a relatively clandestine organization, so there’s no actually way to know. But let’s assume they are and take them at face value for the purposes of this exercise.
What does the page say?
you antifa guys are actually more hateful and violent than any neo nazi group in the 21st century. its fucking disgusting and you should be branded as terrorists just as much as the KKK
We’d usually just block you, Anon, but we’re going to use your message as a reminder of where the violence is coming from in 2017. Off the top of our heads, here’s what the year has looked like so far:
First, note that this document was first written in April 2017, and has been continually edited over the course of the year. Happily, they noted their edits when they made changes so we can see this. So this is a living document. (We could check this on the Internet Wayback Machine if we wanted to, to see it evolve).
This is interesting because if we take the dates at face value, this document is not a direct response to the events of Charlottesville on 8/12/2017, or Trump’s speeches.
What follows is a list of links, dates and events. We’ll tackle those next.
After that list, we have a coda:
In case you have trouble counting, Anon, that’s three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve shootings, three four five six arsons, two three four seven eight nine ten eleven stabbings, two three four five mob beatings, over 40 41 bomb threats and an acid attack by bigots, Islamophobes, nazis and racists so far this year. Eight Nine Eleven Twelve Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six Twenty-seven Twenty-Eight people are dead because of these bigoted attacks and fifteen twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-five thirty-five thirty-seven thirty-nine fifty-eight were severely injured.
But it’s anti-fascists that people should be worried about, right?
‘you should be branded as terrorists just as much as the KKK’
Really, now? Anti-fascists are as much terrorists as the KKK, a terrorist organization which murdered over 3000 people in lynchings, arsons, bombings, etc. over its 150-year history, are we?
Maybe it’s time you learned about the logical fallacy of false equivalence, Anon!
asked by Anonymous
This answer with 13,622 notes was posted 4 months ago on the 10th of April, 2017.
From <http://archive.is/IE8m2>
Medium doesn’t do strikethrough, so see the original for the correct formatting. You can probably guess that each time a number is mentioned, every one but the last one is struck out.
Each of their examples (below) is intended to refer to a criminal act taken on by bigots, racists, nazis and Islamophobes, justifying how antifa are not as bad as the KKK.
Problem 1: This list does not actually build their case. We’ll get to that in a minute, but for now… the many of the cases they list are not organized groups. Some of them are crimes perpetrated as hoaxes.
Problem 2: The KKK may have killed 3,000 people over its 150 history, but has been relatively inactive since 1935. This is not to excuse the KKK in any way — their activity is horrific — but to show that while we should be wary, and ridicule any such organization, the majority of those deaths are historical, and the organization itself appears toothless at this time. That could change, so we should not tolerate it, but it doesn’t appear to be an imminent threat the way it is positioned as a rebuttal here.
Analyzing the list
You can read the list at the archive site. We’re going to go through one by one and see if we can check their veracity.
I’ll put their claim first, then put my analysis underneath. Note: Each of the dates in the quotes below are links you can click on, as on the original site.
January 20, 2017: A right-wing extremist shoots a protestor at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington.
Link: https://archive.is/moxLn
Their Source: Seattle Times
Analysis:
The protestor who was shot was Joshua Dukes, one of the “Wobblies” — the Industrial Workers of the World, a protest group known to be socialist/radical/anarchist. Elizabeth Hokoana has been charged with first-degree assault for shooting Dukes. More details can be found here:
On May 1 2017, Elizabeth Hokoana and her husband Marc who was with her at the event, pled not guilty.
Their lawyer claims that Dukes was posting that Milo Yiannopoulos needed to be stabbed on social media. The posts have not been released to the media, but have been submitted to the court. Dukes’ lawyer insists that this is muckraking:
“He’s making baseless claims and not providing evidence,” Lippek said over the phone. “[Dukes] says he’s posted nothing like that. His page is private, visible only to friends, is active and has never been taken down.”
On June 5th, Elizabeth Hoakoana apparently contradicted her own testimony, switching from not remembering firing, to saying that she fired her weapon because Dukes was holding a knife:
Strangely, there the trail goes cold. Their next court appearance was supposed to be on July 12th, but I’ve not been able to find any more recent reports than the one above.
Conclusion: There is enough murkiness here on what exactly went on in that large crowd on that day that we should wait for the case to unfold to get the full details.
