On March 15th I was with my daughter in Melbourne participating in the School Strike for Climate. Stopping for a coffee after the rally, I checked Facebook on my phone. A post from a Muslim American friend on the other side of the world alerted me to an attacker in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. He’d seen the perpetrator’s livestream video and could not bear to repost it. While children around the world were focused on protesting for climate action, a young white supremacist was committing a massacre. And he was doing it in a remote part of the world that was on low alert for terrorism. We would later learn that the Australian perpetrator had killed 50 people and injured around 50 more, many of them seriously.
As New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern emphasized in her eloquent response to the tragedy, the terrorist’s actions remind us that violent extremism is not the domain of any one group of people. Acts of terrorism in the Global North are typically tied in tabloid media to Muslim-background minorities. But the Christchurch massacre reminds us that terrorism is also the province of the far right, something that received comparatively little attention until this attack. Indeed, incendiary hate rhetoric of the far right is regularly given a platform by prominent world leaders, politicians, and media that have been conditioned by assumptions of white innocence.
Radicalisation and resilience
Extremist groups, whatever their stripes, make a range of promises in order to seduce and recruit people. To be effective, there must be an existing vulnerability in an environment conducive to their messaging. Those recruited typically perceive themselves as victims. Lack of employment, purpose and future-orientation often feed this vulnerability. These ‘push’ factors make it easier for violent extremist groups to recruit people with their unique selling points (or ‘pull’ factors). Some are attracted by what appears to be an offer of restored entitlement or dignity. In the case of recruitment to violent extremist groups such as the Incel movement, recruits may see themselves as victims of feminism. Other groups deploy white ethno-nationalistic and anti-Muslim narratives on social media that claim white Europeans are under existential threat. This vision ignores – and is in direct opposition to – the dignity of others.
