At 1.40pm local time, a man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant burst into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and possibly another, shooting and killing upwards of dozens of panicked and huddled Muslim worshippers at point-blank range shortly before Friday prayers began, laughing insanely as he carried out what can only be described as IS-level violence.
What we do know about Tarrant, however, at least based on his social media accounts, is his profile reads as the sum total of every counter-terrorism practitioner’s and academic’s fear, one that law-enforcement agencies throughout the Western hemisphere have long warned to be the No. 1 terror threat: right-wing extremism.
More specifically, Tarrant represents the dangerous convergence between broken white men and extreme right-wing media, bearing in mind that 100 per cent of all terrorist attacks carried out on US soil in 2018 were carried out by right-wing extremists, with the Southern Poverty Law Centre crediting a “toxic combination of political polarisation, anti-immigrant sentiment and modern technologies that help spread propaganda online”.
These kind of attacks are being carried out in increased frequency and ferocity in mosques, synagogues, and black churches throughout the Western world, with a notable common denominator: the gunmen are always white, male and fuelled by consumption of right-wing media.
“Well, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out an attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via Facebook link,” Tarrant warned on the far-right online forum 8Chan on Thursday, which included links to what he called his “writings”.
Read the article by C.J.Werleman in the The Sydney Morning Herald.