Far-right radicalization is at a climax

On Friday, a 28-year-old terrorist targeted two mosques in New Zealand and killed 50 innocent people, including children and women. According to the office of the country’s prime minister, right now there are 34 people in the hospital, 12 of whom are in critical condition. The attack is the deadliest shooting in the history of New Zealand. The attacks launched an intense debate in different parts of the world on the motivations, causes and potential outcomes. The fact that it took place in one of the most peaceful countries on earth was quite shocking for everyone at first. However soon after the “manifesto” of the attacker was revealed we learned more important things about what happened and more importantly started to discover why it happened.

The so-called manifesto involved a collection of far-right and anti-Muslim slogans that we have heard for the last few years in different parts of the world. Careful observers of the rise of these movements particularly in Western countries drew comparisons of this “manifesto” with Andre Breivik, the man who launched a terrorist attack in Norway in 2011 and killed 77 people. Breivik also left a 1,500-page manifesto before his attack in which he expressed racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views. Soon after the examination of the writings posted by the Christchurch killer it was revealed that the similarity between the two attacks was more than a coincidental one. The Australian killer Brenton Tarrant in fact wrote than Andrei Breivik was his only true source of inspiration.

In this eight-year period, many have raised the threat of anti-Muslim hatred but somehow it has not been given enough thought on how to take steps to stop the spread of these ideas. This attack demonstrated that it is a more dangerous and destabilizing threat than many have assumed. The discourse against Muslims is leading to policies that discriminate against Muslims in some countries today. These policies and the increasing intensity of this discourse may lead to the further radicalization and spread of extremist ideology among existing far-right groups. It is true that in similar types of attacks in the last eight years the Christchurch attacker was the only person that establishes a direct link with Breivik, however, we still do not know how many other potential lone wolf or wolf packs exist today.