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CSUSB professor discusses Arab League leader’s comments on territorial integrity of Arab countriesPress TVNov. 25, 2018 David Yaghoubian, CSUSB professor of history, was interviewed about the recent comments by Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Ghait and the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi regarding the territorial integrity and stability of Arab countries. “If the Arab League is concerned with the territorial integrity of Arab countries it should encourage especially Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE to stop their daily onslaught against the civilians of Yemen and their attempt to conquer the country and to fragment it,” Yaghoubian, said. “The Arab League could have worked towards the territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria at a time when Saudi Arabia and the UAE and other Gulf states were funneling billions of dollars and arms to the so-called ‘Islamic State’: the Daesh takfiri terrorists (ISIS) in an attempt to break up Iraqi and Syrian territorial integrity and create what in the words of the US State Department was a ‘Salafist Principality.’ So, basically this is just pure psychological projection on the part of the Arab League Secretary General.” Press TV is a 24-hour English language news and documentary network affiliated with Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. See the video interview at “Iran urges Arab League chief to stop divisive stances.”
‘Colorism’ and politics topic of article quoting CSUSB professorLos Angeles TimesNov. 23, 2018 Brian Levin, director of the CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, is interviewed for an article on colorism — a subset of racism that rewards light skin and more Anglo features and penalizes dark skin and more indigenous features. It has long affected how people are perceived in this country, the newspaper reported. But it has contributed an extra layer of angst in the Trump era, as the rhetoric around immigration draws attention to those whom some people, with seemingly more audacity than before, judge as not belonging. “When you’re in an era of Euro and white nationalism, color or skin tone can often be a proxy for a variety of distinctions,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. “Oftentimes, darker complexion is exploited as visual proof of a parasitic invasion of the country, that is not just evidence of changing demographics, but a proxy for a sinister attack on our values, culture, economy and safety by outsiders.' Read the complete article at “In the Trump era, a lighter shade of Latino can make life easier.”
CSUSB professor helps analyze FBI hate crime statistics and bias incidents against African-AmericansNBC NewsNov. 21, 2018Brian Levin, director of the Cal State San Bernardino Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (the university was misidentified in the initial article), was quoted in an article about hate incidents against African-Americans. Violence, property crimes, threats and other offenses inspired by racial animus amounted to the most frequent type of hate crime reported in the FBI’s most recent tally of bias crimes. In fact, black Americans have been the most frequent victims of hate crime in every tally of bias incidents generated since the FBI began collecting such data in the early 1990s, the news site reported. Levin parses hate crimes data and the social conditions which seem to feed them. Some of the patterns that Levin has spotted in hate crime in the past add some weight to the theory that Trump’s rhetoric and the rise of white nationalist behavior are driving all sorts of hate crimes in the present. For example, the single worst month in anti-black hate crimes came in July 1996, one month before President Bill Clinton signed a welfare-reform bill into law. That summer, conversations about supposed welfare queens, and ostensibly fecund and lazy blacks, were not difficult to encounter. More recently, when Levin worked with a research partner, Jim Nolan, a sociologist with the West Virginia University Research Center on Violence, the men discovered that Nov. 10, 2016 — the day after Trump’s election — marked the apex of the single worst month in hate crime the country had seen in 14 years. Beyond the hate crimes statistics, Levin said he sees strong and more terrifying indications that we are living in an era of “ascendant white nationalism.” “One of them, without question, is that white nationalist ideology has become accepted as mainstream political thinking,” Levin said. 'We have, at this point, a socio-political movement framed around racial resentment, fear of economic and social change and clinging to certain expectations. And that stuff is not called racism, it’s not called what it is.” In the period between the early 1900s and 1930s, the Klu Klux Klan perfected the art of more subtle but racist critiques of things like “jazz culture,” “foreign influences,” and describing social change as a assault on “traditional” and core “American values,” Levin said. Today, white nationalist groups are making similar arguments in politics, in their own fast-growing social media spaces and in the pages of major news publications, Levin said. But as dire as Levin’s analysis of the present moment may sound, he also sees hints of good news. In 1996, 42 percent of all hate crimes in the United States were directed at African Americans. This year, though bias-driven crimes directed at African Americans remain the single largest category of hate crime, that same figure has declined to 28 percent. “I don’t want to be excessively cheerful,” said Levin. “But what I am saying is 42 percent is a cancer that is going to consume the country. At 28 percent, we can do chemo.” Read the complete article at “In every tally of hate crimes, blacks are the most frequent victims.”
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