Tag Archive for: Christchurch

We must do more to combat right-wing extremism

Recently I met with a former right-wing extremist in Australia who had become deradicalised.

This Australian had once believed, proudly, that given the mere fact they were born white made them superior to other races, other faiths, other people. In fact, this person believed in the eradication of other people of certain races and faiths.

However, through intervention, counselling, mental health support and, ultimately, rehabilitation, this person changed.

In fact, when I met with this person, I was sitting in a room with two of my colleagues—both Muslim. It was a stark illustration of what can happen when the right intervention happens at the right time. Unfortunately, the intervention and support this Australian received is the exception, not the rule.

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the Christchurch mosque shootings, a massacre of 51 Muslims quietly practising their faith. An Australian radicalised by right-wing extremist ideology is currently before the courts charged with these violent murders. On social media and across the globe, that particular Australian is now a hero among right-wing extremist groups.

While Australia should mark the Christchurch anniversary in solidarity with our New Zealand family and with the multi-faith and multicultural communities in Australia, we should also squarely face the fact that right-wing extremism is a growing and real terrorist threat in our nation and the world.

When it comes to national security, political leaders and security agencies should never ignore a threat and never exaggerate a threat. The new director-general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, did neither in his first annual threat assessment last month. Instead, he calmly and clearly told the Australian people the terrorist threat level in Australia has plateaued at an ‘unacceptably high’ level of ‘probable’, and the two threats that drive that threat level are Islamic fundamentalist extremism and right-wing extremism.

Much is being done to counter Islamic violent extremism and radicalisation. Local Australian Islamic families and communities have been crucial to that work. Many terrorist plots have been foiled thanks to the partnership between national security agencies and these communities.

But it’s less clear what particular work, if any, is being done to counter the threat of right-wing extremism in Australia, including understanding how groups are spreading their hate-filled messages and why those messages are resonating with some in the Australian community.

In a recent interview on the ABC’s Insiders, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton didn’t appear to have answers to these questions. He claimed right-wing extremism is being spread on the ‘dark web’. Right-wing extremism is, in fact, being spread openly in social gatherings and on social media, often through the use of specific symbols or ordinary words, like ‘siege’, that signal certain meanings to extremists. Today’s right-wing extremists aren’t using just the symbols of fascism from the past, but a new set of images and words for an online generation.

In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government did sign up to the ‘Christchurch Call’ to counter the drivers of terrorism and violent extremism. However, there is little apparent evidence that much has changed in the government’s counterterrorism approach as a result.

In Canada and the UK, right-wing extremist groups have been listed as terrorist organisations. Given the ASIO director-general’s warnings that small cells are meeting in suburbs in Australia to salute Nazi flags, inspect weapons, train in combat and share their hateful ideology by connecting with overseas groups online, it seems inconsistent that no right-wing groups have been listed here.

It may be that the criteria for listing terrorist organisations in Australia isn’t fit for purpose when it comes to right-wing extremism. For example, the definition of terrorism in Australia and the UK is similar but with a stark difference: the UK definition of terrorism explicitly extends to violent acts or threats made for the purpose of advancing a racial cause.

The UK also allows for listing when a group ‘glorifies’ extreme violence for political or ideological ends, including by sharing images or symbols on social media. The glorification criterion is one of the justifications the UK used to list right-wing extremist group National Action after the group posted tweets and images relating to the murderer of British Labour MP Jo Cox and the 2016 attack on a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The UK government determined these images and posts could reasonably be taken to infer that such actions should be emulated and therefore were an unlawful glorification of terrorism.

Last month, four men from across the US who are alleged to be part of a neo-Nazi group were arrested for intimidating journalists. At the same time, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that domestic racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists pose as great a threat to the United States as foreign terrorist organisations. One of the tools the FBI uses to track such threats is its hate crime statistics database. Wray notes that such crimes are not limited to the US and, with the aid of the internet, like-minded hate groups can reach across borders.

As we learned in Senate estimates last week, Australia doesn’t have any similar formal monitoring systems for right-wing extremist violence to help us understand the nature and scale of the problem here. Nor have we stood up specialist units to investigate such threats, as has happened in the US and Germany.

The Australian government and all federal parliamentarians must now take the terrorist threat of right-wing extremism seriously and respond appropriately. The Morrison government could begin this work by referring Australia’s terrorist listing criteria to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security for review. Our job as parliamentarians is not to play politics or engage in culture wars over such issues, and the PJCIS does neither. Keeping Australians safe is too important for that.

Policy, Guns and Money: Episode 14

In the wake of the Christchurch terror attack, we talk to two eminent thinkers on national security and counterterrorism, ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings and Jacinta Carroll of the Australian National University’s National Security College.

We also talk to John Coyne about a new ASPI research program focusing on the national security challenge of protecting Australia’s north.

Dignity, inclusiveness and the power to change: the aftermath of the Christchurch attack

For those involved in countering terrorism—communities, officials and researchers—the most crucial question is how to effectively counter the terrorist narrative.

Over the past few days, from possibly the most unlikely place in the world, we appear to have seen a masterclass.

