Massacre of 50 Muslims prompts conversations about alt-right, spies and Islamophobia in New Zealand and elsewhere.
A week of national mourning, new gun-control laws and emphatic declarations of “This is not us” – New Zealanders have been forceful in denouncing the March 15 mosque attacks that killed 50 Muslim worshippers.
But amid the outpouring of public support for the Pacific island’s minority Muslim community, many are also asking how the suspected perpetrator of the gun assaults – 28-year-old Australian-born Brenton Tarrant – slipped under the radar of security agencies.
The answer, analysts say, has much to do with online radicalisation, but is also linked to authorities’ failures to adequately assess the threat posed by white supremacists, such as Tarrant himself. Some argue it is linked to the normalisation of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic views by politicians and media outlets throughout the world, including in New Zealand.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday announced a Royal Commission will investigate the mass shooting.
“The inquiry will look at what could have or should have been done to prevent the attack,” Ardern said after her cabinet agreed on the inquiry. “It is important no stone is left unturned.”
Relatively few details have emerged about Tarrant, who claimed to have been inspired to commit the massacre after seeing the “invasion” of France by immigrants in 2017 and called for Turkey’s Hagia Sophia Museum to be “freed” of its minarets.
What is clear, however, is he was plugged into a global alt-right network as his online footprint on 8chan, a notorious far-right site populated by anonymous message boards full of violent language and threats, has shown.
The alt-right is a catch-all term for a number of political views stretching along a spectrum from the far right of mainstream conservatism all the way to pro-violence white supremacism.
At its heart, however, are specific threads of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and white nationalist beliefs that bind the loosely knit grouping together.
All three narratives featured prominently in a “manifesto” allegedly published by Tarrant in the minutes before the mosque shootings.
The 74-page document, which denounced immigrants as “invaders” responsible for “white genocide”, was sent to politicians, including Ardern, while footage of the gun assaults was broadcast live on Facebook.
It wasn’t the first time Tarrant is believed to have aired hateful messages. In the days before the attack, online accounts allegedly linked to the suspect also circulated white supremacist imagery and messages celebrating violence against Muslims and minorities. Local media reports have also claimed he made “regular, racist, Facebook posts”.
Analysts say part of the reason Tarrant wasn’t flagged as a threat, however, is that much of his online activity was limited to murky sites such as 8chan, where he advertised his “manifesto” and the link to the livestream in the minutes leading up to the mosque attacks.
According to Jarrod Gilbert, a senior lecturer on crime and justice at the University of Canterbury, Tarrant’s case points to the fact that adherents of white supremacism, as with other violent and fringe narratives, no longer necessarily congregate together “in physical locales”.
Instead of the traditional “bunch of street thugs hanging around on a corner drinking cheap cider and sneering at immigrants”, he said, the alt-right gather together from the privacy of their homes.
“With the alt-right and the online communities, we don’t know how big or significant they are,” Gilbert told Al Jazeera.
“[They are] very different to the skinheads of the past… They exist in bedrooms and in an international internet community connected only tenuously by hate,” he said.
