[News] Meet the ‘homegrown violent extremism’ researcher behind the crackdown on pro-Palestinian

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/meet-the-homegrown-violent-extremism-researcher-behind-the-crackdown-on-pro-palestinian-students-at-usc/?ml_recipient=120137587998328384&ml_link=120137524351862172&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-05-01&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
Meet the ‘homegrown violent extremism’ researcher behind the crackdown on
pro-Palestinian
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's Youth Working Group
April 30, 2024
------------------------------

Student protestors at the University of Southern California, not a place
usually known for its campus activism, have thrown the school into crisis.
Administrators cancelled the commencement speech
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-16/usc-valedictorian-banned-graduation-speech>
of their Muslim, Pro-Palestinian valedictorian after a pressure campaign
from Zionists threatening the speaker. They then called LAPD onto campus to
brutally arrest 93 students
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-24/usc-pro-palestinian-encampment>
protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And now, administrators have
abruptly canceled
the universities’ 65,000-attendee “main-stage” commencement event
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-25/la-me-usc-commencement-canceled>,
and other commencement speakers have launched a boycott
<https://lithub.com/c-pam-zhang-and-safiya-noble-have-withdrawn-as-usc-commencement-speakers/>
.

The key administrators who made these decisions are facing calls from their
own faculty to resign
<https://twitter.com/arohelmet/status/1784225059168743701>. Among them is
Erroll Southers, the university’s “Associate Senior Vice President of
Safety and Risk Assurance”, who oversees USC’s campus police and
collaboration with LAPD. The L.A. Times notes that not only was Southers
involved in the decision to silence Asna Tabassum but that the university
has “referred questions about security
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-18/usc-campus-reels-after-valedictorians-speech-is-canceled>”
to him.
*Who is Erroll Southers?*

A longtime police official, Erroll Southers is a prominent figure within LA
city politics. He is the president of LAPD’s Board of Police Commissioners,
the “civilian” oversight body that rubber stamps every LAPD expenditure.
LAPD’s Police Commission purports to offer a forum for public conversation
and input. However, at a Police Commission Community Meeting at Bishop
Alemany High School just after Tabassum’s speech was canceled, Southers and
his Police Commission colleagues shut down every public comment about
Tabassum as “off-topic” and forcibly ejected three public commenters – all
of them Black men – from the meeting.

The purpose of this enforced silence is to bury the deeper connections
between Southers and Israeli influence on U.S. policing. Southers’s role in
the crackdown on anti-Zionism must be understood within his long career of
racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism including, among other things*, a **paper*
<https://sci.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CREATE-Characteristics-of-Homegrown-Violent-Extremist-Radicalization.pdf>*
co-authored by Southers that classifies signs of Muslimness and
identification with Palestinians as potential characteristics of “Homegrown
Violent Extremism.”* His career and work also reveal the deep ties between
Zionism, academia, and LAPD’s “counterterrorism” surveillance programs.

After working for multiple police forces, including the FBI, Southers built
an academic career as an “expert” in terrorism and “Israeli
counterterrorism strategies”
<https://today.usc.edu/profile/erroll-g-southers/>. He has spent decades
teaching at the “International Institute of Counter-Terrorism
<https://ict.org.il/ourteam/southers-erroll-g-dr/>” in the Israeli town of
Herzliya. Southers has also served as an Associate Director and Director of
CREATE <https://create.usc.edu/>, a Department of Homeland Security
research hub hosted by USC. In other words, Southers is a lifelong cop and
federal agent, and an academic link between an Israeli counterterrorism
research institute and one run by a federal spy agency in Los Angeles.
*Demonizing Black and Muslim communities*

Southers is an expert at using reformist language to secure more resources
and political cover for the police state. His brand of racism is
characterized by the liberal platitude of opposing “all forms” of extremism
and the use of euphemisms to sanitize racial profiling. Southers routinely
speaks about white supremacist militias, and is quick to disavow
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_cUl5lqAyk> the notion that there is a
single profile for an “extremist”. However, the presence of white
supremacists in Southers’ extremism rosters does nothing to undercut the
racism of his work; instead, he uses “white supremacy” as an analogy to
demonize its own victims. In Southers’ own words
<https://irp.fas.org/congress/2017_hr/threats2.pdf>: “An American who
embraces a Muslim Identity ideology within the United States is a
home-grown violent extremist, and so too is an American who embraces an
ideology positing racial superiority and advocating violence.”

Southers conducted his research on “radicalization” among the Somali
community in Minnesota. And in his PhD thesis-turned-book *Homegrown
Violent Extremism*
<https://books.google.com/books/about/Homegrown_Violent_Extremism.html?id=5NpinAEACAAJ>,
completed at USC, Southers assembles a taxonomy of “extremists” including
“Black Separatist” and “Muslim Identity” extremists alongside white
supremacists.

Southers accuses “Black Separatist” extremists of “racially based hatred,
black supremacy and/or black separatist ideologies”, omitting any analysis
of power or political context to equate “Black Separatists” with
segregationists. Elsewhere, in media appearances, Southers has also branded
“Antifa”, an ill-defined catch-all term for decentralized approaches to
opposing government repression and police violence, as a form of Homegrown
Violent Extremism <https://youtu.be/Ttn6VS38mjQ?si=zUkSKMpIGqBJOJFC&t=2796>.

