Far right and Islamists have the same delusions

Islamists like Omar Bakri (left) and far right extremists like Brenton Tarrant (right) are deluded, sustained by online fantasies and a refusal to accept the world as it is.

Back in 1995, I saw Omar Bakri give a speech at the Cambridge Union about how radical Islam was going to conquer the West. He was a clown, a weirdo; how we all hooted. He was still a joke when the journalist Jon Ronson made a quite wry documentary about him a few years later, in which he said things like “the Spice Girls must be arrested immediately!” and unwound after preaching jihad by watching The Lion King. Today he’s in jail in Lebanon, having been banned from Britain in 2005. Two of his sons died fighting for Islamic State.

One day, perhaps, we will recognise the Bakris of contemporary white nationalism, or white supremacism, or whatever it is we finally decide best describes the culture behind last week’s shooting in Christchurch. There is no shortage of candidates, from YouTubers to self-styled comedians to out-and-out trolls. One, the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, had his Australian visa revoked this weekend. I remember Yiannopoulos when he was a mid-level tech blogger who used to send me flirtatious messages on Twitter, and I still struggle to find him truly alarming. The same is true, mind you, with Bakri.

Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.

To liken new, far-right terrorism to western jihadism is not to make some cheap, pious rhetorical point. It is to accept the evidence of your eyes that they are, in numerous respects, the same thing from different angles. Aside from a shared obsession with medieval battles between crusaders and caliphates, as seen in a manifesto believed to have been written by the New Zealand suspect, there is also a shared loathing of functional diversity.

Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor, also turns up in that manifesto, as a figure of hate. I interviewed Khan two years ago, and I kept thinking this weekend of what he’d said about the attacks he faced from the far right, and the philosophy of Islamic State itself. “Their thesis,” he said, “is that it is incompatible being a Muslim and a westerner, that it is incompatible to have western liberal values and to practise the faith of Islam.” Think back over the politically motivated attacks of the past few years and you may in some cases struggle to recall immediately from which extreme which one came. The middle, the mix, the functional liberal soup; this is the nightmare of both sides.

The similarities, though, are not just ideological. So far as we know, the New Zealand suspect was highly active online and in particular, distinctive communities. As many have pointed out, his manifesto is full of memes that those who inhabit the grim depths of the far-right internet would spot at once.

A section in which he pretends to be a navy Seal is a well-known parody of internet over-reaction, and he feigns inspiration from computer games and from the US right-wing commentator Candace Owens, using both to bait the mainstream media. Immediately before the shooting, he appears to have posted on 8chan, a website beloved of right-wing trolls. His horrific livestream video mentions the YouTuber PewDiePie and the Scandinavian’s long-running, semi-ironic white supremacist internet fight to remain more popular on the platform than his nearest rival, a Bollywood music label.

Brenton Tarrant in Turkey.

This is all weird, esoteric stuff, close to being an online cult. The thing is, there are pretty clear parallels here with jihadism, at least in its appeal in the West. In many respects that, too, is an online cult. ISIS, too, has memes and even jokes. It is hard to establish now whether the hashtag #catsforjihad was real or a parody, but there was certainly a craze for fighters in Syria and Iraq to post pictures of their machineguns next to kittens. Another even stranger meme showed fighters posing with jars of Nutella, supposedly to illustrate how glorious life in the caliphate could be.

Tech companies are pretty good, today, at excising visible jihadi content. In its heyday a few years ago, though, nobody really knows how much of it was centrally masterminded propaganda and how much was organic. Certainly, people were recruited online, as seen with Shamima Begum. For others, though, and feasibly many more, online jihadism was more like a secret porn habit, perhaps close to a fantasy. In 2014, a Channel 4 investigation found that a prolific Twitter account thought to be that of an ISIS enthusiast in Syria was actually that of a businessman in Bangalore, whose real Facebook account mainly posted about pizza. In another guise, that’s the basement-dwelling, pant-wearing keyboard warrior we’ve all seen online. A figure to be laughed at, right up until he googles how to build a bomb.

To be an extremist, though, is to exist in a state of delusion. Islamic State itself, indeed, was a state of delusion; a pretend world that was never going to last. White supremacists thrive in closed worlds online for the same reason that American ones dream of compounds in the middle of nowhere; because everywhere else ceaselessly proves them wrong. The far right loathes Sadiq Khan not because he’s raising the black flag of Islam over City Hall, but because he’s a daily, breathing reminder of their absurdity in suggesting he might.

Like it or not, the world’s future is diverse. Face it, all you fascists, but by the time you are shooting Jordanian Muslims in a New Zealand city called Christchurch it should be pretty damn evident that you have already lost the fight. You’re scary, and I am not afraid to admit it, but don’t ever think you will stop being ludicrous, too.

THE TIMES