It was a miracle that 20-year-old Zaire Goodman made it out of the Tops grocery store in east Buffalo alive.
The young man, who was shot in the neck and through the back by white supremacist Payton Gendron, unwillingly became a member in one of the country’s continuously growing clubs this May: a legion of survivors of mass terror events.
On Tuesday, months after the deadly massacre that left 10 others dead, Mr. Goodman’s mother, Zeneta Everhart, was composed as she spoke at Pittsburgh’s Eradicate Hate summit, an international gathering of anti-violence experts inspired by the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
According to Ms. Everhart, the 18-year-old Mr. Gendron was “misguided.” After she read his 180-page manifesto — one in which he touted the anti-Black and anti-immigrant “Great Replacement Theory” — Ms. Everhart suggested better education on race could have averted the shooting.
“He didn’t know who we were — he doesn’t know who Black people are in this country,” Ms. Everhart said of the alleged shooter. She added, “In America, we don’t teach true African American history. We don’t tell the story of what America did to my ancestors.”
Over the course of the morning, experts in digital extremism monitoring and other survivors discussed how to prevent hateful and racially motivated attacks like Buffalo and extremist violence that has erupted domestically and abroad over the past decade. Like, Ms. Everhart, the panel stressed that education and intervention with potential shooters is crucial, while also important were efforts to remove hateful manifestos and livestreamed videos of attacks from the internet as soon as they appear.
Bjorn Ihler, a survivor of the far-right attacks on Norway’s Utoya Island in 2011, turned the horrific experience — one where 77 people were shot killed — into action.
Mr. Ihler, 31, now runs the Khalifa Ihler Institute, a nonprofit that tackles anti-violence projects. For example, the company used data to create a “hate map” that creates a global picture of extremism. Mr. Ihler drew connections between Buffalo and the Norway attack, where neo-Nazi Anders Breivik left behind a hateful manifesto Mr. Ihler said was similar to Gendron’s. Similar, too, was the manifesto recovered from gunman Brenton Tarrant after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand.
“I think this constitutes a trend, of what I’ve been calling the ‘manifesto shooters,’” Mr. Ihler said. “The documents themselves constitute as a transnational threat.”
Meanwhile, another nonprofit is hoping to form partnerships with social media and tech platforms, where these manifestos and livestream videos of attacks can circulate widely in the minutes following the first gunshot or explosion.
Nick Rasmussen, executive director of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, suggested removing this content as soon as possible can prevent other would-be terrorists from acting. In the 24 hours after Christchurch shot and killed killed 42 people, Meta — formerly Facebook — scrambled to remove the livestream video of the attack from its platform.
“The attacker in Christchurch, New Zealand, successfully livestreamed for way too long a period of time” Mr. Rasmussen said.
His team, which runs a 24/7 monitoring service, aims to alert tech companies when extremist content is shared on their platforms. One focus was smaller tech platforms that lack the tracking resources that large companies like Meta have.
Later, Sam Vinograd, assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, nodded to efforts from the Biden administration, which released the first-ever national strategy for domestic terrorism that included the tracking of financial activity of suspected domestic terrorists, training for military veterans on potential extremist targeting within that community, and funding for anti-extremism prevention groups.
Speaking virtually from a town near Buffalo was the Rev. Mark E. Blue, president of the NAACP’s branch in Buffalo. He said “no amount of money” could ever erase the tragedy that happened in Buffalo.
Still, the community is moving forward to heal. On Monday,, the Buffalo Bills honored family members of the 13 Tops grocery shooting victims during their home opener at Highmark Stadium, including Zaire Goodman.
“We have made some great strides, but we still have a long way to go,” Rev. Blue said. “We had prayer circles we had every nationality of individual in the city of Buffalo come together to try to bring some healing in our city.”
Jesse Bunch: jbunch@post-gazette.com
First Published: September 21, 2022, 12:59 a.m.
