Hate Crimes and Group Psychology

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The recent murder of Egyptian Marwa El Shirbini in a German court of law confirms the trend of racially and religiously motivated violence against Muslims -and those perceived to be Muslims- in many parts of Europe and North America. Right-wing sentiments are on the rise in the EU to the extent of shaping the political scene, influencing the media, and distorting public perception.

Violent racist groups such as Hell’s Angels in Denmarkare allowed TV airtime to position themselves as “social saviors” with a mission to rid society of the “intruding” immigrants.

Policemen in Germany and USA have recently shot and killed two innocents in two separate incidents as a result of prejudiced racial and religious profiling.

Immigrants in general and Muslims in particular, including anyone with Middle Eastern features, are feared, suspected and projected as a potential threat to security and to European homogeneity and culture. Muslim individuals, homes, mosques and even cemeteries are attacked, desecrated and vandalized repeatedly in different parts of Europe.

It’s tragic that the aggression is mostly directed at women who wear hijab (headscarf and long covering clothes) who then become easy targets for harassment and violence as visible symbols.

These incidences can no longer be viewed as unfortunate accidents. They must be understood in connection with longstanding racism, discrimination, intolerance, and exclusion in communities where Muslims live.

The situation only serves to fuel equally strong reactions towards westerners and the west in predominantly Muslim communities, including those deeply entrenched in the European countries, resulting in high crime rates in the immigrant communities in Europe.

On both sides, there is a growing culture of violent revenge and a legacy of mutual hate which must be stopped before it destroys everything we hold dear.

Where does all this hate come from? How can it be eliminated? And how can we replace it by a new attitude of tolerance and respect?

Hate Crimes as a Product of Social Conditioning

Racism is certainly not part of human nature. A newborn child does not instinctively have prejudice against others. Prejudice and racism are learned from the society where a child is raised. These attitudes are derived from fear and ignorance. It is only by combating those attitudes that we will ever achieve truly multicultural societies based on mutual respect.

Islam teaches that everyone is born pure and free of evil. Consequently, those whose environments do not actively corrupt them stay as pure as they were born. Prophet Muhammad likened the process of forcing parents’ convictions on children to mutilating an innocent animal which was born in perfect form.

The Process of Socialization

Human infants are born and transformed by their parents, teachers, and communities into cultural and social beings. The process of acquiring culture is called socialization, which also teaches the appropriate and expected behaviors held by society. Research suggests that the acquisition of values, beliefs, and expectations seem to be due to socialization and unique experiences, especially during childhood, when a child’s personality can be easily molded in particular directions through encouraging specific beliefs and attitudes as well as selectively providing experiences to enforce those directions.

The home and school influence in the early years is the first source of distorted information leading to prejudice and blind hate.

The Oddities of Group Psychology

People’s behaviors in groups are both fascinating and disturbing. As soon as we are grouped together, we start to do odd things: copy other members of the group; favor them over others, look for a leader to follow, and even fight other groups. Exactly as teenagers behave, but it’s scary when adults continue to display the same group dynamics mindlessly. This has been the focus of many insightful social experiments with amazing discoveries.

Humans do Horrible Things Under Pressure to Conform

In a classic social psychology study (Asch) people thrown into a group of strangers were denied of their senses to increase their conformity with others. When simply judging the length of a line, participants went along with the group’s wrong answer despite the evidence is clear to the naked eye.

In the Robbers Cave experiment (Muzafer Sherif) when people were faced with making a judging an ambiguous test, they used others' judgments as a reference point. This is strange because when I can clearly see the answer myself, others' judgments should have no effect, but the experiment proved otherwise.

In Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, and Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiment, participants turned brutal and even inflicted physical pain on other participants! The Prison experiment had to be stopped when even the experimenter got submerged into the role playing.

In Adarves-Yorno’s experiment, group members were found to equate creativity with conformity: people are powerfully shaped by the unwritten group rules which describe how individuals 'ought' to behave and what people believe is right and wrong. Everyone is forced to think “inside the box”, thus, no creative solutions will come from within groups; someone has to start alone first.

This means that mind control is effective on groups rather than on individual creative thinkers. It also means that those groups will soon turn into “sheepol” who believe everything they are told by seemingly “credible” sources such as the media. Critical thinking to make up their minds independently slowly disappears, and the herd mentality takes over. Those who are 'conformers' typically have high levels of anxiety, low status, high need for approval and often have authoritarian personalities.