January 29, 2017: Alexandre Bissonnette walks into a mosque in Canada during evening prayers and opens fire, shooting 17 people and killing six of them.
Analysis:
Strangely, the mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette in this case worked for a call-center for Hema-Quebec, a non-profit company which manages distribution of blood donations for the Quebec region — their current equivalent of the Canadian Red Cross Blood Program, after replacing it in 1998.
He held right-wing positions, and followed a number of people on Facebook with far-right leanings, and was known as an anti-feminist at school. However, there’s no evidence that he was part of an organization.
Posts on his Facebook page show he “liked” Donald Trump, French Front National leader Marine Le Pen and Mathieu Bock-Cote, a Quebec City columnist known for his pro-nationalist and anti-multicultural views. (Source below).
He appears to have acted alone.
“A fellow university student, who also knew Bissonnette from high school in Cap-Rouge, said the accused had developed radical views.
“He was not overtly racist or Islamophobic, but he had borderline misogynist, Islamophobic viewpoints,” said Vincent Boissonneault, who is taking International Studies at Université Laval. “Unfortunately, that’s become more or less acceptable these days.”
Bissonnette did not show signs of mental illness or paranoia, Boissonneault said, adding he didn’t think he was part of an organized extremist group, either.
An organization devoted to helping refugees in the capital city said Bissonnette’s name and photograph, as they surfaced in the media Monday, were already familiar to them.
On a Facebook post, the organization Bienvenue aux refugies said Bissonnette was “unfortunately known by several activists in Quebec City for his viewpoints that were pro-Le Pen and anti-feminist, as expressed in social media and at Universite Laval.” ”
Bissonnette gave himself up to police on the night of the murders he committed, and confessed to his crimes. This one’s pretty open and shut.
Conclusion: Accurate, but he did not act as a part of a group.
January 2017: Over 40 Jewish centers in the U.S. receive bomb threats.
Analysis:
The linked article blames all of this on Donald Trump, and doesn’t give any details on the bombings, but lists hate crimes by demographic. Here’s a slightly better summary of some of the threats:
Reality, on the other hand, is quite telling. The vast majority of bomb threats were tracked down to two specific people.
Juan Thompson — a former journalist for Glenn Greenwaldt’s Intercept — was responsible for a large number of threats against the Anti-Defamation League (a Jewish non-profit organization which tackles anti-semitism, bigotry and discrimination) and multiple Jewish Community Centers, as well as cyberstalking.
He initially blamed the threats on a nasty Brooklyn radical racist white-girl called “Francesca”, (his description) who he appears to have invented as a flimsy alibi.
The majority of the threats? Those were from Michael Kadar — an Israeli-American, living in Israel.
Kadar is interesting for another reason — he was selling bomb threats on the DarkNet to high school children — pay the money, and the school would have a bomb threat and be evacuated. He’d even put someone else’s name on them for a price.
Conclusion: Neither of these people fit the “alt-right” or KKK label, and should not be in this list.
February 22, 2017: Adam Purinton tells two men from India to get out of my country — then shoots both plus a bystander, killing one.
Analysis:
Adam Purinton, 52, was tossed out of a bar in Kansas, only to return and shoot two Indian patrons (both engineers at Garmin), saying “Get out of my country”.
According to the Associated Press, his neighbor believes this to be a drunken mess, and not an anti-immigration related killing.
Conclusion: There’s very little to tie this to any kind of right-wing organization. It is racist, but it’s hard to see how Antifa could prevent this kind of terrible incident any more than the police could.
February 28, 2017: a mosque in Toronto is set on fire by arsonists.
Paragraph 1 in the article they link to:
“ On Tuesday night, a fire broke out at an Islamic center in the west end of the city damaging the roof and leaving a waft of burning plastic. Toronto police are currently investigating it, and a number of other fires in the area over the last week, as arson — not a hate crime.”
(Emphasis mine).
If you read the article, Michael Mendez was arrested that day on another three counts of arson, including one against a Masonic Temple in the same area. The police believed that they are unrelated.
In April 2017, the police were still investigating the attack.
It’s possible that Shawn Le Guerrier (“Shawn the Warrior”, translated?), was also responsible for the arson, given that he also attacked the mosque on other occasions.
Le Guerrier is a member of the “Soldiers of Odin” right-wing group in Canada and Ottawa.
Conclusion: Impossible to gauge until the police complete their investigation, but let’s be generous and assume for now that Le Guerrier is the culprit of the arson as well. True.
March 12, 2017: a mosque in Ypsilanti, MI. is set on fire by arsonists.
Police identified a 16-year old boy as the suspect, and according to them:
“Police do not believe it was a hate crime.
After thorough review of evidence and investigative information…the two fires are not considered to be motivated by a bias against any race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity and are therefore not hate crimes,” Pittsfield Township Police said in a release.
The teen and his parents cooperated with investigators and agreed to an interview, said Pittsfield Township Director of Public Safety Matthew Harshberger. He was released into the custody of his parents pending charges.”
Conclusion: Not a hate crime, and should not be on their list.
March 20, 2017: James Jackson arrives in Manhattan with a sword and stabs the first black man he sees to death. He later tells authorities he “intended to kill as many black men as he could.”
This one’s pretty cut and dried. James Jackson deliberately went to New York to kill as many black men and interracial couples as he could. From the interview with him, he appears insane.
Conclusion: Yep, batshit crazy racist asshole who should rot for all eternity. He appeared to act alone, but liked Alt-Right videos on facebook. That alone doesn’t mean that he’s part of an organization, but we’ll allow it.
March 24, 2017: Yelling “I hate Muslims!” — a man in Minneapolis stabbed a Somali man in an attempt to kill him.
It’s still not clear whether or not this is an actual hate crime, as prosecutors are still deliberating that point in the most recent stories I was able to find.
Conclusion: That said, it’s pretty clear that shouting “I hate Muslims” after you’re arrested indicates that the motivation is highly likely to be Islamophobic. There’s no evidence I can find that he’s associated with right-wing groups — although he has a long and storied violent criminal past.
March 26, 2017: A racist mob attacks a 15-year-old Polish boy in Gloucestershire and, when a local Asian shopkeeper tries to intervene, attack him as well with crowbars and baseball bats, then attempt to run him over with a car.
Conclusion: Another UK crime, so it’s not clear why it’s in the list, but this one is clearly racially motivated.
March 31, 2017: A 17-year-old Iranian/Kurdish boy is nearly beaten to death by a mob of eight people in Croydon after he revealed to them that he was a refugee.
Conclusion: As with the case immediately above, this is another UK crime, so it’s not clear why it’s in the list, but this one is also clearly racially motivated and anti-immigration.
April 6, 2017: A Charlotte store is set on fire by an arsonist who leaves a warning message for the shop owner that he “did not want any refugee business owners and that they would torture the owner if they did not leave and go back to where they came from,” according to police. It was signed “White America.”
Analysis:
This hate crime against an Indian grocery-store owner involved breaking a window, throwing in some form of incendiary device, and leaving a note to the owner.
The note may have been signed “White America”, claiming Trump as our leader, but the person who left it was Curtis Fourtnoy, a 32-year old black man.
Conclusion: Crime, masquerading as a right-wing Hate crime hoax, and should not be on the list at all.
MAY 5TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
April 30, 2017: A white man storms a pool party in San Diego and shoots four black women, two black men, and one Latino man while allowing white attendees to leave. One victim dies while the other six sustain critical injuries.
From the article, in case you didn’t read it:
“San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman — said Monday that race was not a factor in a shooting — at a birthday party where witnesses said a gunman never left his poolside chair as he opened fire on seven people, killing one.”
Emphasis mine.
More from CNN:
“Though Selis was white and some of the victims were people of color, Zimmerman said there was “zero information” to suggest the rampage was racially motivated.
“The victims were targeted for no reason other than their mere presence,” Zimmerman said. “What started as a celebration of a friend’s birthday turned into a tragedy of epic proportions for all those in attendance.” ”
So what happened here? Selis had a bad breakup the night before, and depressed, randomly starts shooting people around the pool in his apartment complex. In the middle of it, he calls the girl who broke up with him, and keeps her on the line while shooting more people, until the cops arrive and shoot him dead.
Conclusion: Not a right-wing, or hate crime. Instead, this is suicide by cop. A terrible senseless crime, but not a fascist hate crime as Antifa are portraying it.
The score so far
Fascist/racist/bigotry/far-right crimes in Antifa International’s list: 7
Unrelated crimes/hoaxes, presented falsely as the kinds of crimes Antifa are against: 5
Inconclusive: 1
Moral of the story? Always check facts before spreading posts on the internet.
