#Christchurch Mosque Attack

[filosofablogger]

The Difference Between Good And Evil

Two stories in yesterday’s news caught my eye and the juxtaposition was jaw-dropping.  One is about a good person, a truly inspirational leader, stepping down, and the other is about a young, grossly ignorant punk being treated like royalty. A good person stepping down I was saddened to see that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand is stepping down.  I have a great deal of respect and…

[ms-hells-bells]

this bizarre politicisation of the existence of basic empathy driven fear and horror really confounds me.

when the christchurch attack happened, much of my country was significantly traumatised. i remember watching the news for hours, just crying. it was terrible. because people died. in a really horrible way. and because country kinship exists, you go 'oh, i probably knew someone who died or know someone who knew someone who died'. my roommate had friends at the mosque.

i'm not talking about the politicisation of the event in terms of how the american government used it to justify the invasion of iraq, i'm not talking about the politicisation of the event to spur racism and nationalism and xenophobia. i'm not talking about the politicisation of the event in terms of being used as an excuse to further push into a surveillance state, as per the snowden files.

i'm just talking about the mocking, minimising, and derision of what is essentially just a large group of people that witnessed something horrible and have strong feelings and memories because human beings have empathy. no amount of 'well, other people have it worse elsewhere' changes that. by that logic, no one should be scared and upset about mass shootings on the other side of the country, no oppressor group actually feels bad about oppression because 'it's not happening to you', countries that dealt well with covid shouldn't have any residual issues from seeing what other countries went through, and vicarious/collective trauma would not exist as a psychological concept.

[xclowniex]

So if that terror attack on Lebanon is justified for the death of those 12 Druze children (which I'm sure you wouldn't be as heartbroken about them if they were killed by the IDF instead), what should the IDF punishment be for killing thousands of Palestinians children and how many Israeli civilians are you willing to let die in order to get to those Israeli terrorists? Assuming you think Israelis should even be punished for killing children (or that the word terrorists can be used to describe someone that isn't Muslim)

I wasn't going to answer this as I know it's obviously in bad faith but I'll bite

Stop putting your US centric views onto me. Here in New Zealand, we considering March 15th a terror attack. If you don't know what happened that day, a white supremist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch. The white supremist who did it? He is a terrorist. I consider him a terrorist. All the media here considers him a terrorist. He is a terrorist.

New Zealand has designated a few white supremist groups and individuals as terrorists

Do you know who else is on this list?

Hezbollah.

Do you know who is not on this list? The IDF. You can check for yourself too

To quote the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002, which is ya know, laws surrounding terrorism, the IDF currently is exempt from it.

"However, an act does not fall within subsection (2) if it occurs in a situation of armed conflict and is, at the time and in the place that it occurs, in accordance with rules of international law applicable to the conflict."

(Sub section two refers to civilians being harmed or killed)

Fun fact about war crimes! Individuals get arrested for them and designated as war criminals, not everyone who is apart of the military. Bibi can be arrested for war crimes. Any individual IDF member who did the war crime can be arrested for war crimes. Whatever the Israeli version of John Smith is, who has never committed a war crime during his service, cannot be arrested for a war crime, and therefore cannot be labeled a terrorist.

But wouldn't Hamas and hezbollah be excempt from being a terrorist group as they're in an armed conflict? They've both committed terrorist acts outside of armed conflicts, ergo, terrorist organizations.

Also, you can read the act I was quoting if you want

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/0034/latest/DLM152702.html?search=ts_act%40bill%40regulation%40deemedreg_terrorism+suppression+act_resel_25_a&p=1

So, now that we have established that the IDF has not committed a terror attack as they're currently in armed conflict with Hezbollah, the rest of what you said falls apart, but to address it.

