US racial tensions rooted in economic problems: Analyst

The racial tensions in the US that lead to deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, is rooted in economic problems and President Donald Trump will cause more financial and human disaster in America and the world, says an academic in London.

"It is perfectly clear that President Trump of the USA is a white racist. But I do wish to point out that the battle between the racists and the fascists and the anti-fascists is in fact a distraction of the much bigger racial and other issues going on in the world in which President Trump is complicit,” said professor Rodney Shakespeare.

“Trump is a supporter of something which is not just resulting in disorder on the streets but in the massacre of hundreds of thousands,” Shakespeare told Press TV on Wednesday.

“He is a supporter of the Wahhabist philosophy and the Wahhabist practices of Salafism and Takfiri which lie behind all the massive destruction in the Middle East,” he added. “He is in fact involved in what is a massive war in which the Wahhabist forces led by Saudi Arabia are trying to wipe out all the Shia peoples of the Middle East.”

On Saturday, a suspected Nazi sympathizer, identified as 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr, plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters, leaving one woman dead and 19 others wounded.

Trump has come under increasing pressure over his stance on the violence, with many members of his own Republican party and US business executives distancing themselves from him.

On Tuesday Trump provoked further controversy when he said that those who had been protesting against the right-wing groups were partly responsible for the violence. His comments came a day after he bowed to overwhelming pressure to explicitly condemn the white supremacist groups.

The violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville is “a distraction from the bigger issues of the economics and economic failure,” Shakespeare noted.

People are “being distracted from the fact that they are not going to have an economic future. And at the same time they are being put at massive amounts of debt,” Shakespeare said

“How many people of those people on the streets of Charlottesville really understand that they are being spied on left, right, and center and that America is moving toward a fascist state…. and it is taking place perhaps under Donald Trump,” he argued.

“So let us fight against this and at the same time remember Trump is the agent of much bigger distractive forces and that Trump is going to bring more disaster to America and just fighting on the streets of Charlottesville will not in itself stop it. People have to wake up and look at the bigger critical and economic issues,” he concluded.

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