Extremist attacks rise as polarisation continues Far-right inspired lone wolf attacks are harder to predict and detect than traditional forms of terrorism, and they are on the rise, note U.S. experts in the June issue of ASIS International’s Security Management magazine. As tragedies go, the 15 March terrorist attack in Christchurch seemed particularly concerning for several reasons.
The country had experienced political bombings and other violent protest acts, but never anything to the extent of a mass shooting with 51 fatalities. “I’m 66. I never thought in my life I would live to see something like this—not in New Zealand,” a local woman told news outlets near the scene of the attacks. The suspect’s attempts to draw attention to the deadly acts also seemed unprecedented: he live-streamed the shootings via a head-mounted camera. Hours after the suspect’s arrest, some Internet users continued uploading the video to YouTube and other online services. “The rapid and wide-scale dissemination of this hateful content— live-streamed on Facebook, uploaded on YouTube, and amplified on Reddit— shows how easily the largest platforms can still be misused,” U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a statement. The suspect also self-identified as a white supremacist in a lengthy manifesto he posted on Twitter before the attack. In the manifesto, the suspect railed against cultural dilution, described nonwhite people as invaders, and advocated for the superiority of his race. Experts said he had clearly spent time scouring the Internet for sites where extremists from around the world vent their anger and discuss white nationalist concepts, such as replacement theory.
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This too is troubling, experts say, because this type of activity, and its potential for violence, seems to be on the upswing. Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent who is a counterterrorism expert and homeland security scholar at the University of Southern California, recently said that white supremacy is no longer a movement on the fringes but “is being globalized at a very rapid pace.” The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, a nonpartisan research center at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), has found that the current atmosphere of worldwide political polarization and upheaval offers extremists an opportunity to present their views as an alternative to those who have soured on mainstream political choices. This can also lead to more violence. For example, the United Kingdom’s Home Office reported that hate crimes surged following the Brexit vote in 2016. Not long before the vote, a member of Parliament who opposed the referendum, Jo Cox, was murdered. Similarly, a recent analysis of FBI data conducted by the CSUSB center found that in the United States, the election period of November 2016 was the worst month for hate crimes since September 2002. Earlier this year, a new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that the number of white nationalist groups surged by almost 50 percent from 100 groups in 2017 to 148 groups in 2018. The vast majority of U.S. hate groups, including neo-Nazis, the
Ku Klux Klan, racist skinheads, neoConfederates, and white nationalists, adhere to some form of white supremacist ideology, according to the SPLC. Also in 2018, right-wing terrorists killed at least 40 people in the United States and Canada, up from 17 in 2017. The extent of the violent far-right terror problem can differ from country to country, according to Chris Hawkins, senior analyst at Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre. “In the United States, far-right extremism is emerging as a significant terrorism threat, with attack incident rates and casualty numbers likely to rise more quickly than those of Islamist terrorism,” Hawkins says. As evidence, he cites FBI data which indicates that in 2017 and 2018 there were higher arrest rates of domestic terrorism suspects, including white supremacists and other far-right extremists, than those linked to international terror groups, such as jihadists. In Western Europe, the threat posed by far-right extremism has also risen sharply in recent years, but it remains significantly smaller than the Islamist terrorism threat. For example, 64 counterterrorism operations against right-wing extremists in Western Europe were recorded in the two-year period between 2017 and 2018, almost triple the 22 operations in 2015–16, according to IHS Markit, an information and intelligence company. In comparison, 275 Islamist-related counterterrorism operations were recorded in 2017 and 2018.
August / September 2019
