The Terrorist Threat the West Still Ignores

The Islamic State’s recent return to prominence with its bloody attack on a Moscow concert venue overshadowed a solemn and tragic anniversary of a different kind of terrorism. Five years ago in March, a white supremacist named Brenton Tarrant carried out twin shooting attacks against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Fifty-one people were killed, all of whom were Muslim.

Until then the conventional wisdom was that Islamist terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS posed the only serious terrorist threat to Western countries, with Christian white supremacists rarely mentioned. This assumption was shattered with the Christchurch attack, which would become the defining exemplar of modern far-right terrorism—and a precursor of more tragedies to come. At a moment when attention is again focused on the threat from the Islamic State, it is important to remember that other terrorist threats exist and can have equally lethal consequences. The violent, almost viral momentum of such attacks inspire copycats and require an holistic appraisal to effectively and sufficiently counter them.

It took only weeks for other violent far-right extremists to emulate Tarrant’s target and tactics. On March 24, an arson attack on an Escondido, California mosque was perpetrated by a white supremacist who spraypainted “For Brenton Tarrant -t. /pol/” on the pavement, an obscure reference to the 8chan imageboard that both terrorists frequented. A month later, that same person, John Earnest, walked into a Jewish synagogue in nearby Poway and opened fire, murdering one person. “Tarrant was a catalyst for me personally,” he wrote in his manifesto, which itself copied another of Tarrant’s tactics.

10,000 miles away and five months later, Philip Manshaus, a 21-year-old Norwegian neo-Nazi, was clearly and directly inspired by Tarrant in his targeting choice, communications efforts, and sanctification of his terrorist predecessors when he murdered his Asian-origin stepsister as she slept, before proceeding to the Al-Noor Islamic Centre in Bærum, a posh suburb of Oslo with a GoPro attached to his helmet. (Manshaus was quickly subdued by elderly worshippers.)

Tarrant’s influence can also be seen in the shooting at an El Paso Walmart, perpetrated by Patrick Crusius, a white supremacist who killed 23 Latinos in August 2019. (Crusius opened his manifesto by referencing Tarrant.) And, Payton Gendron, who killed 10 Black Americans at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo in May 2022, plagiarized large sections of the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto in his own screed.

With his own violent act, Tarrant was following the model arguably advanced by Anders Breivik eight years earlier. In July 2011, Breivik murdered 77 persons in twin attacks. Tarrant himself was actually inspired by events in the United States. While dismissing Donald Trump as a politician, he nonetheless praised the then-serving president “as a symbol of renewed white identity.” Notably, Tarrant also weaponized strategies of leaderless resistance and accelerationism, which respectively advocate for lone acts of violence designed to spread violence and disorder leading to the collapse of elected government; both of these can be traced to the American neo-Nazi movement of the late-1970s and early 1980s.

More than anything, then, the Christchurch shooting was indicative of the increasing internationalization of domestic, far-right terrorism. The potential for its continuation and expansion should be a matter of greater international concern. A more coordinated and systematic transnational response, focusing on better countering social media radicalization and increased multi-lateral law enforcement coordination and intelligence sharing, is key to containing this threat.

The ideology of Tarrant’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” can be traced back at least as far as the Reconstruction era after the U.S. civil war. The name refers to a conspiratorial rant which claims that Jews and Marxists in the West are deliberately replacing Western white communities by encouraging and facilitating mass immigration in previously homogeneous polities. Today, this dangerous and virulent ideology poses a particular challenge when it is weaponized by politicians and media figures.

What is also noteworthy about the Tarrant model, and is in fact more easily achieved today, is lone actor violence using firearms. In the United States, where the lack of gun control laws significantly enhances terrorist capability, such attacks are particularly effective at totally destabilizing communities, entrenching a deep sense of perennial danger. Precisely this point was made by the European white supremacist who attacked a gay bar in Bratislava in October 2022. His manifesto praised the Buffalo shooter for successfully damaging the cohesiveness of the community in which he acted.