1. I would be equally as sad if the IDF killed 12 druze children

2. I think that any IDF members who have committed war crimes + bibi should be arrested for war crimes as I've stated so many times

3. If I lived in an ideal world, all hezbollah members would simply be arrested and there would be no loss of life. But we don't live in an ideal world. Hezbollah won't allow themselves to be arrested. Hezbollah also remains an active threat. If IDF members who have committed war crimes + Bibi refuse to be arrested and are still an active threat to people (key word active threat), yeah killing them would be best. Considering the exploding pagers had a mortality rate of 0.3%, and not all of that were civilians, I would expect a mortality rate of less than 0.3% of civilians near the individual war criminal to be killed.

Oh whats that? Not the answer you expected yeah I thought so. How about instead of frothing at the mouth trying to find a gotcha you can use to dehumanize me, you actually A) read up on laws* and definitions and B) read through my blog first because I've said many times that individuals who have committed war crimes should be arrested

*I know that NZ law may differ from laws elsewhere but they're pretty similar in the US, Canada and the UK

[radicalgraff]

"Destroy White Supremacy"

Memorial mural in Meanjin / Brisbane, for the victims of the Christchurch massacre, when an Australian white supremacist attacked two mosques in the New Zealand city on 15 March 2019.

[morbidology]

A statue of Jesus Christ spattered with blood following the 2019 Sri Lanka bombing.

On April 21, 2019, Sri Lanka was rocked by a series of devastating terrorist attacks targeting three churches and three luxury hotels. This tragic event, known as the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings, marked one of the deadliest days in the country’s history, resulting in the loss of over 250 lives and leaving more than 500 injured.

The attacks were carried out by a local Islamist extremist group called National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ), with alleged support from international terrorist networks. This marked a significant shift in the landscape of terrorism in Sri Lanka, a country that had endured decades of civil war primarily driven by ethnic tensions. The bombings were reportedly in retaliation for the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, which had occurred a month earlier.

[sixminutestoriesblog]

ides of march

well, its tumblr's favorite holiday and who can blame us? The assassination of Julius Caesar is probably one of the only group projects that ever went down the way it was supposed to with, well, not complete group participation (there were said to be upward of 60 people involved but only 23 stab wounds - obviously someone was not carrying their weight) but at least a good effort was made at it. But lets take a moment, between our jokes about salad and Animal Crossing butterfly nets to look at what else has happened in history on the Ides of March. For instance, did you know, on March 15th:

1493 - Columbus returned to Spain after 'discovering' the new world.

1580 - Phillip II of Spain put a bounty on the head of Prince William I of Orange for 25,000 gold coins for leading the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Hamburgs

1744 - King Louis XV of France declares war on Britain

1767 - Andrew Jackson, who would go on to be the seventh president of the US, was born.

1820 - Maine became the 23rd state in the US

1864 - the Red River Campaign, called 'One damn blunder from beginning to end' started for the Union Forces in the American Civil War

1889 - a typhoon in Apia Harbor, Samoa sinks 6 US and German warships, killing 200

1917 - Czar Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne, bringing an end to the Romanov dynasty

1955 - the first self-guided missile is introduced by the US Air Force

1965 - TGI Friday's opens its first restaurant in New York City

1991 - in LA, four police officers are brought up on charges for the beating of Rodney King

2018 - Toys R Us announces it will be closing all its stores

2019 - a terrorist attacks two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51, and wounding 50 others

Oof! Pretty bleak, isn't it? It would almost make you think that the day is just bad luck, start to finish and its probably just as well, we're all focusing on assassination instead of other horrors. But wait - its not all bad news! The Ides of March has some tricks up its sleeve yet (joke intended). I'd be telling you only half the story if I didn't add:

1854 - Emil von Behring is born and will eventually become the first to receive the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin, being called 'the children's savoir' for the lives it saves

1867 - Michigan is the first state to use property tax to support a university

1868 - the Cincinnati Red Stockings have ten salaried players, making them the first professional baseball team in the US

1887 - Michigan has the first salaried fish and game warden

1892 - the first automatic ballot voting machine is unveiled in New York City

1907 - Finland gives women the right to vote, becoming the first to do so in Europe

1933 - Ruth Bader Ginsberg is born and will go on to become a US Supreme Court justice

