Fifth anniversary of terrorist attacks on Christchurch mosques
Vigil after the Christchurch mosque attacks, Basin Reserve, Wellington 17 March 2019
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the neo-Nazi terrorist attack on two Ōtautahi Christchurch mosques on March 15, 2019. The shooter, Australian man Brenton Tarrant, murdered 51 people and injured 40 during Friday prayers at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre. Tarrant also planned to target Ashburton Mosque but was intercepted by police before he could reach it.
Today our thoughts are with the victims and survivors of these attacks, their whānau and loved ones, and the Muslim community across Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia. 51 shuhada rose that day, massacred at prayer and martyred for their faith and many, for their ethnicity.
Brenton Tarrant was radicalised in Australia and traveled to Aotearoa New Zealand to carry out his attacks because of lax gun laws. The newly elected coalition government in New Zealand has proposed changes to gun laws, including re-introducing the semi-automatic weapons used by Tarrant on March 15, 2019, and banned after the attacks. The Canterbury Muslim community had recently met with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon seeking assurances that any changes to the gun laws would not jeopardize their safety.
Temel Ataçocuğu, a survivor who was shot nine times, has written about reliving the massacre during Friday prayers and his anger at the current government's preparation to roll back gun law reforms. He raised concerns over many matters left unresolved in Aotearoa New Zealand, including how the previous Labor government abandoned a reform of hate speech laws and social media regulation and the lack of reparations for survivors and their families. Most of the Royal Commission’s findings have not been addressed or implemented, apart from gun reform, which is now under threat.
Ataçocuğu writes, "Since the attacks, New Zealand has been too nervous to have some difficult conversations that could help to increase awareness of the problems we face and how to solve them. There should be public forums to talk about online extremism and racism in the street, how it happens and how to prevent it. We need to talk more."
If New Zealand has been hesitant to have difficult conversations post-March 15, 2019, Australia has refused to have them at all. Even as fascism and Nazism have grown and become more visible in Australia, the state’s only response has been to enact more laws, such as those banning Nazi salutes and hate symbols. No funding has been made available in Australia for community-based programs to support families of radicalized young people or any deradicalization programs outside of the justice system. The fifth anniversary of the attacks went entirely unremarked on by leaders from Australian political parties as well as Australian mainstream media.
Rita Jabri Markwell, legal adviser to the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN) told Al Jazeera this week:
“I think we’re looking for honesty and for reckoning. That honest reflection and accountability. The Christchurch massacre didn’t happen because of just some crazed individual. It happened because of a culture that has been created in Australia for at least 20 years."
Dr. Jordana Silverstein, a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Law School, told Al Jazeera:
“We just don’t remember this massacre that happened as an Australian thing. It’s just not being narrated as part of Australian history. And this is a real problem of Australia pretending that we’re not as racist as we are."
Recently published research by Chris Wilson, Ethan Renner, Jack Smylie, and Michal Dziwulski revealed that Tarrant posted publicly online for five years before his attacks. He even posted his plans in March and August 2018 on the online message board 4Chan. The authors highlighted the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terror attacks:
The individual claimed that he was not a frequent commenter on extreme right-wing sites and that YouTube was, for him, a far more significant source of information and inspiration. Although he did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.
Through their research, the authors found that Tarrant was not radicalized on YouTube, confirming what many researchers had long suspected—that parts of his manifesto were designed to deflect attention away from the real sources of his inspiration, by trolling about alt-right personalities and YouTubers. The authors found that Tarrant had been calling for “the need to attack people of colour in locations of ‘significance,’ including places of worship” since at least 2015. They described how 4chan’s /pol/ (politically incorrect) board "became his home" and an important radicalization vector, a place where he found an extremist community and interacted with people over months and years. After posting about his plans, he eventually broke through the anonymity of 4chan with an attack live-streamed under his legal name, ensuring he would forever enjoy notoriety amongst violent white supremacists.
