First, they are radicalizing because of what they read online. ISIS created a vast global library of propaganda that influenced terrorists such as Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. Mateen never met with anyone in ISIS and never traveled to Iraq or Syria where ISIS was headquartered. His radicalization was entirely driven by what he viewed on the internet.
Similarly, Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who allegedly carried out the New Zealand attacks, killing 50 people, tapped into a large library of white nationalist material from around the world on the internet, according to the document that Tarrant posted about his motivations for the attacks.
Tarrant’s heroes were right-wing terrorists from around the West: Darren Osborne. who killed a Muslim man near a mosque in North London two years ago; Dylann Roof. who killed nine African-Americans in a church in South Carolina in 2015, and, above all, Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011.
Just as school shooters in the United States model themselves and learn from other school shooters, so too do aspiring terrorists learn from and emulate other terrorists.
Nothing in Tarrant’s manifesto suggests that he was indoctrinated in-person or was trained by a white nationalist group. Like Mateen, he radicalized because of what he saw online.
Second, both Mateen and Tarrant seem to have been drifting through life while they shopped for an ideology that justified acts of violence.
According to his manifesto, Tarrant embraced anarchism, communism and libertarianism before finally settling on white nationalism.
Similarly, according to Tarrant’s account in his manifesto, he was going nowhere fast in life. Tarrant “did not attend university” because he “had no great interest in anything offered in the universities to study.” Instead, Tarrant, an Australian, was drifting around the world as a tourist in France, Spain and Portugal and eventually New Zealand.
In both cases, the terrorists were no longer merely zeros, they were now heroes in their own minds, acting either as a soldier of the caliphate or with the blessing of the Knights Templar.
Third, just as the adherents of other murderous ideologies that preceded them believed, Mateen and Tarrant felt that utopia here on earth could only be achieved by the removal of “the Other.” For Stalinists it was the kulaks. For the Nazis it was, of course, the Jews. For ISIS, it is the Shia and other “infidels.” For violent white nationalists it is non-whites, and particularly immigrants.
As we saw with the globalization of ISIS’ ideology, which led to outbreaks of terrorism across the West, the increasing prevalence of white nationalist ideas around the globe has provided fertile ground for acts of violence.
Political leaders in several Western countries feel no compunction about staking their careers on white nationalist themes that are typically anti-immigrant, often anti-Muslim and sometimes anti-Semitic.
A few years ago these ideas were on the fringes of politics in the West, but they have now entered the mainstream.
Similarly, Tarrant described Muslim immigrants in his manifesto as “invaders.”
Of course, merely espousing white nationalist views doesn’t make you a terrorist any more than merely espousing views about jihadism make you a terrorist. But these ideas are a necessary feature of acts of white nationalist terrorism of the kind that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, or for the acts of jihadist terrorism that have plagued the West for many years.
Both Mateen and Tarrant needed the ideologies of ISIS and white nationalism to give them the justification to murder dozens of innocent strangers. Both radicalized online and felt that they were carrying out heroic missions that would help set the conditions for some utopian future. Of course, all they achieved was to create a hell here on earth for their victims and their families.
Source : Nbcnewyork