WASHINGTON: Themassacre of Muslims at New Zealand mosques on Friday demonstrated the globalreach of a white nationalist movement that preaches an imagined"European" ideal, rejects immigration and shares often viciousthreats over the Internet. It's leaderless, fragmented, and relies forattention on lone-wolf type attackers like the 28-year-old Australian terroristBrenton Tarrant, who killed 49 people Friday in Christchurch, explaining in amanifesto that he wants to "crush immigration" and revenge terrorattacks on Europe.
But experts sayit is a cohesive movement bound together online that stretches across Europeinto Russia, has a deep following in the US and Canada, and as Friday's attackshowed, is present in Australia and New Zealand. They say it poses as much ofan international threat as Islamic extremism, and even more so in the UnitedStates where white nationalist attacks have outpaced those by jihadists foryears.
"Whitenationalism and far-right extremism is the most prominent extremist threatfacing the United States today, and indeed it is a worldwide phenomenon,"said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism atCalifornia State University, San Bernardino. "These folks fear demographicchange. They use the term white genocide," he said.
The whitenationalist movement has roots in concepts espoused decades ago by European andAmerican fascists and neo-Nazis. French historian Nicolas Lebourg noted thatthe Christchurch suspect's manifesto cited British 1930s fascist Oswald Mosley,who developed the idea of a planet organized by race. His use of the word"Europeans" for whites was first promoted in the late 1940s byAmerican neo-Nazi Francis Parker Yockey. "White genocide" is an ideathat appeared around 1972 in the United States, Lebourg noted, and was thenpopularized in Europe by French writer Renaud Camus.
Indeed, thesuspect's manifesto was titled "The Great Replacement," the title ofa 2011 book by Camus, popular in white nationalist circles, that argued thatnon-white immigrants are supplanting white Europeans. But their ideas are notuniform - some white nationalists are anti-Muslim, some anti-Jewish, somecapitalist, others socialist. What unites them today, analysts say, is theirfundamental opposition to immigration.
VanderbiltUniversity professor Sophie Bjork-James said a common fear was that whiteChristians could become minorities in societies they have dominated forcenturies. This has given rise to movements like the France-rooted"Identitarians," and Identity Evropa in the United States. White nationalists have been furtheremboldened by the rise of politicians espousing traditionalist views and atough line on immigration - from Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orban inHungary to Russian President Vladimir Putin; and the UKIP party in Britain.
The same holdstrue in the United States where President Donald Trump campaigned for the WhiteHouse on an anti-immigration platform, backed by an overwhelmingly white voterbase. Trump notoriously appeared to sanction the march by white supremacistsand neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, and has avoided condemningviolence from the far-right. Bjork-James said, "They see him as anincredible opportunity to broaden their influence."
The Christchurchsuspect called Trump "a symbol of renewed white identity and commonpurpose". While he was swift to condemn the massacre, Trump courtedcontroversy once again on Friday by saying he did not think it showed whitenationalism to be a growing problem worldwide. "I don't really. I thinkit's a small group of people," he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Bjork-James saidthe internet, especially sites like GAB and Stormfront, have helped build aglobal community for the otherwise disparate white nationalists."Stormfront is a global clearinghouse for white nationalism," shesaid. It was filled with comments early Friday on the Christchurch attack, withsome questioning the murder of women and children. One commenter rejected thedebate, she noted, by saying chillingly: "Invaders are not innocentpeople."
She said overallthe movement operates consciously as a "leaderless resistance", whosemembers aimed to inspire each other into action. "The lone-wolf attack isactually a part of a global strategy," said Bjork-James.The Christchurchsuspect wrote that he took inspiration from other white nationalists whoundertook mass killings. He cited Anders Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people inNorway in 2011; Dylann Roof, who killed nine African-Americans in a US churchin 2015; Alexandre Bissonnette, who murdered six in a 2017 attack on a Canadianmosque; and others like them.
But Lebourg saidthat attacks more recently appear to have become part of a cycle of revenge,especially since the bombings that targeted France in 2015. The suspect'smanifesto supports that: He cites revenge for historical events and recentIslamist extremist attacks multiple times. The 2015 attacks were "a tippingpoint for all the supremacists", Lebourg said. "Now revenge is inpeople's heads." - AFP