By Brigitte Nacos
After seeing the most gruesome ISIS videos that showed the meticulously staged executions of hostages, the beheading, the drowning, the burning of victims, I thought that I couldn’t see anything worse, nothing more inhumane.
This morning I was proved wrong.
The video that the Christchurch terrorist shot with a camera seemingly attached to his helmet or cap and streamed on the best known social media platforms during his killing spree is of unspeakable cruelty.
Not only did the killer shoot peaceful, innocent human beings as they were worshiping in a mosque, he aimed at the same people—dead or injured already—again and again.
When he was nearly out of ammunition, he walked back to his car shooting at pedestrians further away to his right and left. He took another handgun from the trunk of the car, walked back into the mosque, and aimed his shots again at the people lying in their blood on the floor.
What I saw was the personified evil devoid of any humanity.
And, no, contrary to the common but false narrative of our time, this terrorist was not a Muslim, not a jihadist affiliated with ISIS or like-minded groups.
He was a White Nationalist, an angry, hateful racist with an Australian passport who wanted to fire the first deadly shots in a war against “invaders” of different religions and races.
When I read the 74-pages of a tract that the mass killer posted online, I was hardly surprised. He expresses the same hate, the same ignorance, the same calls for defending the white race, the same appetite for all-out race war, and the same attacks on humanitarian leaders who opened their countries’ doors to non-white, Christian refugees. On this count, he attacks most of all German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
These racist outbursts are nothing new; they are central to the regular discourse on white supremacy/neo-Nazi online discussion boards, web sites, and social media accounts. The resemble the message sent by the Alt-Right’s “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville in 2017 that President Trump could not bring himself to condemn.
The mass killer of Christchurch is at home in the white nationalist online milieu. His primitive declaration that the news media characterized as "manifesto" celebrates among others the Norwegian white nationalist Anders Breivik (who killed 77 people to highlight his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda) and the American white supremacist Dylan Roof (who in 2016 killed 9 African Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church).
While Facebook and Twitter closed the terrorist’s accounts and thereby tried to block access to the horrific video and the terrorist tract titled “The Great Replacement,” both were readily available on White Supremacy sites.
That alone attests to the fact that the Christchurch terrorist did not think, plan, and act in a vacuum. He is part of a growing international front of White extremism that spans from North America to Europe and Australia and poses just as serious a threat as does Muslim extremism.
A fact that European governments have come to recognize contrary to top-decision-makers in Washington.
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