The Christchurch Report Shows The New Face of Terror
The mosque in Christchurch where white supremacist Brenton Tarrant committed mass murder. Creative Commons photo.
(OPINION) On Dec. 8, New Zealand’s Royal Commission released a grim 792-page report on Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 attacks on two Christchurch mosques. These massacres killed 51 Muslim worshippers and wounded 50 more. The report concluded that the New Zealand intelligence agencies’ almost exclusive focus on Islamic terrorism had distracted them from properly investigating right-wing threats. The report took 18 months to finish and included interviews with hundreds of people.
“The report shows that institutional prejudice and unconscious bias exists in government agencies and needs to change,” said Abdigani Ali, a spokesperson for the Muslim Association of Canterbury in Christchurch.
‘The Terrorist’
The longest and most chilling chapter of the Christchurch report is called “The Terrorist.” It describes Tarrant’s formation into a mass murderer. Tarrant’s parents separated when he was young, and his mother’s boyfriend, who was of Aboriginal ancestry, violently assaulted both Tarrant and his mother. Tarrant and his sister ended up living with their father, who committed suicide in 2010. Tarrant found his father’s body. Tarrant and his sister received $AU500,000 each from their father’s estate. This inheritance enabled Tarrant to live independently without working.
From the age of 6, Tarrant was an online gamer. He became obsessed with multiplayer online role-playing games and with first-person shooter games. His mother and father gave him unfettered access to the internet from computers in his bedroom. He spent his free time at school gaming on school computers. Tarrant’s online gaming buddies frequently expressed racist and white supremacist views.
After traveling around the world for three years, Tarrant moved to New Zealand in 2017, where his exclusive goal in life was training for his terrorist attacks. During this time, Tarrant’s mother and her current partner, who is of Indian descent, went out to breakfast with him. Tarrant told his mother that he didn't want to go to a “migrant cafe,” but instead wanted his money going to "white New Zealanders.” Tarrant’s mother later told the Australian Federal Police that when she left New Zealand, she felt “petrified” about her son’s mental health and racist views. She said he had no friends and had holed himself up in an empty apartment.
Tarrant was deeply influenced by the terror manual that Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik disseminated before killing 69 teenagers in 2011. Tarrant’s training followed Breivik’s advice for terrorists. Tarrant joined a gym, bulked up on steroids, practiced shooting in rifle clubs and prepared an apocalyptic manifesto that was disseminated at the time of the attack. Tarrant believed that the publicity surrounding his attack would inspire copycats.
Tarrant’s manifesto echoes the themes found in Breivik. It is a screed against immigrants, Jews, democracy and capitalism. Tarrant writes that Communist China, with its deplorable record of abusing ethnic minority populations, is the country with “political and social values” closest to his. Tarrant expressed anxiety about the West’s plunging birth rates, empty nurseries, full casinos, empty churches and full mosques.
Tarrant writes that the United States is an example of how people of different races cannot live together. “The United States is one of the most diverse nations on earth and they are about an inch away from tearing each other to pieces,” Tarrant writes. He predicts that his attacks will start a “civil war” in the United States over gun ownership, leading to the balkanization of the United States along racial lines.
A White ISIS
Brenton Tarrant is becoming a sickeningly familiar figure in the modern West: an angry, disaffected, lone wolf who finds purpose and direction in dark corners of the internet. University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew fears that there are thousands of white supremacists like Tarrant, who are eager to escape their wrenching psychological problems through a blood-soaked path to redemption.
Belew argues that we are in the midst of a wave of increasingly frequent mass attacks that are motivated by a transnational ideology of white power. News reports of white power terrorism often present us with a series of isolated incidents, “one anti-Semitic, one anti-immigrant, and one attempt at political violence,” Belew writes. But such attacks date back to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and they include those carried out in Norway, Quebec, Charleston, Christchurch and El Paso.
“White ISIS” is the term that New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali gives to this movement, but this brand of terrorist is harder for law enforcement to detect than Islamist terrorists because these assailants almost always act alone.
“The usual way we catch terrorists is that they interact with other humans,” Brookings Institute counterterrorism researcher Daniel Byman told me in an interview. Lone wolves have no co-conspirators and rarely announce their intentions to friends or family.
The Royal Commission’s Report made 44 recommendations for improving New Zealand’s security, but it also concluded that enhanced security would not have stopped the attack. “There is no plausible way” that the terrorist’s plans could have been detected by New Zealand’s government agencies “except by chance,” wrote the investigators. Tarrant’s footprints were too “fragmentary” to warrant action to stop him, the report concluded.
Auckland University of Technology Law Professor Kris Gledhill finds this part of the report to be disingenuous. “Tarrant was a rural white guy from Australia, and he was treated as ‘one of us’ by the authorities,” Gledhill said in an interview. In his application to purchase firearms, Tarrant cited the name of an online gaming friend as his character reference. If Tarrant were a Muslim who frequented shooting ranges, “would the authorities have accepted a reference from a gaming friend? I don’t think so,” Gledhill said.
If there is any good news in the report, it is that a copycat would have a hard time replicating Tarrant’s unique circumstances. “Not many lone-wolf terrorists are independently wealthy, don’t work, have no friends, know how to modify firearms and have no social media footprints,” said Daniel Byman. It is the Commission's hope that if New Zealanders devote as much attention to monitoring white power extremists as they have to monitoring Islamist extremists, New Zealand might be able to dodge future attacks. This is a lesson that is highly relevant for Western leaders, some of whom have publicly stated that Islamist terrorism is the only terroism worthy of national attention.
Robert Carle is a professor of historical theology and Islam at The King’s College in Manhattan. Dr. Carle has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, Religion Unplugged, Newsday, Society, Human Rights Review, The Public Discourse, Academic Questions and Reason.