Sina Simantob is the founder of the Highland City Club, a social center for rich people in downtown Boulder, Colorado. The Highland City Club’s weekly newsletters, authored by Sina himself, regularly feature bigoted rants. As one columnist pointed out in Boulder Weekly, Sina dedicated an entire 2019 newsletter to affirming and defending his belief in racial stereotypes. His central argument? That avoiding ethnic and religious minorities based on these stereotypes for self-serving purposes is “smart” and therefore…not racist.
As a young foreign engineering student, I remember dropping an advanced calculus class because more than half the students were oriental, and though they weren’t any smarter, they worked 3X as hard, so I had no chance to get a good grade. I stopped doing business with Hasidic Jews in NY because time after time they proved to be better businessmen than me. And I stopped playing sports if there were more black players on the other team. So am I a smart survivalist, or a bigoted racist?
As Lawrence argues in Boulder Weekly, the answer to Sina’s rhetorical question is “[…obviously the latter. Only a bigoted racist would intentionally avoid: playing football with Black people; taking math classes with Asian people; or doing business with Jews.”
Unfortunately for us, Sina has continued to use the Highland City Club newsletter as a channel for his reactionary musings. In a recent essay titled “A Modern Day Crusade,” Sina blames Muslims for the recent wave of mob violence against non-white people in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Simantob argues that the race riots abroad can be traced back to “the very start of Islam.” Not only does he blame the Islamic concept of jihad for the current upswell of violence, but for the entire history of conflict between Christianity and Islam, positioning the recent explosion of white supremacist attacks as the culmination of a centuries-long war instigated by innately violent Muslims.
We noticed a few problems in the passage below, where Sina attempts to link the UK riots with the Crusades.
The first two sentences of this paragraph are clearly plagiarized from this article on the Crusades from History.com. Sina’s own minimal contributions to the passage, underlined above in red, put forward the bizarre and ahistorical argument that, actually, Muslims did the Crusades too. It appears to us that Sina typed “the crusades” into google.com, opened the link to the second search result, copied the first two sentences, and then tacked on his own Islamophobia at the end. Pretty embarrassing for someone who considers himself a thought leader and intellectual.
It only gets worse from there. Sina describes Muslim immigration to western Europe as an “incursion” with the ultimate goal of imposing sharia law. He states that Muslims are using “Democracy as a backdoor crusade,” exploiting immigration policy in a deliberate effort to force Islam upon Europeans (saying nothing of the fact that many involved in the riots are open neo-Nazis who themselves reject the concept of “Democracy”). Despite admitting earlier in the piece that the mob violence was spurred by misinformation and false rumors, by the end of the newsletter, Sina leaves no doubt that he sides firmly with the white supremacists. He writes, “The current political unrest in England, France, Germany, and Italy really amounts to the locals’ recognition of this reality and their decision to fight back.”
These people set fire to a hotel and barricaded the doors so no one could escape.
Just unimaginable evil.
Everyone involved should be charged with attempted murder. pic.twitter.com/0ms3Rk0Lvz
— Alfie Potts Harmer (@ahtralfie) August 4, 2024
A mob attempts to burn down a hotel full of migrant families in Rotherham.
The horrific events Sina is working so hard to justify have been described by some as the worst race riots the UK has seen since the 1919 Glasgow race riots. Non-white people were assaulted indiscriminately, immigrant-owned businesses were burned, and homes in Asian neighborhoods were attacked. As Red Flare uncovered, many of these attacks were incited by a Finnish Neo-Nazi named Charles-Emmanuel Mikko Rasanen.
After a list of 39 immigration-related services in England was posted with a call for simultaneous arson attacks by one of the administrators, Rasanen used his Mr.AG account to repeatedly post a guide on how to commit arson attacks in the chat. The guide was authored by the Russian-Ukrainian neo-Nazi group National Socialism/White Power (NS/WP) Crew which is designated as a terrorist organisation in Russia and linked to several murders.
The argument that Muslim immigrants pose an existential threat to Europeans is the basis of the white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The Great Replacement theory motivated neo-Nazi Brenton Terrant to slaughter 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March of 2019.
Was the attack “islamophobic” in origin?
Islamic nations in particular have high birth rates, regardless of race or ethnicity, and in this there was an anti-islamic motivation to the attacks, as well as a want for revenge against islam for the 1300 years of war and devastation that it has brought upon the people of the West and other peoples of the world.-Brenton Terrant
The Great Replacement
Let’s compare these lines from Terrant’s manifesto to Sina Simantob’s defense of the lynch mobs in the UK:
I posit that the origin of this fight goes back 1400 years to the very start of Islam with its injunction that all Muslims embrace Jihad as a way of life to spread Islam throughout the world by any means.
The Islamic crusades, having failed to outright conquer Europe by force, are now pursued in the form of legal immigration by taking advantage of Europe’s low native birth rate and its need for cheap labor to power their industrial production.
This incursion uses Democracy as a backdoor crusade. That is, rather than assimilating into the host culture, the Muslim population, upon reaching a ~6% ratio, demands the adoption of Sharia Law and their way of life.
The current political unrest in England, France, Germany, and Italy really amounts to the locals’ recognition of this reality and their decision to fight back.
-Sina Simantob
A Modern Day Crusade
Both Terrant and Simantob argue that lethal violence against Muslims in white majority countries is justified on the premise that the world’s entire population of Muslims are waging a 1400 year long “crusade” against Europe.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the Highland City Club’s overt racism, local politicians often attend event’s at the establishment. Then-city council member Bob Yates gave a talk about homelessness at the club in 2021, alongside then-Police Chief Maris Herold.
The Highland City Club will be hosting a private meeting with Boulder’s new Chief of Police Stephen Redfearn on September 26th. Redfearn’s appointment to Boulder’s top cop has been shrouded in controversy because of his involvement in Elijah McClain’s killing at the hands of the Aurora Police Department and EMTs.
There should be zero tolerance Sina Simantob’s scapegoating of Muslims and support for neo-Nazis. Boulder’s Muslim community does not need any more hatred lobbed their way.
Find a printable flyer to warn the community about Sina and the Highland City Club here.
Sina likely plagiarized the US Library of Congress in a subsequent Highland City Club newsletter that compares Elon Musk to Galileo. Plagiarism is not nearly as important as Sina’s defense of violent neo-Nazis, but we felt it was worth mentioning given Sina is at the helm of Highland City Club’s think tank, The Highland Institute.
Here is a side-by-side of Sina’s September 13, 2024 piece “A Telescope of the Mind” compared to “Galileo and the Telescope” from the Library of Congress:
Sina clearly took entire sentence and phrases from the Library of Congress piece and crudely chopped them up so his section on Galileo wouldn’t be an exact copy & paste job. It is not lost on us that Sina dropped the sentence about foundational advancements in telescopes from Islamic scientists.