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CSUSB professor: Hate crime law should be extended to include California’s homelessSan Francisco ChronicleMay 3, 2019 A bill that would have made it a hate crime to attack a homeless person in California may have stalled in a state Assembly committee, but Brian Levin, director of CSUSB’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, says such a law is needed. “If you look at the characteristics of homeless people as a group —the vulnerability, the negative stereotyping, the violence directed towards them, the lack of protection from the state — they’re the same characteristics you find in every other protected class,” Levin said. Read the complete article at “Uncertainty over creating another class of hate crimes to protect homeless.”
‘No society that acculturates violence or anti-Semitism does well in the end,’ CSUSB professor saysCapital & MainMay 2, 2019 Brian Levin is a criminologist, civil rights attorney and the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, a nonpartisan research and policy center, where he specializes in analysis of hate crimes, terrorism and legal issues. He spoke to Capital & Main about hate and extremism in California in the wake of the April 27 synagogue shootings in Poway, California. “We wouldn’t let someone dressed as a Nazi into our teenager’s room,” says Levin, but “there’s a whole 24/7 Charlottesville on the Internet available to these kids.” Read the complete article, and watch a related video segment with Levin, at “Why Californians love to hate.”
CSUSB professor interviewed for report on violence casting a shadow over San Francisco Bay Area religious communitiesKCBS Radio (San Francisco)May 3, 2019 Brian Levin, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, was interviewed for an in-depth report about growing sense of insecurity, and also about the budding resilience and solidarity that is forming, in response to attacks on people because of their religious beliefs. Listen to the report at “Violent incidents cast shadow over Bay Area religious communities.”
Trend in extremist violence, he said, is toward individual actors radicalized by fragmented communities online, CSUSB professor saysKPBS San DiegoMay 2, 2019 In a report about the extremism in light of the Poway synagogue shooting and the unrelated arrest of a man who planned to bomb a Long Beach rally: “(U.S) Sens. Dick Durbin and Tim Kaine last month unveiled legislation that would require the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to report annually on cases of white supremacist violence, analyze incidents of domestic terrorism and focus limited resources on the most significant domestic terrorism threats. “The bill is supported by the Anti-Defamation League, Muslim Advocates and the Center for the Study of Violence and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino. That group's director, Brian Levin, said the government has mostly focused on combating large, organized terrorist groups. But the trend in extremist violence, he said, is toward individual actors radicalized by fragmented communities online. '’Additionally, assailants are acting out in their home regions,' he said. ‘So a lot of this is in both a geographic but also investigative area that the feds don't have as well covered, oftentimes, as local authorities.’' Read the complete article at “In LA, authorities thwarted an attack; in Poway, they failed to see one coming.”
Documentary film co-produced by CSUSB communication studies professor is focus of review, opinion columnMint PressMay 2, 2019 Miko Peled, an author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem, reviewed the documentary film “1948: Creation and Catastrophe,” which was co-produced by Ahlam Muhtaseb, CSUSB professor of communication studies, and Andy Trimlett. Muhtaseb and Trimlett spent 10 years making their 86-minute documentary, which explores the events of 1948, the most pivotal year in one of the most controversial conflicts in the world. According to its website, “this documentary was the last chance for many of its Israeli and Palestinian characters to narrate their first-hand accounts of the creation of a state and the expulsion of a nation.” Read Peled’s column at “What strikes Bernie Sanders as ‘extremely unfair’ is a catastrophe for millions of Palestinians.”
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