In early 2018, Tarrant posted in the Lads Society Facebook group about “immigration and the necessity of violence.” This kind of rhetoric was normalized at the time by many in mainstream Australian political parties and the media, with journalist Jason Wilson writing after the attacks that "Islamophobia is practically enshrined as public policy in Australia.” Senator Fraser Anning, who employed neo-Nazis on his staff, weaponized anti-immigration rhetoric as a radicalizing force. Anning appeared at a violent far-right rally alongside neo-Nazis Blair Cottrell and Thomas Sewell in St Kilda less than three months before the attacks in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Chris Wilson, Ethan Renner, Jack Smylie, and Michal Dziwulski wrote about the “benefit of hindsight and the accumulation of information relating to the attack.” Tarrant went undetected by both Australian and New Zealand authorities, despite sending a death threat on Facebook to an Australian in 2016 before an anti-refugee rally, referencing “the day of the rope.” When the victim reported this threat to Victoria Police, he was advised to block Tarrant and no official statement was taken. There were many other red flags in addition to his posts on 4chan and the Lads Society Season 2 Facebook group, including purchasing and advertising weapons for sale on TradeMe under the username "Kiwi14words" (The 14 Words referencing a white supremacist slogan), his posts on hunting and shooting forums, joining a gun club, his purchase of an assault rifle, and admittance to hospital with firearms injuries.
Hindsight does not prevent horrific acts of white supremacist violence and terror. We must rely on the experience and knowledge of our communities and their assessment of danger in response to threats, especially those who are the most marginalized and vulnerable to white supremacist violence. That includes Indigenous, Muslim, Jewish communities and other religious and racialized minorities, as well as LGBTQI+ communities. The knowledge of antifascists, who are often steps ahead of the authorities, is also essential in warning communities about threats to safety.
Tarrant live-streamed his attack on Facebook Live, changing the landscape of neo-Nazi extremism forever and inspiring multiple copycat attacks that were also live-streamed. The aesthetic of Tarrant’s attack was heavily reminiscent of Siege culture and inspired a new era in the Terrogram ecosystem—"Saints Culture." Tarrant was anointed after his attack as a "Saint'' by militant accelerationists online. He was depicted in fan art and memes in the style of a religious saint and his attack inspired everything from neo-Nazi rap albums, “Tarrant chan” fan art, to recreations of the attack in video games. Starting in 2021, neo-Nazis made a "Saint Calendar," chronicling historical and new racially motivated acts of terror and violence in the hope of inciting more. Stefan Eracleous, an Australian neo-Nazi and member of the National Socialist Network, uses the number of dead in Tarrant's attack – 51 – as a white supremacist dog whistle with his friends and followers online, to celebrate the attack. Eracleous is a member of the European Australian Movement and the National Socialist Network, led by Thomas Sewell, who once tried to recruit Brenton Tarrant and accepted a donation from him for his previous group, The Lads Society. Many members of Sewell’s group privately laud Tarrant as an inspiration. Sewell was recorded in a private conversation comparing Tarrant to Nelson Mandela: “He will be in there [in prison] until we win the revolution. He doesn’t come out unless we win … He’s putting us on a timeline.”
Out of the tragedy of March 15, 2019, including a live-streamed act of terrorism on a mainstream social media platform, the Christchurch Call was formed—a community “of over 130 governments, online service providers, and civil society organizations acting together to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.”
The Christchurch Call was created to bring together government, agencies, tech companies, and non-governmental organizations to universally fight online terrorism and extremism. The Christchurch Call aims to develop technical tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to prevent violent content from being shared and spread online. Since its inception, the Call has had both successes and challenges.
The Call has successfully broken down barriers between multiple organizations, governments, and the tech community globally, allowing for faster and more seamless responses to threats and online extremist content. It has also provided accessible ways for smaller companies to utilize the shared resources. One of the Call’s most notable successes has been increased collaboration between the tech-sector, governments, and civil society organizations. This access and collaboration aids in the cross-sector ability to counter the spread of extremist content online.
However, despite these improvements, the Christchurch Call still faces multiple challenges which are impacting its progress. One consistent issue is the lack of universally agreed-upon definitions of extremism and terrorism, as well as other terms that are too loosely defined. This lack of a shared definitional framework, or even list of designated terrorist entities, can lead to the misuse of tools and partnerships intended for countering terrorist activities for censorship and the invasion of privacy. This feeds into the concern that stricter monitoring of online spaces could be misused by governments. Another challenge is to prevent the tunnel-vision of focusing on the largest social media companies as if they constitute the entirety of the internet. This narrow-sightedness often means that more fringe platforms, such as Telegram, are not being monitored to the same extent. A terrorist attack in Halle, Germany in 2019 was live-streamed on Twitch, and it took 30 minutes for the the Content Incident Protocol (CIP) of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a consortium of tech companies facilitating collaboration in removal of terrorist content, to be activated, and for the video to be removed. Although they managed to remove it from Twitch it later resurfaced on Telegram.
