Far-right terrorism in the West, especially in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania, has become a critically rising trend in global terrorist activities. As reported by the Global Terrorism Index 2019 (GTI), terrorism crimes committed by such trend have increased by a further 320% over the past five years. The GTI report noted that the far-right attacks “were not taken as seriously as should be by the security and intelligence services in the West.”
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) in the United States of America revealed that “far-right extremists committed more than 217 killings between 1990 and 2018. Excluding the 9/11 Attacks in the USA in 2001, the far-right extremists outperform Islamist extremists in their terrorist activity in the USA. From September 12, 2011 until 2014, far-right extremists carried out 81 terrorist attacks, killing 131 people, while Islamist extremists carried out 28 incidents, killing 51 people. Such notoriously escalating terrorism is fueled by the hate groups for which the USA is the main base, and from which it is spread in most of the western countries.
As the US Census Bureau published its forecasts that the white will not be the majority by 2044, the fury of far-right extremists boiled up and mounted in 2018 inflamed by such deadly emotions, animosity, hostility and enmity bubbled up to a higher level, and the total number of hate groups infamously rose to 1020 in 2018, at about 7% from 2017, as revealed by the statistics released by the Year in Hate and Extremism: Rage Against Change. The annual report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed that hate crimes reached 7775 criminal incidents in 2017, in comparison with 6121 incidents in 2016.
In the 2018 midterm congressional elections, white extremists released their wrath and indignation and carried out three far-right terrorist attacks, killing 15 people, as well as a foiled attack attempt. The violence was so shocking that opinion polls conducted by CNN concluded that three-quarters of the electorate voiced that race was an important and effective factor in their vote.
Among the most notorious new far-right supremacist white groups in the United States is the Rise Above Movement (RAM), whose members declare that they are fighting a modern world corrupted by the destructive cultural influences” of liberals, Jews, Muslims and non-white immigrants.” The movement announced its establishment in March of last year, in a gathering in support of US President Donald Trump near Huntington Beach in California, and the RAM has propensity to use violence. The RAM members promote the neo-Nazi doctrine on various social media. Some of them have criminal records for the use of violence. Some of its members participated in several marches such as “A March Against the Law” in San Bernardino, California in mid-June 2017, organized by the anti-Muslim hate group known as “ACT for America” founded by Brigitte Tudor, known as Brigitte Gabriel in 2007, with 750 thousand members and more than 1000 branches. “ACT for America” is the largest anti-Muslim group in the United States of America.
The National Front was founded in August 2017 in Virginia by Thomas Rousseau, and at the time he was 18 years old! The National Front took over the old website of Vanguard America, which was previously known as www.bloodandsoil.org, a slogan inspired by a Nazi poet.
Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves
Empowered by a structural matrix, Identity Evropa successfully burgeoned, with the number of affiliated branches increasing from one branch in 2016 to 15 branches in 2017, then to 38 branches in 2018. Identity Evropa, rebranded as American Identity Movement in March 2019, is at the forefront of recruiting white youth and inculcating indoctrination of white supremacist superiority, making the headquarters in the universities the springboard for its activities. The number of Identity Dixie branches established in 2017 was seven. Atomwaffen Division with its German name and violent Nazi practices, whose members have been accused of being associated with five notorious and heinous killings since May 2017, has grown from one branch in 2017 to 27 branches in 2018.
The Internet Is Under a Cloud of Suspicion
Hate groups instrumentalize social media to spread their ideologies and recruit their followers. For instance, Cesar Sayoc, born 1962, a fervent supporter of President Trump who rattled the country when he mailed 14 homemade pipe bombs to President Trump’s critics, used the internet to broadcast hate speeches against Muslim minorities, illegal immigrants and Democrats.
Although the American authorities managed to arrest him five days after he sent the booby-trapped parcels, charging him with several accusations, the most notorious and hideous of which was the threat of former presidents and possession of illegal explosives, such charges did not include a charge of misusing social media, and it took only five days after the arrest of Caesar for Twitter to close his account.
In most cases, technology companies do not take hate crimes seriously; this is what is agreed upon by most of the research studies addressing far-right terrorism. Most websites of far-right extremists and groups, especially unofficial ones, are spread on communication platforms camouflaged under freedom of speech. Such companies wait until physical violence happens against the victims then take a meaningful action. This was the case after Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans in 2015, in the wake of the riots that claimed the life one person and nearly 20 others were injured in Virginia in 2017 in the largest protest of white supremacists in one generation as aroused by far-right groups across the Facebook. More notoriously, most far-right extremist nationalist groups are no longer traditional groups under one leadership; rather, such groups formed organized networks that rely mainly on advertising via websites.