In New Zealand’s response to the Christchurch attack—led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern—we have seen that rare combination of the right words and the right actions. Until Friday, Ardern had never had to deal with a terrorist attack or plot—indeed, until that day the country’s terrorism threat alert level was at ‘low’ (since raised to ‘high’).

There were no practised words and likely few if any standing talking points to deal with such an extreme situation. Yet standing humble before representatives of a devastated Muslim community in Christchurch on the day after the attack, Ardern said she ‘brought a message of love’ from other New Zealanders and expressed sorrow that their right to feel safe and secure in their home—her responsibility as prime minister—had been shattered.

Ardern’s strong and heartfelt message of community and shared pain led the day for the narrative around this attack. Her image and words spun around the world on social media, providing a rallying point for many.

New Zealand authorities’ quick and public action to limit the spread of the livestreamed video of the attack, and to limit publicity about the alleged attacker and anyone else who may have been involved, meant that they quickly took control of the narrative around the attack.

Australia’s political leaders and mainstream media have followed suit. Statements by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and opposition leader Bill Shorten have stressed camaraderie and unity. Morrison was the first leader to publicly call this a terrorist act, well aware from Australian experience of the importance of not treating right-wing extremist violence any differently from Islamist violence. On Monday he denounced ‘tribalism’ in politics and society. Shorten cut straight to the information war at the heart of terrorism, warning against giving ‘oxygen’ to extreme views.

And despite the demands of the 24/7 rolling news cycle, much of the commentary—including from some of the more outspoken media personalities—has stressed caution in speculating about what was going on, and started healthy discussions about the possible links between simplistic public debates about issues and the global manifestation of political extremism, including violence.

So why is this important?

Terrorism is about ideology and propaganda. In addition to harming people in an attack, terrorists of all types have another goal, which is to publicise and aggrandise their actions. This serves the dual purpose of marketing the ideology and recruiting supporters.

In recent years, the Islamic State terrorist group’s effective use of propaganda has become notorious. At its height, the group was producing multilingual online magazines and reams of videos, and was supported by its ‘virtual caliphate’ of online supporters spreading its information further. Through this battle with Islamist terrorists over information, authorities and the media have learned a lot about the power of the narrative—and about how terrorists use the media to promote their own agenda.

Authorities acted quickly to ensure that the Christchurch attacker didn’t get to dictate the message on the day. The alleged killer published photos of some of his weapons and a so-called manifesto statement to justify his actions, and live-streamed the attack on social media. One of the first things we heard from the New Zealand Police on the day of the attack was a request for all of us to not watch the video, for media not to show it, and for internet hosts to take it down. The public and the media got the message and, while it’s not completely removed from the internet, the video is inaccessible to most. The attacker failed in one of his main objectives—to propagandise his attack.

This left much of the public arena open for another narrative to lead the day—that of a successful and welcoming New Zealand, home to those who were attacked and hurting with them. The raw emotion of a clearly moved Ardern in meeting with the Muslim community is the message that has gone viral around the world, not the message of hate. Instead of fomenting division, it would appear that the attack has—at least in the immediate aftermath—served only to strengthen New Zealand’s society, and in turn, Australia’s.

Research on countering terrorist narratives and countering violent extremism has identified ongoing issues in trying to get meaningful and timely information out to the right audiences. Some recent evaluation, including collaborative studies of practice in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, has identified the difficulties of getting into the information loops of extremist and populist discussion, and the difficulties in trying to counteract the messaging of terrorist propagandists, which is devastatingly effective because of its simplicity. For open liberal democracies such as Australia and the United Kingdom, however, there’s the additional challenge of a public used to poking fun at earnest government efforts to talk about issues such as values—as seen with the much-derided ‘Living Safe Together’ campaign in Australia.

Rather than focusing primarily on the terrorist narrative and seeking to counter it, research led by Professor Michele Grossman and others at Deakin University and Dalhousie University in Canada has drawn on sociology to examine how to build resilience. This research indicates that individual, family and community resilience to threats can be built and reinforced by access to information and other resources, and that levels of resilience can be measured. Key factors in building resilience include trust and confidence in governments (linking capital) and in other people across society (bridging capital), and calling out violence.

The statements by Muslim community leaders in New Zealand—and Australia—suggest that these indicators are tracking strongly. And the reason for this can be linked directly to the way both government and community leaders, supported by the media, have treated this issue.

In the face of unimaginable tragedy, Ardern has intuitively demonstrated exactly what a threatened community needs to hear: that they are truly part of a bigger community, that their government actively supports and will protect them, and that violence has no place.

Extremists can take little benefit from her actions, or those of the broader New Zealand community, and the global debate that has ensued. So the propaganda value of the attack—ultimately desired equally by right-wing and Islamist extremists—is denied. And the counterterrorism movement is strengthened.

The response to the Christchurch attack will not on its own defeat the threat of violent extremism. But this strong demonstration of compassion and focus on community rather than the terrorist threat has increased resilience in an already strong society. It provides a powerful message of why terrorism will not succeed and a lasting example of how to face up to the threat of violent extremism that will continue to resonate across the world.