Further increasing collaboration and creating stronger, more universally agreed-upon definitions will allow for improvements among tech tools, and allow us to use AI to help tackle the spread of online extremism.
The attack on March 15, 2019, didn’t happen in isolation in Aotearoa New Zealand, or Australia. Both countries have a long history of white supremacist violence and massacres dating back to colonization. The oppression of Indigenous peoples and violent mechanisms of colonization continue to be enforced in both countries.
Aotearoa New Zealand was quick to proclaim "This is not us," after ignoring the years of warnings by New Zealand Muslims, particularly the advocacy of the Islamic Women's Council of New Zealand, about the danger and intensity of Islamophobia and the threats they faced. Māori have also been long targeted by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Aotearoa New Zealand, including by neo-Nazi and former National Front leader Kyle Chapman, who confessed to a series of arsons between 1987 and 1992, including a kura and the fire-bombing of a marae, for which he was convicted. Less than a year after the March 15, 2019 attacks, a neo-Nazi wearing a skull mask made a violent threat outside Al Noor Mosque and disseminated it online, including to an international Telegram channel "Brenton Tarrant's lads." Former Action Zealandia member Sam Brittenden was raided over the threat but was never charged, due to his refusal to hand over his cellphone's passcode.
Last year, we conducted an in-depth mapping of the persistent hate-landscape in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in collaboration with InternetNZ and the Khalifa Ihler Institute’s Hate Map project. Our findings are published here.
Tarrant told the Royal Commission that he began "to think politically when he was about 12 and that his primary concerns have been about immigration, particularly by Muslim migrants into Western countries." This would have placed the seeds of his Islamophobia in 2002, after 9/11, the Invasion of Afghanistan, and at the beginning of the “War on Terror” and escalating global Islamophobia. This was also a year after the 2001 Tampa affair when a Norwegian freighter rescued 433 asylum seekers in international waters about 140 kilometers north of Christmas Island. The Australian Government refused to allow the MV Tampa to land any of the asylum seekers, with Prime Minister John Howard describing them as "an uncontrollable number of illegal arrivals." Not long after the Tampa affair, Howard’s government ministers lied, claiming asylum seekers were throwing their children into the sea so they would be rescued and could claim asylum.
Islamophobia has surged globally since October 7, 2023, and political leaders have done little, if anything, to reassure Muslim and Arab citizens of their humanity and safety. This new era of the “War on Terror” leaves Muslim communities especially vulnerable to violence from the far-right.
Brenton Tarrant’s political engagement in Australia was through the “patriot movement,” an Islamophobic neo-fascist movement led by today’s prominent neo-Nazi leaders. Tarrant frequently commented on the Facebook Pages of True Blue Crew and United Patriots Front, the predecessor to Blair Cottrell’s and Thomas Sewell's group The Lads Society. He referred to Cottrell as "Emperor Blair Cottrell" in the comments and later donated to The Lads Society. Almost immediately after the attack, Sewell wrote in a Lads Society Facebook group “This is not a false flag … take my word for it,” and that Tarrant “had been in the scene for a while.”
Neo-Nazi terrorist Jack van Tongeren was another inspiration for members of The Lads Society and the groups that came after it—the European Australian Movement and National Socialist Network. Van Tongeren led a firebombing campaign against Asian restaurants and businesses in Western Australia between 1988 and 2004. Despite the history of white supremacist terrorist attacks in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it took almost four more decades and the massacre of 51 people for authorities to take the threat of fascism and neo-Nazism seriously.
We would like to leave you with the following words from survivor Temel Ataçocuğu:
“For a long time, I remembered holding someone’s hand under a pile of bodies as the attack went on. I could not see the man whose hand I was squeezing and didn’t know if he had lived or died. That was difficult. A few months ago, four and a half years after the attack, I finally learned his identity. The man whose hand I was holding was shot and survived, like me. All these years he had wondered who I was too. When I met him, we said to each other, ‘It was you. You were holding my hand.’
I want people to know that they cannot expect us to be normal again. We are still very tender about it. We are still very raw. This is different to other pain – to the end of a relationship or physical hurt. I still can’t handle what I witnessed. It will never go away.”