Group dynamics, the horrifying results of the pressure to conform, and the conformer’s characteristics are our second source of hate crimes.

Media Manipulation as a Socialization Tool

In the award winning BBC Documentary “The Century of the Self” one discovers a blood-chilling systematic process of mass manipulation through the media. Selective reporting, dramatization, emotionally charged images and expressions and fear mongering seem to be the foundations of the modern science of Public Relations, which was originally aimed at public manipulation, in order to redefine the limits of personal freedoms under the post-recession US “Democracy” of the 1930’s.

The documentary suggests that the techniques have been constantly improved in various parts of the world, resulting in a strictly controlled flow of information to the public, while bearing such shiny labels as “freedom of press”. In addition, the focus is on mindless entertainment rather than informative reporting, which is another form of sedating the public with so-called “fun” programs, and manipulating public opinions by using “celebrities” as a tool of socialization.

Pop Idols & Movie Stars are Unfit as Social Leaders

The 'halo effect' is a classic finding in social psychology when a general impression of a person (e.g. she is likeable) turns into judgments about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent). Movie stars demonstrate the halo effect perfectly: because they are attractive we naturally assume they are also intelligent, friendly, well-mannered and wise. Most music, movie, and sports stars are not fit (culturally, morally and psychologically) to lead masses of people around the world in intellectual and social trends, yet they do without challenge, backed by a media machine whose only goal is material gains, even in death! (Michael Jackson is a glaring example).

The biased commercial media is the third tool that breeds prejudice and leads to unjustified hate and related crimes.

Marwa El Shirbini and Hussein Shehada as Examples

In Marwa’s case, she was repeatedly denied work in Dresden because of her headscarf; the aggressor harassed her verbally calling her a terrorist Muslim, and physically tried to remove her veil. Later, he stabbed her to death 18 times, and injured her husband in court for 8 long minutes before anyone interfered. Then the police shot at the injured husband instead of the murderer, didn’t contact the Egyptian Embassy to report the crime, and aggressively searched the victims’ home for “evidence”. The media was nearly silent until the cries of shock could be heard all the way from Egypt. The rest of the European media is still mostly silent.

These events are clearly products of accumulated misinformation about Islam and Muslims, as well as right-wing venom against immigrants, although the German aggressor who is under-educated, unemployed and living on welfare, attacked two highly educated and working professionals, one of them about to submit his PhD thesis on Genetic Engineering.

In the US, Arab-American Hussein Shehada was shot dead by a police officer on mere suspicion of hiding a weapon, and on racial bias of being “Middle Eastern” and therefore a potential trouble maker, only to be found innocent. The same policeman shot and killed another man in less than two days, which means he was not even suspended for his first crime.

If either of these situations was in reverse, can we imagine the global media repercussions?

Food for Thought

1- Mutual trust and respect between Muslims on one side, and law enforcement officials and the media on the other must be restored.

2- Sensitivity training for law-enforcement officers should be redesigned to counter discrimination based on race, color, gender, or religion. We should bounce back from the aggressive, pre-emptive Bush administration’s “war on terror” attitude of “shoot first, ask later”.

3- Limit your entertainment intake and start varying your media diet to include “healthier” sources. Alternative and social media are good supplements.

4- Reach out to people from other cultures and make up your own mind about them, rather than parrot pop culture beliefs.

5- Parents and educators must help children understand and fight against prejudice by asking questions and listening to them as they talk about their discrimination experiences (whether they were the offenders or the victims).

6- The majority is not always right, and conformity is not a virtue. The Qur’an states:

(If you obeyed most of those on earth, they would lead you away from the path of God. They follow nothing but speculation; they’re merely guessing. Your Lord knows best who strays from His path and who is rightly guided}(Al An’aam, 6:116-117)

If you would like an answer to a question pertaining to the issues raised by this article, please mark on your calendar Veiled Martyr - Was It Racism .... for Monday July 20th 2009 at 10.30GMT.

Sources:

PsyBlog Insights into Human Nature  Accessed 16th July 2009

Curtis, A. The Century of the Self. Accessed 16th July 2009

Sahar El-Nadi is a professional instructor and public speaker on creative cross-cultural communication and effective presentation skills. You can reach her through Don’t Hate, Educate!