Mobs have attacked foreign-owned businesses on the streets of at least three South African cities in recent days. This has caused outrage across Africa. There have even been
retaliatory attacks. The South African government, under pressure to protect her
large international migrant community, quickly defused the attacks.
Eighteen-year-old Gift Makau enjoyed playing and refereeing football games in her neighbourhood in the North West Province of South Africa. She had come out to her parents as a lesbian and had never been heckled by her community, according to her cousin.
The 19-year-old Azerbaijani man claims he awoke one morning in mid-August to the sound and feel of gasoline splashing on his body and his mother angrily screaming. Through a sleepy haze, he saw her burning a piece of paper. Suddenly, he alleged, his mother’s intentions became clear; he was about to be burned to death for being homosexual.
“Every day I live in fear that I will be raped,” said Thembela*, one of thousands of lesbians across South Africa being terrorised by the scourge of “corrective rape”.
Amidst the rising tide of racial and religious intolerance worldwide - including xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia - the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) will meet in the Austrian capital of Vienna later this week to strengthen cross-cultural relations in a world it describes as "alarmingly out of balance".
Donald P. Green is a U.S. professor of political science who turns theories about hate crime upside down with his research.
The attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in early August on the heels of the shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado signals the rise of right-wing domestic terrorism in the United States, experts say.