A teenage white nationalist gunman opened fire at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo New York on Saturday, methodically killing ten people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racial attacks in recent US history.
Law enforcement officials identified the gunman as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron of the small upstate New York town of Conklin. Gendron had drove over 200 miles to commit his terrorist attack, which he also livestreamed to a video feed that appeared designed to promote his political agenda.
Prior to the shooting, Gendron had uploaded a manifesto to the internet, warning of “white genocide.”
The 180 page manifesto details his ideological positions and tactical considerations for Saturday’s attack.
“Call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you,” wrote Gendron.
The manifesto dedicates separate sections to different ethnic groups and offers detailed explanations for why white nationalists view each of these groups are subhuman. In it, Gendron took pains to clarify that while Jews are the real issue troubling the United States, he chose to attack the Black community to prevent its impact on the country. While he expressed a wish to strike at more ethnic minorities, he acknowledged that he would only be able to carry out an attack against one.
The views laid out by Gendron’s manifesto point to a Jewish conspiracy to destroy “White countries” by flooding them with immigrants and displacing the resident. The conspiracy theory is often referred to by white nationalists as the “Great Replacement.”
“I’m advocating for is the gentiles vs the Jews,” wrote Gendron.
“We outnumber them 100x, and they are not strong by themselves. But by their Jewish ways, they turn us against each other. When you realize this you will know that the Jews are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had. They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We can not show any sympathy towards them again.”
Gendron’s rants about the Jewish people and the threat we pose to the West shouldn’t be dismissed so quickly. While it’s true that there is no actual plot by Jews to harm the American people, the children of Israel do represent something that’s deeply threatening to Western civilization. Despite the fact that they consciously misdiagnose and misinterpret the details of that threat, white nationalists tend to be innately attune to the fact that the Jews do in fact post a threat.
From a Jewish historiographical perspective, Western civilization – the civilization our sages associate with Esav – destroyed Israel roughly 2,000 years ago and usurped the Hebrew role on the world stage ever since. If the broader West can be seen as Esav, white nationalists – the most self-aware and militant component of Western civilization – should be understood as being manifestations of Esav’s nefarious grandson Amalek.
A conflict between Israel and Amalek has raged throughout history, with some notable Hebrew victories in ancient Israel and Persia, as well as a mass scale catastrophic defeat in Europe only a century ago. But now that Israel has returned home to our land and has been experiencing rapid advancements in our national development, the forces of Amalek are intuitively sensing the dangers we pose to their civilization.
Where white nationalists are wrong, however, is in their assumption that Jews are intentionally planning to harm the West through replacing white populations, challenging cultural norms or other conspiratorial plots.
In truth, there are no Jewish conspirators with a conscious agenda to take down the West. But Israel’s national rebirth in and of itself threatens the very foundations of Western civilization and signals the collapse of a world order built on tyranny and exploitation.
The deep conflict between Israel and Esav can’t be reconciled. Any surface reading of white nationalist literature makes this clear. Amalek is determined to protect Esav’s broader civilization from the fundamental threat Israel poses. And in doing so, white nationalists are likely to hurt a lot of people – not only Jews but also innocent people like those gunned down by Gendron last week. The more self-aware Jews become to what this conflict is really all about, the more we will stand in solidarity with other peoples systemically victimized and exploited by Esav and the better equipped we will be to defend not only ourselves but also other groups targeted by the forces of Amalek.