Similarly, Southers classifies “Muslim Identity Extremism” as “a worldview
that there is a predatory relationship between “the West” (broadly, the
United States and Europe) and the Islamic world (Muslim-majority nations).
The perceived motivations for Western aggression include control of natural
resources, as well as the destruction of Islam as a religious or political
force.” Southers pathologizes criticism of US and Western imperialism as a
sign that a Muslim is a potential “Muslim Identity extremist”.

Another article, co-authored by Southers
<https://sci.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/CREATE-Characteristics-of-Homegrown-Violent-Extremist-Radicalization.pdf>
and published by USC CREATE under his directorship, goes even further. This
article lists “Radicalization Characteristics” that include:

   - “pervasive frustration or anger toward the United States”
   - “Strongly identified with Muslims perceived as being victimized
   (Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, or Muslim Kashmiris)”
   - “Adopted dress, grooming, or conduct increasingly indicative of Muslim
   identity (paid off debts, observed dietary laws, women donned fuller
   covering, men let their beard grow)”
   - “Converted to Islam as an adult”
   - And even, simply “Comes from Muslim immigrant community”

We must ask: are Muslim and Arab students at USC safe with a professor and
an administrator who sees their religious and ethnic background and their
identification with Palestinians and other oppressed peoples as
“radicalization characteristics”? Are Black communities safe with a Police
Commissioner who characterizes movements to end police violence as a form
of “extremism”?
*Racist surveillance programs and profiling*

Southers did not just theorize about Muslim and Black radicalization. He
actively supported the development of surveillance programs which target
Black and Muslim communities. Los Angeles was a pilot city for the Countering
Violent Extremism
<https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/countering-violent-extremism-cve-resource-page>
(CVE) program, in which police cultivated “community partners” to report on
suspected extremists. These “community partners”
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s0GxzDQHjwEmo9mNB14Nfg6lj247_dl1/view?usp=sharing>
included several Zionist organizations, as well as Muslim organizations
with close ties to law enforcement. CVE has been widely discredited for
overt Islamophobia and racism <https://muslimjusticeleague.org/cve/>.
Public records show that Southers sat on the Community Advisory Committee
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n1uVy_GXaQRJsgp3mjSXgE77xVtODW0a/view?usp=sharing>
of LA’s CVE program and wrote a letter of support
<https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2017/17-1228_misc_1-8-2018.pdf> for a
federal Department of Homeland Security grant to expand the program.

Communities in Los Angeles organized to block this grant
<https://www.dailynews.com/2018/08/16/la-mayor-turns-down-425k-in-federal-funding-to-counter-violent-extremism-after-opposition-from-civil-rights-groups-stalls-process/>
to expand CVE in 2018, but CVE lives on today in the form of LAPD’s Providing
Alternatives to Hinder Extremism (PATHE)
<https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2021/21-1476_rpt_bpc_12-07-21.pdf>
program, in which LAPD is training teachers, counselors, and faith leaders
to spy on youth for signs of radicalization.

Sometimes Southers simply employs euphemisms to advocate for racist
policies. In an op-ed in the *Jerusalem Post*, Southers complains that
Americans, compared to Israelis, are too hostile to racial profiling
<https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/america-is-not-israel-but>:
“the mere mention of the ‘P-word’ (profiling) in the English lexicon,
invokes images of shredding the Constitution.” He then extols Israeli
airport security, which routinely discriminates against Palestinians
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/07/discrimination-against-palestinian-americans-should-disqualify-israel-from-the-visa-waiver-program/>,
claiming that Israel uses “behavioral cues and responses” to identify
threats in a way that is consistent with civil liberties. In another
interview, he whitewashes NYPD’s infamous “Stop and Frisk” practice
<https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/entering-the-era-of-homegrown-violent-extremism-interview-with-erroll-southers/>
as nothing more than “selective enforcement, which employed in other ways
can be successful.” He even brags that he has “engaged in selective
enforcement when I was a gang officer in Santa Monica.” Southers’ affection
for Israeli profiling practices and his own predilection for “selective
enforcement” should be taken into consideration when judging his
qualifications for his USC job and Police Commission role.
*From academic complicity to academic rebellion*

We echo the demands from the students that USC divest from death, whether
it’s Israel’s genocide in Gaza or LAPD’s murderous policing in South
Central. We also support the calls from faculty for the administrators
responsible for endangering and censoring their students should resign. USC
must also end its partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and
shutter USC CREATE. Finally, we call on academics to expose and organize
against colleagues who develop racist theories for the national security
police state – to follow the lead of their students and move from academic
complicity to academic rebellion.

Southers is the embodiment of the liberal racism that pervades USC, and
academia as whole: one that can celebrate “Arab Heritage Month”
<https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2024/04/01/usc-celebrates-the-start-of-arab-american-heritage-month/>
while locking up nearly one hundred students for protesting a genocide
against Arab people in Palestine. This racism nominally opposes white
supremacy in Charlottesville but not in City Hall, the Oval Office, or the
Knesset. It’s telling that the egregious censorship of a non-Black,
non-Palestinian Muslim has finally brought the spotlight on Erroll
Southers. For too long, both Zionism and the ordinary anti-Black machinery
of policing – the two pillars Southers’  career has been built on – have
not been recognized as racist.

Luckily, the students rising up in what Palestinians are dubbing the
“Student Intifada” are helping to change that. And they know, as do we,
that the number one indicator that someone is on a pathway to committing
violence won’t be found in any of Southers’ research papers on “extremism”:
it’s putting on a police badge or an IDF uniform.
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