1934 - the 5$ a day wage was introduced by Henry Ford, forcing other companies to raise their wages as well or lose their workers

1937 - the first state sponsored contraceptive clinic in the US opens in Raleigh, North Carolina

1946 - the British Prime minister recognizes India's independence

1947 - the US Navy has its first black commissioned officer, John Lee

1949 - clothes rationing ends in Britain, four years after the end of WWII

1960 - ten nations meet in Geneva for disarmament talks

1968 - the Dioceses of Rome says it will not ban 'rock and roll' from being played during mass but that it deplores the practice - also in 1968, LIFE magazine titles Jimi Hendrix 'the most spectacular guitarist in the world'

1971 - ARPANET, the precursor of the modern day internet, sees its first forum

1984 - Tanzanian adopts a constitution

1985 - symbolics.com, the first internet domain name, is registered

The Ides of March turns out to just be a day, like any other day in history.

Unless you're us. In which case -

[mariacallous]

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.

[ausetkmt]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The social media posts are of a distinct type. They hint darkly that the CIA or the FBI are behind mass shootings. They traffic in racist, sexist and homophobic tropes. They revel in the prospect of a “white boy summer.”

White nationalists and supremacists, on accounts often run by young men, are building thriving, macho communities across social media platforms like Instagram, Telegram and TikTok, evading detection with coded hashtags and innuendo.

Their snarky memes and trendy videos are riling up thousands of followers on divisive issues including abortion, guns, immigration and LGBTQ rights. The Department of Homeland Security warned Tuesday that such skewed framing of the subjects could drive extremists to violently attack public places across the U.S. in the coming months.

These type of threats and racist ideology have become so commonplace on social media that it’s nearly impossible for law enforcement to separate internet ramblings from dangerous, potentially violent people, Michael German, who infiltrated white supremacy groups as an FBI agent, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

“It seems intuitive that effective social media monitoring might provide clues to help law enforcement prevent attacks,” German said. “After all, the white supremacist attackers in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and El Paso all gained access to materials online and expressed their hateful, violent intentions on social media.”

But, he continued, “so many false alarms drown out threats.”

DHS and the FBI are also working with state and local agencies to raise awareness about the increased threat around the U.S. in the coming months.

The heightened concern comes just weeks after a white 18-year-old entered a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, with the goal of killing as many Black patrons as possible. He gunned down 10.

WATCH: Senate Homeland Security committee holds hearing on white supremacist violence

That shooter claims to have been introduced to neo-Nazi websites and a livestream of the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings on the anonymous, online messaging board 4Chan. In 2018, the white man who gunned down 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue shared his antisemitic rants on Gab, a site that attracts extremists. The year before, a 21-year-old white man who killed 23 people at a Walmart in the largely Hispanic city of El Paso, Texas, shared his anti-immigrant hate on the messaging board 8Chan.

References to hate-filled ideologies are more elusive across mainstream platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Telegram. To avoid detection from artificial intelligence-powered moderation, users don’t use obvious terms like “white genocide” or “white power” in conversation.

They signal their beliefs in other ways: a Christian cross emoji in their profile or words like “anglo” or “pilled,” a term embraced by far-right chatrooms, in usernames. Most recently, some of these accounts have borrowed the pop song “White Boy Summer” to cheer on the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe v. Wade, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a social media intelligence firm.

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta banned praise and support for white nationalist and separatists movements in 2019 on company platforms, but the social media shift to subtlety makes it difficult to moderate the posts. Meta says it has more than 350 experts, with backgrounds from national security to radicalization research, dedicated to ridding the site of such hateful speech.

“We know these groups are determined to find new ways to try to evade our policies, and that’s why we invest in people and technology and work with outside experts to constantly update and improve our enforcement efforts,” David Tessler, the head of dangerous organizations and individuals policy for Meta, said in a statement.

A closer look reveals hundreds of posts steeped in sexist, antisemitic, racist and homophobic content.

In one Instagram post identified by The Associated Press, an account called White Primacy appeared to post a photo of a billboard that describes a common way Jewish people were exterminated during the Holocaust.

