Behind the Christchurch killer is a serious ideological threat

The life imprisonment imposed on Brenton Tarrant, who attacked and killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, should lead to a full discussion about the ideology behind his murderous spree.

In a Today interview on Radio 4, Justin Webb sensitively interviewed a family member of one of his victims, whose mother told the court she had forgiven the murderer. But now the rules of sub-judice are behind us, it would be good if Today and other serious media outlets examined an uncomfortable fact — the killer’s statements on Facebook make it clear that this was a political act of mass murder.

Facebook failed to pick up his posts, which stated that he was about to go out on a killing spree. The killer had tweeted pictures of the guns he would use — but, like Facebook, Twitter hides behind freedom of expression to justify the spread of hate.

The killer told his followers that he was inspired by Anders Berhring Brevik, the Norwegian far-right obsessive, who killed 77 people in 2011, and by Canada’s Alexandre Bissonnette who attacked the Quebec City mosque in 2017. He warned that: “I will carry out an attack against the invaders and will even live stream via Facebook… If I don’t survive the attack, goodbye, godbless and I will see you all in Valhalla.”

His “Valhalla” for the rest of his life will be a New Zealand prison — right-wing ideological terrorists, now a bigger threat than any other kind according to most security services, tend to avoid the martyrdom option of their Islamist comrades.

We now have a guide to this growth in right-wing terror ideology and its use of social media in a remarkable book, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. It’s written by a young Austrian researcher, Julia Ebner, who is based at London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Ms Ebner explains that the Christchurch killer was driven by the European rightist theory of the “Great Replacement”, the idea that “white Europe” is being taken over and replaced by dark-skinned Muslims who want to create “Eurabia”.

In 2004, the Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci wrote: “Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.”

This concept of “invasion” is central to the belief of the far-right that they are doing no more than defending their (white) culture and country from being conquered. In 2017, Douglas Murray, a British writer, wrote that, “Mass immigration — the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people”. The trope of “replacement” has been a driver in the rise of nationalist populist politics in the large decade.

Marine Le Pen speaks of little else. Alternative für Deutschland began as a party critical of Brussels and the euro, but only won seats in the Bundestag and regional governments in Germany when it began denouncing Islam and the arrival of refugees from Syria. Matteo Salvini also rose on the basis of attacking immigration and refugees.

As we saw in the long campaign that culminated in Brexit, the question of immigration into Britain was the key driver. During the Balkan wars, the most popular song of Serb genocidists was “Remove Kebab”. White supremacists worldwide have adopted it as an anthem. Indeed, the Christchurch killer is described as the “Kiwi Kebab Killer” in an entry in “Encyclopedia Dramatica”, an online source for the far right.

The idea of “invaders” and “invasion” — language both Donald Trump and Priti Patel have foolishly used to describe refugees and asylum seekers trying to get into the United States or Britain —  is not just anti-Muslim. The man responsible for the Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas, which killed 22 people in August 2019 posted a denunciation of the “Hispanic invasion of Texas”. The man who opened fire on a synagogue in Poway, Southern California, which killed one woman and injured others, posted that “global Jewish elites” are conspiring to replace the white race, the same claim that was taken up by the white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville, whose actions Donald Trump refused to condemn.

Another key theme alongside the “Great Replacement” idea is the concept “Accelerationism”, described by Ms Ebner as the idea of an “inevitable race war” which needed to be accelerated by by staging terror attacks and mass shootings… to spark a civil war.’

In previous times, this kind of nonsense was limited to flyers printed in green ink and photo-copied ramblings circulated to a few people. Now Facebook, Twitter and new social media accounts use Google to reach millions including one mass-murdering New Zealander.

The Today programme might find some time to interview Julia Ebner and carry out a public service duty of alerting us to this new ideology and its murderous intent.