With the rapid growth of the number of users of social media platforms, hate groups from the far-right have managed to cross geographical boundaries and spread their propaganda to millions of users. While technology companies have closed many official accounts of some groups, we see that they have left the webpages of unofficial groups under leading figures in groups, the accounts of which are blocked! For instance, Facebook rejected the Proud Boys website that targets immigrants and Muslims, and is a gathering point for those who later join white supremacist groups. Although the group carried out a violent protest in Portland in June 2018, which experienced acts of riot, the Facebook administration released a statement, explaining that the group did not violate standards, and allowed it to remain active on the website, ignoring videos that documented the group’s abusive battering.
In August 2018, Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, announced that his company would not ban Alex Jones’s account, one of the most notorious far-right leaders, despite other major companies, such as Facebook, YouTube and Apple, taking action against Jones. YouTube faced problems in 2019 after a CNN investigation revealed that the company was displaying ads for more than 300 major brands on channels that promote extremism.
Avaaz in New York, which fights hate on websites with offices and employees in 40 countries, has revealed more than 500 suspicious groups operating throughout France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Poland and Spain, and the webpages that Facebook has closed have received more than 500 million views.
Cross-Border Hate
The US has an enormous ability to influence the countries of the world, because of its political, economic and ideological influence. The emergence of a political, cultural or ideological trend can echo throughout the world; therefore, the impact of American hate groups and white supremacist far-right has spread across Europe and Japan. Far-right peoples fueled by anti-immigrant enthusiasm has spread around the world. In the same vein, research conducted by the British newspaper, The Guardian, in association with more than 30 political pundits, has shown that one in every four Europeans is now voting for populist parties.
American far-right extremists are helping their allies around the world with international influence networks. For instance, the far-right, anti-immigrant Lega party came to power in Italy in March 2018 within the ruling coalition, and is an ally of the World Congress of Families (WCF) headed by American far-right activist Brian Brown. Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega Party, became Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, and opened the doors of the country more broadly to American far-right extremists such as the leader of the far-right media, Steve Bannon. Salvini, far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Moldovan President Igor Dodon worked with the WCF and sent their speeches to be recited at the annual conference of the group that embraces a large number of far-right extremists. The official report of the Observatory for Security against Acts of Discrimination (OSCAD) in Italy revealed that these crimes increased three times between 2017 and 2018, from 92 to 360 crimes.
In Japan, members of a far-right extremist group called Zaitokukai took to the streets of the Japanese capital Tokyo in 2007, shouting: “Kill good and bad Koreans.” This group has now formed a political party whose leader Makoto Sakurai visited the United States of America in 2018. He met the leaders of the white movements, and upon his return to Japan the party marketed its relations with American white nationalists. Unlike previous groups, the Zaitokukai group is very similar to European far-right groups; i.e., that they target ethnic minorities with violent attacks.
Figures in the annual report on the protection of the democratic constitution in Germany, compiled by the intelligence services to monitor anti-constitutional activities, show that there were 24,100 far-right extremists in the country in 2018, including approximately 12,700 people who were classified as targets of violence. Far-right violence increased by 71% between 2017 and 2018.
The report by the research and consulting firm IPSOS regarding the amount of unreported hate incidents against Ukrainians, Muslims, and sub-Saharan Africans living in Poland, showed that of 269 crimes, only 19 crimes were reported to the police!
A study published by the New York Times based on the GTI database issued by the START at the University of Maryland revealed that at least one third of the white supremacist extremist killers who carried out nearly 350 extremist terrorist attacks in Europe, North America and Australia between 2011 And 2017 were a source of inspiration for others who committed similar attacks. In the mass shooting incident in Texas in August 2019, the perpetrator, Patrick Crusius, (21), published a statement minutes before he committed the crime explaining that he was inspired by the attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019, whose perpetrator was referred to by Brenton Tarrant, 28, in a statement he posted on the internet to Anders Behring Breivik, a far-right extremist who killed 77 people in Norway on July 22, 2011.
More critically, Behring inspired four other white supremacist extremists, unlike Tarrant, who also praised a Canadian, who opened fire in a mosque in Quebec City in 2017. At least four white supremacist extremist killers made online statements praising Elliot Rodger (22 years old) who shot dead six people while injuring 14 other people near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara, before killing himself in his car on May 23, 2014.
This circle of white supremacist far-right extremists from Norway to the United States, New Zealand and Canada indicates that they are going beyond their national affiliations and see themselves as part of a global network.
“They don’t see themselves as Americans or Canadians ... they may have acted in ways that seemed local, but the line of thinking was always about building an international white movement,” states Heidi Beirich, leader of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which issues periodic hate reports in the United States of America about such extremists. Given these international ties, it is important to review the nature of the threat”. “There is a common framework for far-right terrorism as a type of terrorism that is not a threat,” states Irene Miller, database manager at START.
Wei Kay and Simon Lyndon, who wrote the aforementioned New York Times research study, refer to the challenge facing law enforcement to tackle hate crimes in the West, which is the “myopic view represented by the focus on Islamic extremism as the only driver of international terrorism.”