It is the nature of these “extremely online” terrorist attacks that details are often hidden from public view for years after. Only this February, for instance, have researchers in New Zealand revealed previously unknown online posts that actually undermined much of what Tarrant would eventually declare in his manifesto, suggesting he in fact began dreaming of his violent act long before he claimed. Not only do his earlier posts suggest law enforcement and intelligence agencies may have missed an opportunity to intervene in this budding terrorist’s trajectory, they also reveal specific details about his tactics and targeting, which followed those of Dylann Roof, the gunman who in 2015 attacked a place of worship in Charleston, SC. The findings underscore the continuing centrality of social media for modern terrorism and counterterrorism—and the importance of tackling social media radicalization head on.

The New Zealand government has led the charge in holding social media companies accountable for wanton radicalization on their platforms. Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern founded the Christchurch Call, which has worked with social media companies to better address harmful content on their platforms through countermeasures including content moderation and algorithmic reform. A suite of gun control measures, meanwhile, included buy backs and bans on high-capacity magazines, with the initial bill passing the parliament 119-1. New Zealand also took symbolic steps to counter the ideology that inspired the killing. The Christchurch Commission Report, when it was released in late 2020, was titled Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei—Maori for “This is our home”—a resolute statement of unity and openness across race, religion, and language.

Despite the initial failure to stop Tarrant’s attack, this sweeping counterterrorism response has successfully derailed various follow-on attacks in New Zealand. Other countries should heed lessons from the Christchurch tragedy and New Zealand’s holistic policy responses. Namely, a focus on three dimensions of effective counter terrorism: combatting online extremism; escalating countering violent extremism programming; and, most importantly, building an international coalition, especially among those democracies most often targeted with this violence, to ensure a united front in countering domestic threats. Though these are aimed at individual democratic countries, they often have a dangerous transnational dimension and intention.

Firstly, the imperative to counter the free rein of extremism on social media has never been more critical. Today, extremists proliferate freely online, as social media titans, most notably Elon Musk’s X, dilute their online harms departments. European countries and institutions have been aggressive in pushing back, with the European Union for instance, implementing the Digital Services Act, forcing large social companies to better police their platforms or risk major fines. Last fall the United Kingdom enacted the Online Safety Act that gives government with parliamentary approval the power to suppress a range of online content.

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution makes the adoption of similarly far-reaching measures to curb digital content more complicated and controversial. However, the United States could take signal action by reforming Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This law, enacted at the dawn of the internet, is an anachronism in an era where more people get their news online—and especially from social media—than from traditional, mainstream news and media sources. Section 230 protects internet and social media platforms from being held liable for content they publish. Removing that protection would likely force social media platforms to more actively monitor and remove dangerous content, including not just extremism but a range of other online harms, such as child sexual abuse material—much like the UK’s Online Safety Act.

Secondly, the United States in concert with other countries should considerably ramp up and improve their own respective domestic programming on countering violent extremism (CVE), focused on addressing vulnerabilities to extremism and radicalization, including mental illness and histories of isolation. Across the board, far-right terrorists are getting younger (some arrests now involve individuals as young as 13), and although Tarrant is a relative exception, his case exhibited the same instances of bullying and family trauma that often accompany extremism today. CVE, however, remains a mostly localized and uncoordinated cottage industry both nationally and especially transnationally of social workers, psychologists, former extremists, and welldoers—professionals doing important work, but often lacking direction, funding, and scale. The German-Swedish EXIT program provides one model of a framework for counter- and de-radicalization programming that might be replicated.

Our final recommendation is an ambitious one: as the international community is increasingly challenged by these ideologies and the violence they inspire, it should create a more formal multi-lateral framework to coordinate responses to these trans-national manifestations of domestic political violence. First, and most importantly, more organized cooperation than currently exists would better enable the exchange of best practices. Second, enhanced intelligence sharing about transnational terrorist networks and violent individuals communicating internationally would enable more effective disruption of cross-border terrorist financing. Finally, the sum total of improved cooperation would appreciably advance the core democratic values and traditions the countries most afflicted by this violence share, including trust in electoral systems and better countering the conspiracy theories that threaten undermine them. Such a working group might emerge from pre-existing alliances such as the Five Eyes partnership already linking intelligence sharing between the United States and New Zealand as well as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In this way likeminded countries with shared values can cooperate in undermining a pervasive threat that now threatens national security across the Western world.