“We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out bigotry against Jews isn’t an overreaction,” the pictured billboard said.

The caption of the post, however, denied gas chambers were used at all. The post’s comments were even worse: “If what they said really happened, we’d be in such a better place,” one user commented. “We’re going to finish what they started someday,” another wrote.

The account, which had more than 4,000 followers, was immediately removed Tuesday, after the AP asked Meta about it. Meta has banned posts that deny the Holocaust on its platform since 2020.

U.S. extremists are mimicking the social media strategy used by the Islamic State group, which turned to subtle language and images across Telegram, Facebook and YouTube a decade ago to evade the industry-wide crackdown of the terrorist group’s online presence, said Mia Bloom, a communications professor at Georgia State University.

“They’re trying to recruit,” said Bloom, who has researched social media use for both Islamic State terrorists and far-right extremists. “We’re starting to see some of the same patterns with ISIS and the far-right. The coded speech, the ways to evade AI. The groups were appealing to a younger and younger crowd.”

For example, on Instagram, one of the most popular apps for teens and young adults, white supremacists amplify each other’s content daily and point their followers to new accounts.

In recent weeks, a cluster of those accounts has turned its sights on Pride Month, with some calling for gay marriage to be “re-criminalized” and others using the #Pride or rainbow flag emoji to post homophobic memes.

Law enforcement agencies are already monitoring an active threat from a young Arizona man who says on his Telegram accounts that he is “leading the war” against retail giant Target for its Pride Month merchandise and children’s clothing line and has promised to “hunt LGBT supporters” at the stores. In videos posted to his Telegram and YouTube accounts, sometimes filmed at Target stores, he encourages others to go the stores as well.

Target said in a statement that it is working with local and national law enforcement agencies who are investigating the videos. As society becomes more accepting of LGBTQ rights, the issue may be especially triggering for young men who have held traditional beliefs around relationships and marriage, Bloom said.

“That might explain the vulnerability to radical belief systems: A lot of the beliefs that they grew up with, that they held rather firmly, are being shaken,” she said. “That’s where it becomes an opportunity for these groups: They’re lashing out and they’re picking on things that are very different.”

[brexiiton]

UK terror attack survivors warn politicians over anti-Muslim hate

By Arab News 10 Mar 2024 13:35

A photograph taken on March 22, 2022 shows a wreath of flowers laid on Westminster Bridge in front of Palace of Westminster, home to the House of Parliament and House of Lords, in London, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Westminster Bridge terror attack (AFP)

London: A group of more than 50 survivors of Islamist terror attacks in the UK have signed an open letter warning politicians against tarring British Muslims as extremists.

The letter against anti-Muslim hate was coordinated by Survivors Against Terror, a network of people in the UK and British people overseas who have been affected by terrorism.

Signatories include Rebecca Rigby, the widow of Lee Rigby, a soldier who was stabbed to death in London in 2013, as well as Paul Price, whose partner Elaine McIver was killed in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

The letter reads: “To defeat this (extremist) threat the single most important thing we can do is to isolate the extremists and the terrorists from the vast majority of British Muslims who deplore such violence.

“In recent weeks there have been too many cases where politicians and others have failed to do this; in some cases equating being Muslim with being an extremist, facilitating anti-Muslim hate or failing to challenge it.”

The signatories say defeating Islamism and extremism should be a “national priority” and they are “only too aware” of the threat posed by terrorism.

But they are saddened by a series of controversies in which major political figures in the UK have conflated Islam with extremism.

Last month, the former deputy chair of the governing Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, was suspended after claiming that Islamists had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor.

Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, also faced controversy after warning that “the Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now,” referring to pro-Palestine protests that have taken place in London amid the Gaza conflict.

Their comments are “playing into the hands of terrorists,” signatories to the letter believe.

Darryn Frost, who fended off a terrorist who had killed two people near London Bridge in 2019, said: “I think it’s dangerous when any of our leaders marginalise communities and paint a very broad brush.

