Call New Zealand attack terrorism
Treat white supremacy as serious threat
The counterterrorism insight from Brenton Tarrant’s horrific actions in New Zealand is not that he is an aberration in right-wing extremism; it’s that he is not. Yes, he used a camera to livestream the atrocity over social media, but that was his only innovation. Tarrant is a typical white supremacist. His so-called manifesto checks every box on the standard list of violent extremist characteristics.
He expressed the superiority of his racial cohort; he characterized all nonwhite people as “other” and “invaders”; he showed moral absolutism, where his side is always righteous and the other is always evil; he made sweeping statements about race and history to paint an apocalyptic picture for his group; and he littered his writing with white supremacist vernacular (code speak).
Tarrant simply acted on the ideas that extremists around the world discuss and embrace daily, particularly in the United States. He killed at least 50 people at two mosques, and we need to call this what it is: terrorism.
For decades, racially motivated extremists have terrorized the communities they hate. The 2015 mass murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the car-ramming attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 are two examples. There was the October attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the white nationalist and Coast Guard lieutenant arrested in February for planning a terror attack.
Learn from New Zealand PM
Yet, while these incidents reached the national news, dozens (not all of them fatal) by white supremacists are less known, such as the racially motivated attack on an African-American DJ in Lynwood, Washington; the bombing of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, by two members of a white nationalist militia; or the violence perpetrated by the white supremacist Rise Above Movement.
Extremist violence like this is sometimes difficult to track because domestic terrorism law is not prosecuting the reality. Prosecutorial charge sheets seldom mention “terror.” Federal prosecutors have the authority to use the term and should, when an act of far-right violence meets the statutory definition. Failing to do so obscures the true scope of the threat.
We could certainly learn a lesson from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who labeled the incident a terror attack in her first news conference. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 2018, there was a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of white nationalist groups in the United States. Last year, right-wing terrorists killed at least 40 people in the USA, up from the 17 killed by white supremacists in 2017.
From 2008 to 2017, right-wing and white supremacist terrorists accounted for 71 percent of fatalities from extremist violence in America, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Don’t downplay extremism
We have hard data showing the threat is regularly materializing. So why is there so much controversy over whether right-wing racially motivated violent extremism is a growing threat?
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security found some military veterans could be susceptible to rightwing radicalization, but congressional blowback and fiery debate forced DHS to withdraw the report. That and other research is accurate, but the threat is still not receiving the attention it warrants, as shown by the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding for organizations working to end right-wing violence. Furthermore, some public figures consistently downplay the terrorist threat posed by white supremacists.
Social justice for a white supremacist means intolerance, segregation, racism, hate and, most important, violence. This is not just a “small group of people,” as President Donald Trump said after the New Zealand rampage. It’s not a leftist false flag, as Rush Limbaugh speculated. The shooter was not an “ecoterrorist,” as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway asserted.
It’s a group of extremists and potential “terrorists,” with global aspirations and networks, and there is no question we will see this kind of terrorism erupt again in the USA. This movement is the most dangerous threat to our public safety and homeland security. We need to unapologetically apply the “T-word” when describing its actions. And we must treat white supremacy extremism with the same aggressiveness and seriousness that we have applied to Muslim identity extremism since 2001.
If we do not, what do we think will happen? We can point to New Zealand as a case example, but we do not need to look that far. All the evidence we need is right here at home.
Former FBI special agent Erroll G. Southers is a professor at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, director of its Safe Communities Institute and director of the Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies.