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\u003cp\u003eIn January, \u003cem\u003eSurvival\u003c/em\u003e published my article ‘Right-wing Extremism and the Terrorist Threat’. Among other things, the piece noted that right-wing extremism was becoming increasingly transnational. Sadly, the tragic mass murder of at least 50 mosque-goers in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March confirmed this conclusion.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe act was devastating but perhaps not surprising. Analysts in both the US and Europe have for some time recognised the potential for nationalist far-right groups to forge strong transnational links. Such groups are using the internet, and in particular social media, both liberally and inventively – as jihadists have – to encourage attacks across a wide geographical range. Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch attack, reportedly drew inspiration from the American far right and, like American right-wing terrorists Robert Bowers and Cesar Sayoc, he was part of an international online network of extremists, having posted a racist manifesto. He was savvy enough about online propaganda and information technology to film the attack with a helmet camera and disseminate the video in real time via social media; some presumably sympathetic recipients passing the footage along obscured its digital identifiers to thwart censorship mechanisms.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight-wing extremist groups lack substantial state sponsorship and seem unlikely to engender a transnational powerhouse comparable to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (ISIS). But, as al-Qaeda was forced to decentralise after 9/11, it increasingly encouraged self-initiated, homegrown terrorism far afield; ISIS has broadly followed this pattern. Accordingly, jihadism has become more localised and central leadership less relevant to its operational effectiveness. Given that right-wing extremism is dispersed and localised itself, its adherents might, ironically, find jihadism\u0027s evolution reassuring and emboldening.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe article follows in its entirety.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eI\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight-wing extremism has been a major threat in the United States for at least a decade. According to the FBI, hate crimes, the majority of which target a person’s race or ethnicity, rose 17% in 2017, while anti-Semitic crimes in particular rose 37%.\u003csup\u003e1\u003c/sup\u003e The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism indicates that far-right or white-supremacist movements were responsible for 387 extremist-related fatalities, or 71%, in the US between 2008 and 2017, compared with 100 fatalities, or 26%, for Islamist extremists. This data contravenes US President Donald Trump’s claim that most extremists committing terrorist acts in the US are ‘foreign-born’.\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e Given the excited reaction of right-wing extremists to presidential rhetoric, and the angry political polarisation that appears to be both a cause and an effect of the Trump presidency, it is logical to expect right-wing extremism in the United States to rise further.\u003csup\u003e3\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWere it not for 9/11, right-wing terrorism might have become a central US-government concern years ago. In the 1990s, terrorism was at a crossroads. The ethno-nationalist type in Europe was on the wane, as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque nationalist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) wound down their armed campaigns and moved towards predominantly non-violent political approaches. Far-left ideological outfits such as the Red Brigades in Italy and Greece’s 17 November Group were enervated. In the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, in itself constituted a dramatic spike in right-wing terrorism. But, though he did enlist several accomplices, the FBI assessed McVeigh to be essentially a lone-wolf operator. The bureau increased surveillance and infiltration of right-wing militias that had already been spurred by the Aryan Nations’ violent campaigns in the 1980s, and by the end of the decade considered the phenomenon to be contained.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDuring this period, while incidents such as the Ruby Ridge and Waco stand-offs, together with the growth of the internet, were quietly galvanising right-wing extremists in the United States, transnational jihadist terrorism steadily intensified. The failed 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, al-Qaeda’s 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, and its attack on the USS \u003cem class=\u0022italicText\u0022\u003eCole\u003c/em\u003e in Yemen are just a few examples. The 9/11 attacks were and have remained aberrationally catastrophic, but they stimulated concerns about jihadism in the United States and Europe – sustained by the 2004 attacks in Madrid, the 2005 attacks in London and many others – that almost completely crowded out residual worries about right-wing terrorism. In 2005, the US Department of Homeland Security had only one analyst working on non-Islamist terrorist threats.\u003csup\u003e4\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePresent US political tensions are conducive to right-wing extremism. Racial and anti-immigrant anxieties, stoked beforehand by Barack Obama’s two-term presidency, appear to have motivated a significant minority of American voters and given rise to a broader white nationalism. According to economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, right after Obama was elected in 2008, one in 100 Google searches for ‘Obama’ also included the initials ‘KKK’ or the word ‘nigger’.\u003csup\u003e5\u003c/sup\u003e Stormfront.org, America’s most popular online hate site for white nationalists, founded in 1995 by a former Ku Klux Klan leader, saw by far its largest single increase in membership on 5 November 2008 – the day after Obama was elected.\u003csup\u003e6\u003c/sup\u003e Trump used xenophobic and racially charged rhetoric in his election campaign; right-wing violence has surged since he became president.