“People need to consider the power of their words because they have the power to incite further hatred.”

The letter is being published ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Christchurch mosque killings on March 15.

The attack, carried out by a far-right terrorist, led to the murder of more than 50 Muslims in the New Zealand city.

Brendan Cox, co-founder of Survivors Against Terrorism, said: “Anyone using the issue (of extremism) to seek tactical party advantage risks undermining that consensus and making our efforts less successful.

“The message from survivors of attacks is clear: you can play politics all you like, but not with the safety of our country.”

Among the 57 signatories is Magen Inon, whose parents were killed during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

The letter coincides with UK government plans to update the official definition of extremism, which will allow authorities to suspend ties or funding to groups found to have exceeded the new definition.

Currently, extremism is defined by the government as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”

Communities Secretary Michael Gove, who is leading the change, has claimed that pro-Palestine marches in London have included groups who are “trying to subvert democracy,” and that some pro-Palestine events have been organized by “extremist” organizations.

[ifreakingloveroyals]

25 April 2019 | Prince William, Duke of Cambridge arrives at the RNZAF Air Movements Terminal in Christchurch, New Zealand. Prince William is on a two-day visit to New Zealand to commemorate the victims of the Christchurch mosque terror attacks. (c) Hannah Peters - Pool/Getty Images

[hasellia]

9/11 reminds me of when the Christchurch massacre happened in Aotearoa. The next day, my family was at a neighbourhood backyard party. My dad and I talked to an old man who had moved from Serbia to Australia when the subject of the attack came. His eye lit up in fear, and he started talking about "there will be a retaliation! It will happen for sure! It's only a matter of time!" Somehow, despite knowing my dad for roughly a month now, he completely missed that he's muslim and that both me and him carry Islamic names. My dad went to a mosque that very morning praying with the immam and other followers for peace for the families as well as the victims. Even though I'm pale as dog shit my dad is visably a POC, we didn't say say anything back to him other than a soft "no I don't think that'll happen, it'll be alright." I think about the fear in his eyes and how scared that old man was every now and then but especially on this day.

[airyairyaucontraire]

When a NZ Twitter user complained about seeing the video of defenceless adults and children being gunned down by a terrorist, Twitter’s initial response was that it didn’t break their rules against glorifying or encouraging extreme violence or terrorism. It took questioning from our major newspaper and contact from our government to get them to take it down. Ffs.

[grad603laura]

Research on the 2019 Christchurch Mosque Attacks.

On 15 March 2019, two consecutive mass shootings occurred in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The attacks, carried out by a lone gunman who entered both mosques during Friday prayer, began at the Al Noor Mosque in the suburb of Riccarton at 1:40 pm and continued at the Linwood Islamic Centre at 1:52 pm. 51 people were killed and 40 were injured.

The gunman, 28-year-old Brenton Harrison Tarrant from New South Wales, Australia was arrested after his vehicle was rammed by a police unit as he was driving to a third mosque in Ashburton. He was described in media reports as a white supremacist. He had live-streamed the first shooting on Facebook, and prior to the attack, had published an online manifesto; both the video and manifesto were subsequently banned in New Zealand and Australia. On 26 March 2020, he pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders, and engaging in a terrorist act, and in August was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole – the first such sentence in New Zealand.

The attack was linked to an increase in white supremacy and alt-right extremism globally observed since about 2015. Politicians and world leaders condemned it, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it as "one of New Zealand's darkest days". The government established a royal commission into its security agencies in the wake of the shootings, which were the deadliest in modern New Zealand history and the worst ever committed by an Australian national. The commission submitted its report to the government on 26 November 2020, the details of which were made public on 7 December

How did Parliament respond? 

When Parliament sat for the first time following the attacks, on March 19, then Speaker Trevor Mallard led a procession of leaders from different faiths into the House. Usually, non-members are not allowed to walk on the floor of the debating chamber when Parliament is in session. 

