Christchurch brings global white supremacist threat into sharp relief
The setting alone was shocking: a pastoral, oceanside city in New Zealand, the country ranked the planet’s second-most peaceful, after Iceland. When a white-supremacist terrorist opened fire in two Christchurch mosques on March 15, taking 50 lives including those of a 3-year-old child and 78-year-old man, the brutal display of racial hatred – live-streamed on social media – jolted the world.
The perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in New Zealand history carefully calculated his actions for maximum impact on a global audience. He published a ranting, 74-page manifesto – praising far-right terrorists from Europe and the United States and inciting white men to violence against people of color, immigrants, and especially Muslims.
Yet while the repercussions of the attack are unclear, it has already proved a watershed event in drawing the world’s attention to what experts agree is a rising transnational threat of violent white supremacism – and how it has so far been underestimated and misunderstood.
While governments have tended to view far-right extremism as a homegrown problem, white supremacists today are using the proliferation of social media and cheap travel to operate internationally, much as other terrorists have. “It is very mobile, it is very transnational,” says Paul Spoonley, who studies the far-right in New Zealand. Hate crime is “an international phenomenon,” says Dr. Spoonley, who wrote the book “Politics of Nostalgia: Racism and the Extreme Right in New Zealand.”
“This is a much bigger global challenge than it is a challenge just in New Zealand or just in the U.K., with Britain First, or just in the U.S. with the [Ku Klux] Klan and a range
Overlooking domestic threats?A vicious circleThe mainstreaming of far-right rhetoric‘A rough road ahead of us’