\u003csup\u003e7\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMeanwhile, in the first two years of his presidency, Trump has falsely claimed, among other things, that Latin American immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, and that large numbers of jihadists are infiltrating the US–Mexico border. He has appeared tolerant of white supremacism, drawing moral equivalence between those protesting Confederate memorials and ‘Unite the Right’ demonstrators – including self-identified neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists and white nationalists, as well as various militias – who killed one of the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.\u003csup\u003e8\u003c/sup\u003e He has derided black professional football players for protesting police violence against African Americans by kneeling during the national anthem, and routinely insults African American journalists and politicians. Indeed, in advance of his campaign to become president, his main political platform was the promotion of ‘birtherism’ – the allegation that Obama was born in Africa and not the United States – a conspiracy fantasy that can only be understood in racial terms.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the run-up to the recent midterm elections, Trump characterised a group of several thousand economic migrants making their way to the Mexican border as an ‘invasion’ of the United States. He deployed thousands of active-service US troops to the border to repel them, arguably in violation of the federal Posse Comitatus Act, in a pre-election stunt to rally his voting base. In late October, Cesar Sayoc, a fanatical Trump supporter, sent 16 pipe bombs to the president’s critics, and Robert Bowers, an anti-immigration extremist, shot dead 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Although he was apparently sour on Trump, casting him as a loathed ‘globalist’, Bowers had also disparaged online a Jewish charity for helping Latin American immigrants enter the United States.\u003csup\u003e9\u003c/sup\u003e The attack was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in US history.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eII\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs recently reported in the \u003cem class=\u0022italicText\u0022\u003eNew York Times\u003c/em\u003e, a decade ago, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis warned of a rise in right-wing extremism. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s secretary of homeland security, recognised the threat and the potential synergies between far-right movements and a rising number of unhappy US veterans with weapons training, and the need to ramp up domestic counter-terrorism. Until Eric Holder, the attorney general under Obama, reconvened the Department of Justice’s Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee in 2014, it had not met for 13 years and had no budget or staff. But congressional Republicans objected to the Obama administration’s nascent domestic counter-terrorism mobilisation, casting it as a partisan effort to demonise those whose views diverged from the liberal mainstream that Obama represented.\u003csup\u003e10\u003c/sup\u003e At the same time, continuing high-profile jihadist-terrorist operations such as the Boston Marathon attacks tended to obscure concerns about right-wing terrorism.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Justice Department concedes that it has a ‘blind spot’ as to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, and that both state and local authorities are lax about reporting them.\u003csup\u003e11\u003c/sup\u003e The FBI has about 1,000 open cases of domestic terrorism – about the same size as its file on the Islamic State (ISIS). In sum, American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies remain unprepared to address right-wing terrorism. So far, operatives have seemed amateurish and incompetent, and more inclined towards loose bluster and hooliganism than focused action. But military and paramilitary connections suggest a potentially dangerous trajectory, and it is a hallmark of terrorism that relatively few committed individuals are required to make a serious impact.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEurope is hardly immune to right-wing extremism. The Axis powers were defeated, but Nazi and fascist ideology was never fully extinguished. Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’ between 1969 and 1982 began not with an attack by the Red Brigades, the dominant player of the period, but rather with the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan executed by Ordine Nuovo, a neo-fascist group, which killed 17 people and injured 88. An offshoot of the group perpetrated the era’s most lethal attack, the 1980 bombing at the Bologna railroad station, in which 85 people died and 200 were hurt.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSince the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland have developed more pronounced right-wing attitudes, some committing racist and anti-immigrant attacks. Over the past 20 years, several former British National Party (BNP) members have committed terrorist attacks or been convicted of terrorism-related charges in the United Kingdom. Far-right extremist Thomas Mair brutally murdered Member of Parliament Jo Cox in 2016, and since then UK authorities have interdicted several right-wing terrorist plots. The xenophobic National Socialist Underground operated in Germany from 2000 to at least 2007, killing ten. In 2014, a 30-member racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim group known as the ‘Oldschool Society’ arose in Munich, accumulating weapons and planning to attack a refugee shelter before the group’s leaders were arrested in 2017 and the operation aborted.\u003csup\u003e12\u003c/sup\u003e There has been right-wing terrorist activity in France and Sweden as well, and its precursors are arising in Poland.