Sittings of the House normally begin with the parliamentary prayer. The March 19 session was instead opened with a prayer in Arabic from Imam Nizam ul haq Thanvi, translated into English by Tahir Nawaz. This was followed by the parliamentary prayer in te reo Māori by then Assistant Speaker Adrian Rurawhe, and in English by then Deputy Speaker Hon Anne Tolley.

"That quiet Friday afternoon has become our darkest of days. But for the families, it was more than that. It was the day that the simple act of prayer, of practicing their Muslim Faith and religion, led to the loss of their loved ones lives. Those loved ones were brothers, daughters, fathers, and children. They were New Zealanders. They are us. And because they are us, we as a nation, mourn them." - Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

"The unimaginable hurt that our Islamic community is feeling is shared amongst all New Zealanders, because I know that every New Zealander feels this wasn't just something targeted at our Islamic community or just at Christchurch, as real as that is; it. has happened to all New Zealanders, and all New Zealanders are grieving with them." - Hon Simon Bridges

NZ Changed their Gun Laws

Reforming New Zealand’s gun laws 

Parliament acted swiftly after the mosque attacks to introduce gun laws to improve public safety and tighten gun control in New Zealand.

The first of these was the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines and Parts) Amendment Bill. It was introduced to Parliament just over a fortnight after the attacks. The bill aimed to remove semi-automatic firearms from circulation and use by New Zealand’s general population, by banning semi-automatic firearms, magazines, and parts that can be used to assemble these.

Usually, bills take months or even years to pass through the several stages to becoming law. However, in this case Parliament agreed to accelerate the process, and the bill became law within 11 days.  

The bill had near unanimous support across the House, with all but one of Parliament’s 120 MPs voting for it.

In September 2019, the Arms Legislation Bill was introduced. This bill aimed to introduce  tighter controls on the use and possession of firearms. It also re-stated the purpose of the Arms Act to make it clear that owning a firearm is a privilege, and that people with that privilege have a responsibility to act in the interests of personal and public safety.

The bill enabled the creation of a registry to store information about licence holders, their weapons, and ammunition. It also strengthened the licensing system by creating a new system of warning flags to show if someone is not a fit and proper person to hold a firearms licence.

The Arms Legislation Bill bill was granted Royal assent in June 2020.

Reference List

[archangelmag]

The message archangel: The rise of neofascism with eco-humanitarian mask go hand-tied and we all should be cautious about it.

WGSN once prewied that rebellion would be a trend amount clothing and behavior. Now we are watching an old idea masked as a form of rebellion, and i will tell you here.

If you’re into the most recent news, you probably saw in somewhere about climate activists that throw tomato soup in Van Gogh’s artwork. After this occurrency, many other artworks got “a little dirty” with smashed potatos, glue or baby food. Words like “our planet is in colapse” or “did these paintings are way more valuable than people” were said during the acts.

What sounded quite performative and left me questioning: there are billions of people that are poor and hungry, then why are you throwing soup in a replica?

To us in 3rd world democracy, it just sounds weird.

And it is weird.

It’s been said that a Getty family scion has come out in support of climate activists. In case you missed, the getty family is basically heir to the oil industry. Jean Paul Getty Sr, the patriarch, founded the Getty Oil Company. It just don’t click when you’re asking “just stop oil” when the people that supports you are literally making billions... with oil.

In other hand, throw food around in form of protest – perfomative – then target art spaces that have no connections or relations with oil industry, are linked with this one name: ecofascism.

And let me tell you something: it’s not irresponsible to call it by the name.

According to Elaina Hancock, in an interview to UCONN; It is important to be able to recognize typical ecofascist talking points or myths because then you can start to recognize where they are popping up in everyday life and scenarios.

The typical behaviours is defend cosmetic tests on prisoners, throwing food away to make a performance against consumption, call it human race as "deeply egoistic" , and in this case, destroying works of art as a form of protesting against the oil industry.

It’s necessary the fully understandment that, before draw a target in minority group, fascists will destroy arts.

If a facist destroy art and nothing happens, the next step comes. In this protest, we even had an yt p0w3r signal.

