‘Rise of the Moors’ classified as antigovernment group, not hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center, adding there has been ‘no actual violence’

“Rise of the Moors,” which recently had an hour-long standoff between a group of heavily armed people and the Massachusetts State Police, was identified as an anti-government group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2020.

“We at the Southern Poverty Law Center list them as an anti-government group, where we list all sovereign citizen groups known to us that are currently active or have been active in 2020,” said research analyst Rachel Goldwasser, adding that they apply but not as a hate group.

The stalemate on Interstate 95 in Wakefield began when police said the group alleged “disregard our laws” and ended with the arrest of 11 people.

Rise of the Moors, who identify as Moorish Americans, are specific to New England.

“They believe that they are actually the first people to live in Rhode Island,” said Goldwasser. “They view their territory as opposed to the territory of the United States of America.”

When police stopped the group in Massachusetts, they told police that they were traveling from Rhode Island to Maine to train on “private land”. In one of the videos recorded during the confrontation with the police, Jamhal Talib Abdullah Bey, the group’s founder, said the vehicles contained camping gear.

The Rise of the Moors website listed the organization as the headquarters of an apartment building in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Steven Latimer, Bey’s father, has also pointed out the lack of violence on the part of the group.

“He’s not a violent person at all,” Latimer told 25 News. “Nobody can ever say that he did anything to them, nobody.”

There are similar groups across the country.

“The Moorish sovereign civil movement is a collection of independent organizations and individuals that emerged in the early 1990s as an offshoot of the anti-government sovereign civil movement that believes individual citizens have sovereignty over the authority of federal and state governments,” the Southern said Poverty Law Center on Movement. “Moorish sovereigns advocate an interpretation of the sovereign doctrine that African-Americans represent an elite class within American society with special rights and privileges that give them sovereign immunity that places them above the authority of federal and state agencies.”

And some of them, said Goldwasser, had become violent.

“There were links to violence, not so much New England specific as New Orleans,” Goldwasser said.

In 2016, Gavin Eugene Long killed three police officers in Baton Rouge. He had declared himself part of the Washitaw Nation, who also identified as Mu’urs, which, according to NOLA.com, is the exact spelling of the Moors.

What does this mean for residents of Rise of the Moors and New England?

“From a legal perspective, the way they are handling the law enforcement situation was wrong. But they did not use violence against law enforcement in this situation, which is a relief, ”said Goldwasser. “It also indicates that [violence] won’t be their first answer. Will it be her second? We do not know it.”

That applies to any extremist group, said Goldwasser, which is why the Southern Poverty Law Center is tracking them down.

“Some start out nonviolent and get violent,” she said. “It’s very difficult to predict what a group will do, especially a group that hasn’t been particularly violent in the past like this one.”

And while the group in New England may be small in number, its range is much wider.

Currently, the group’s YouTube account has more than 17,000 subscribers. One of their videos, streamed last week, got 200,000 views and another, posted on Tuesday, got more than 2,000 views in eight hours.

“The Moorish Sovereign Movement is a rapidly growing group of people who believe they belong to a sovereign nation that has a treaty with the United States but otherwise operates outside of federal and state law,” said JJ MacNab, a George Washington University scholar Program on extremism, on Twitter.

Last year, the New England group added more than 5,000 followers on YouTube, Goldwasser said. And sometimes events like this can increase their online following.

“This group operates outside the laws of the United States,” she said, reminding people that “either violating or promoting the breaking of the law cannot go well for any member of this group, as we can now see.” several members were arrested as a result of this incident. “

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