Apologies are being issued today from the New Zealand government and its agencies by everyone from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern down over the Christchurch Mosque Shootings.
Established ten days after a lone individual conducted mass shooting events at two mosques during Friday prayer on 15 March 2019, the Christchurch Attack Royal Commission released its findings yesterday.
The Royal Commission identified government failures in hindsight — issues with firearms’ licensing, policing and reporting which led up to the attack that left 51 people dead and injured another 40.
The Royal Commission noted in its 792-page report that the individual responsible was radicalised online and his most significant influence was videos posted on YouTube.
He was named just once in the report’s Executive Summary. Thereafter he was referred to only as the “individual”.
The report is publicly available and is recommended reading for anyone wanting to understand the motivations of a terrorist mass murderer.
He was an Australian citizen born in Grafton 30 years ago, driven by right wing extremism, an ad hoc white supremacist ideology and was devoted to what is known as The Great Replacement, a toxic white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that arose first in France; that so-called political elites were seeking to replace white Europeans with non-Europeans, especially Arab, Berber and sub-Saharan Muslim populations.
He also idealised the right wing extremist responsible for the two sequential domestic terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 which left 77 dead (eight by bombing, 67 by gunfire, two indirectly) and injured 319 people.
Of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies, the commission found: “The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service had decided to concentrate its scarce counter-terrorism resources on the presenting threat of Islamist extremist terrorism. This was in part because it had a lack of capacity until mid-2018 both to deal with that threat and, at the same time, to baseline other threats.”
The Royal Commission found however, “that the concentration of resources on the threat of Islamist extremist terrorism is not why the individual’s planning and preparation for his terrorist attack was not detected.”
This is a terrible story of a lone wolf radicalised online. There are peculiarities about his personality type and his personal circumstances which in some considerable way created the means for his attack. He was unemployed but was financially independent having received a sum of around half a million dollars from his father’s estate. He was essentially a loner, with few acquaintances and fewer friends. He travelled the world extensively but did so almost always alone.
“He describes himself as an introvert,” the Commission reported. “He told us that he had suffered from social anxiety since childhood and found socialising with others stressful. Without a job, he had no need to associate with people in workplaces and his frequent and usually solitary travel meant he did not form enduring relationships with others. This meant that his self-described introversion was not mitigated by the usual daily interactions that most people experience in their regular lives. Accordingly, there was limited opportunity for the hard edges of his political thinking to be softened by regular and lasting connections with people with different views.
“ … His limited personal engagement with others left considerable scope for influence from extreme right-wing material, which he found on the internet and in books.”
The individual claimed to have a light touch in the shadowy corners of the internet — on extreme right wing bulletin board discussions in Reddit, 4chan and 8chan. Up until the day of the attack he used Facebook intermittently although he was one of 120,000 followers of the United Patriots Front Facebook page.
The Commission reported, “United Patriots Front was a far-right group based in Australia. Between April 2016 and early 2017, the individual made approximately 30 comments on their Facebook page. At that time, the United Patriots Front was led by Blair Cottrell. Several of the posts made by the individual expressed support for Blair Cottrell. For example, when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, the individual posted on Facebook “globalists and Marxists on suicide watch, patriots and nationalists triumphant – looking forward to Emperor Blair Cottrell coming soon.”
The individual also expressed support for Blair Cottrell on the True Blue Crew Facebook page. The True Blue Crew is another far right Australian group.”
There are various mentions by the individual and others in that group of what they call “The Day of the Rope”, a fantasy of a neo-Nazi reckoning, of mass lynching of non-whites in the community. Cotterill, who has appeared on Australian media on numerous occasions, has made these comments himself on social media.
The Royal Commission’s report finds however that the individual was radicalised largely by watching YouTube videos.
“Although he did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.”
That toxic videos appear on its platform is a not free speech issue although it is often rationalised in this way.
YouTube, wholly owned by Google, lives large on advertising profits but fails to provide adequate resources for curation. The company does not, for example, include videos promoting paedophilia because they would quickly fall foul of the laws in any number of jurisdictions. But when it comes to the promotion of white supremacism or the grifters and cultists peddling The Great Replacement, the videos sail through and have largely remained.
So, we have the archetypal man in his basement lurking about watching dangerously toxic videos with no other influencing social forces. His personal and financial circumstances allowed him this luxury and further to purchase weapons and plan his attack in secret.
His circumstances are by no means unique.
There are others out there just like him, planning mass murder and mayhem being radicalised online. Some continue to regard him as a hero. At least eight people in New Zealand have been charged with trafficking the video of the mosque attacks filmed by the individual and posted to Facebook, Live Leak and YouTube.
The Royal Commission concludes that “when the individual came to live in New Zealand on 17 August 2017, it was with a fully-developed terrorist ideology based on his adoption of the Great Replacement theory and his associated beliefs that immigration, particularly by Muslim migrants, into Western countries is an existential threat to Western society and that the appropriate response (at least for him) was violence.”
Eighteen months later, he entered the Al-Noor Mosque where people had assembled for prayer and began his rampage.
Three weeks ago, Phillip Galea, 36, was sentenced to at least nine years behind bars in Victoria’s Supreme Court after his convictions for preparing for a terrorist act and making a document likely to facilitate a terrorist act.
Galea had been a member of far right groups, Reclaim Australia and the True Blue Crew.
In July, AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw told a parliamentary inquiry the AFP has seen a “steady increase” in operations directed at right-wing extremism and were “alive” to the challenge.
In its report in October, ASIO identified “Sunni Islamic extremists” as the agency’s “greatest concern” but acknowledged that right wing extremism accounts for around 40 per cent of its counter-terrorism case load.
It remains the job of government to call out all forms of violent extremism and in respect of far-right extremism it should be doing so more often and with greater vigour.
But it is Big Tech, the big social media companies, and YouTube especially, that ignore the threats posed by the material posted on their platforms and who must bear responsibility at least in part for what occurred in Christchurch on May 14, 2019. Surely now, they must direct their attention to removing and deplatforming the dangerous and toxic material that acts as inspiration for far right terrorism.
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