Do you know why fascists destroy arts?

A fascist has a HORROR of subjectivity, a real allergy to the human sciences. Because he thinks he is a pragmatist (but in fact he is just a 100% technical stupid), he attacks everything that he doesn't understand, that he doesn't have the sensitivity to absorb. This is why this bunch of scumbags likes use ultra-realistic painting or sculpture as self-identification. They cannot understand that art is not a 1:1 portrait of reality, because they only see technique, but not subjectivity, message, feeling. This is why some people watch movies, read books, or listen to music, and have no idea what is being said there.

First, they attack arts, then, they start attack minorities using environmentalism with racist and reactionary ideas. Examples includes the man who murdered 51 People in a Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque in 2019. The El Paso, Texas, shooter, also in 2019, did a copy of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, including many of its bogus arguments about race, nation, and environment. More recently, an young man drove several hours to Buffalo, New York, where he targeted Black grocery shoppers.

The thing is that since 1922, these ideas circulate.

Facist ideas increasingly circulate on the left and among political moderates at the center as well as on the right. This is how fascism has worked historically and still works even now. Fascist movements are rarely ideologically rigorous. Instead, they draw on commonplace, existing ideas about national, ethnic, racial, and environmental belonging that reinforce lines between in-groups and out-groups.

Right now, Europe is slowly experiencing the rising of neofascism. Here in Latin America, most countries experienced neofascists governements between 2018 and 2022. Put climate crisis together with the near-universal economic upheavals, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing pandemic and you have a recipe for the rise and triumph of neo-fascism.

This is why it is important to be able to recognize typical ecofascist/neofascist talking points or myths because then you can start to recognize where they are popping up in everyday scenarios, talk about them openly, address their misconceptions and clarify their consequences, and deliberate over actual, alternative solutions.

To Elana Hancock, it’s important to break down the myths, since the aim is to debunk widely circulating myths that lend support to explicitly ecofascist activities. From this, a web zine was created with a hope of help teachers and students to do that. It’s called Against the Ecofascist Creep, and it breaks down several common myths that often appear in everyday media and conversation.

It is important to avoid performative activism, study their basis and bring down their ideas, embracing collective actions that bring actual changes in our society.

https://www.asle.org/wp-content/uploads/Against-the-Ecofascist-Creep.pdf

Please, talk to your friends about it. Pass this text ahead.

[sidleyparkhermit]

And in local Justice Dept. indictment news:

From a residence in Boise, Matthew Allison, 37, is accused of fostering a loosely connected online haven for extremists seeking to incite a race war. His tactics included splicing adulatory videos about prior terror attacks and compiling detailed how-to guides that included the nuts and bolts of how to make bombs and chemical weapons, how to find a suitable target and how not to get caught, according to a Department of Justice indictment and news release. In pursuit of ways to “accelerate” violent clashes around the globe to speed up the creation of a white ethnostate, the conspirators looked to radicalize new recruits and incentivize their violent ideations, calling attackers “saints” and promising to commemorate those who succeeded, authorities said. One document that was in the works, called the “Saint Encyclopedia,” included mugshots of white supremacist killers and still photographs from a shooter’s 2019 livestream of a Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, which killed 51 Muslims attending prayer services. The network of communications channels, group chats and archives was built on the social media app Telegram and is known as “Terrorgram.” The activities on the platform and charges against Allison and alleged co-conspirator Dallas Humber, of Elk Grove, California, were detailed in a 37-page indictment released by the Justice Department on Monday.

The Telegram web was replete with instructional manuals for how to make bombs, videos valorizing past attacks motivated by racist ideologies, detailed instructions for targeting important infrastructure and words of encouragement for any would-be attackers. Here are some of the international terrorist attacks that federal authorities linked to Allison and Humber, and documented in the indictment. SLOVAKIA A 19-year-old Slovakian killed two people and injured a third in a shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava in October 2022. He then killed himself. Before the attack, the shooter authored a manifesto and sent it to Allison, “thanking Terrorgram for inspiring and guiding him.” A section of “Recommended Reading” included one of the Terrorgram’s documents, which the shooter called a “practical” guide to carrying out their agenda. Humber later created an audiobook version of the manifesto. Before his attack, the shooter had been in “frequent” conversation with Allison online, and was celebrated by him in reposts after the killings.

NEW JERSEY In July, an 18-year-old was arrested for allegedly plotting to attack an electrical substation in New Jersey. He had been an active member of Allison and Humber’s Telegram group chats, and had thanked other members for sending him “accelerationist propaganda” videos created or spread by Allison. One of Allison’s videos had recommended a particular method to break an electrical transformer; the New Jersey attacker recommended that an accomplice — who turned out to be an undercover agent — use the same method. TURKEY In mid-August, an 18-year-old from Turkey was arrested in the stabbing of five people outside a mosque in a city southeast of Istanbul. He wrote in his manifesto that he had used Terrorgram’s documents to plan his attack, and also shared the 2022 manifesto of the Slovakian attacker. In a separate instance last December, Allison encouraged another user who had expressed his plans to commit a mass shooting, the indictment said. “Wish you the best in everything homie,” Allison wrote to him.

[novumtimes]

Online misinformation is fueling tensions over the Southport stabbing attack that killed 3 children

LONDON (AP) — Within hours of a stabbing attack in northwest England that killed three young girls and wounded several more children, the name of a suspect was circulating on social media. Hours after that, violent protesters were clashing with police outside a nearby mosque. Police say the name was fake, as were rumors that the 17-year-old suspect was an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain. Detectives say the alleged attacker was born in the U.K., and British media including the BBC have reported that his parents are from Rwanda. That information did little to slow the lightning spread of the false name, or stop right-wing influencers pinning the blame on immigrants and Muslims. “There’s a parallel universe where what was claimed by these rumors were the actual facts of the case,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that looks at issues including integration and national identity. “And that will be a difficult thing to manage.” Local lawmaker Patrick Hurley said the result was “hundreds of people descending on the town, descending on Southport from outside of the area, intent on causing trouble — either because they believe what they’ve written, or because they are bad faith actors who wrote it in the first place, in the hope of causing community division.” One of the first outlets to report the false name, Ali Al-Shakati, was Channel 3 Now, an account on X that purports to be a news channel. A Facebook page of the same name says it is managed by people in Pakistan and the U.S. A related website on Wednesday showed a mix of possibly AI-generated news and entertainment stories, as well as an apology for “the misleading information” in its article on the Southport stabbings. By the time the apology was posted, the incorrect identification had been repeated widely on social media. “Some of the key actors are probably just generating traffic, possibly for monetization,” said Katwala. The misinformation was then spread further by “people committed to the U.K. domestic far right,” he said. Governments around the world, including Britain’s, are struggling with how to curb toxic material online. U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Tuesday that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the content on their sites. Katwala said that social platforms such as Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, worked to “de-amplify” false information in real time after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Since Elon Musk, a self-styled free-speech champion, bought X, it has gutted teams that once fought misinformation on the platform and restored the accounts of banned conspiracy theories and extremists. Rumors have swirled in the relative silence of police over the attack. Merseyside Police issued a statement saying the reported name for the suspect was incorrect, but have provided little information about him other than his age and birthplace of Cardiff, Wales. Under U.K. law, suspects are not publicly named until they have been charged, and those under 18 are usually not named at all. That has been seized on by some activists to suggest the police are withholding information about the attacker. Tommy Robinson, founder of the far-right English Defense League, accused police of “gaslighting” the public. Nigel Farage, a veteran anti-immigration politician who was elected to Parliament in this month’s general election, posted a video on X speculating “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the attack. Brendan Cox, whose lawmaker wife Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right attacker in 2016, said Farage’s comments showed he was “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit.” “It is beyond the pale to use a moment like this to spread your narrative and to spread your hatred, and we saw the results on Southport’s streets last night,” Cox told the BBC. Jill Lawless, The Associated Press Source link via The Novum Times