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn 22 July 2011, Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed a total of 77 people and injured more than 300 in two attacks: a van bomb in Oslo followed by a far more lethal gun attack on a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on Utøya Island, 38 kilometres northwest of Oslo. The operation demonstrated just how much carnage one competent and determined terrorist can wreak on an unsuspecting population. Islamist terrorist threats may still be the most salient ones in Europe, and Breivik himself was assessed to be mentally disturbed (though legally sane) and to have acted alone despite his claims of networked support. But his militantly anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant agenda appeared to underline a right-wing, neo-fascist disposition that would become an influential political trend in Europe, due partly to the accelerating influx of mainly Muslim refugees on account of persistent turmoil in the Middle East.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is a transatlantic dimension to countering right-wing terrorism, as there is to thwarting Islamist terrorism. Although the right-wing variety is more localised, and is unlikely to engender a transnational powerhouse similar to al-Qaeda or ISIS, the dynamics of each phenomenon appear to be broadly convergent. Before and immediately after 9/11, al-Qaeda contemplated Europe as a kind of staging area for attacks on the United States. But as the group was forced to decentralise, it increasingly regarded Europe as a target in its own right, and encouraged self-initiated, homegrown terrorism on both sides of the ocean; ISIS has broadly followed this pattern. Thus, jihadism has become more localised, and more like right-wing terrorism.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eIII\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTransatlantic cooperation on jihadist terrorism became robust after 9/11, and has since evolved and adjusted quite nimbly to changes in threat perceptions and patterns. While the UK’s exit from the European Union may initially compromise Europe’s transnational counter-terrorism capabilities, the negative effects can probably be mitigated.\u003csup\u003e13\u003c/sup\u003e Accordingly, there are no major institutional, bureaucratic or operational reasons that transatlantic partnerships and modes of cooperation, painstakingly developed since 9/11 to deal with jihadist terrorism, could not be readily applied to structurally comparable right-wing terrorism. The resurgence and, to varying degrees, political mainstreaming of xenophobic nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, however, could constitute formidable political impediments.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrump’s rhetoric, in demonising certain groups by publicly and persistently alleging that they are working against the common good, has encouraged and emboldened American right-wing extremists to commit violent acts. Sociologists call violent behaviour of this provenance ‘scripted violence’.\u003csup\u003e14\u003c/sup\u003e So far, perhaps the most flagrant example is Sayoc’s unsuccessful pipe-bomb operation. A number of similarly inspired extremists, of course, have actually murdered or hurt people.\u003csup\u003e15\u003c/sup\u003e The president has been doubling down on securing his far-right base via populist appeals to a mainly white and often rural demographic. At a political rally in Indiana last November, he both exaggerated the threat posed by left-wing activists and belittled their strength, calling on presumptively more muscular Trump supporters – bikers, the police, the military – to confront them and surreptitiously giving the ‘Q’ sign associated with white supremacy.\u003csup\u003e16\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFurthermore, former US Department of Homeland Security officials have described a pattern of neglect of right-wing extremism in the Trump administration, decried Trump’s use of racially loaded terms and perceived a president who is ‘actively supporting and amplifying’ far-right hatred.\u003csup\u003e17\u003c/sup\u003e And by overtly dismissing the US intelligence community’s assessments of Russian election-meddling and Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the president has demonstrated his willingness to cast government agencies as the nefarious elements of a ‘deep state’, and to ignore and even impede them when their direction or findings do not align with his political agenda.\u003csup\u003e18\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Europe, the British government has warned that right-wing extremism is on the rise.\u003csup\u003e19\u003c/sup\u003e Synergistic relationships have arisen between right-wing groups and elements of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in Germany.\u003csup\u003e20\u003c/sup\u003e Violent xenophobic offences there rose from 316 in 2014 to 612 in 2015, and the trend is expected to continue.\u003csup\u003e21\u003c/sup\u003e Last June, French authorities rolled up Operational Forces Action, a far-right, anti-Muslim group headed by a former policeman, for conspiring to commit acts of terrorism and on weapons charges.\u003csup\u003e22\u003c/sup\u003e Yet counter-terrorism priorities in Europe have paralleled those in the United States, heavily privileging Islamist threats over right-wing ones.\u003csup\u003e23\u003c/sup\u003e Populist leaders tolerant of right-wing, extra-legal violence have also emerged in Southeast Asia in the form of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and in South America in that of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Like Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin is inclined towards ethnic nationalism and xenophobia.\u003csup\u003e24\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe evolution of jihadist terrorism reflects the power of the internet to build transnational networks of disparate local groups, Russia’s hacking of the US electoral process and the ability of determined state actors (and potentially non-state actors) to manipulate such groups. Scholars in both the US and Europe have for some time recognised the potential for nationalist far-right groups, empowered by the internet, to forge strong transnational links.\u003csup\u003e25\u003c/sup\u003e One study notes that transnational right-wing, anti-immigrant propaganda is considerably more effective than opposed left-wing efforts.\u003csup\u003e26\u003c/sup\u003e National leaders who appear even tacitly sympathetic with the far right reinforce its determination and validate its extremism.\u003csup\u003e27\u003c/sup\u003e They too are proliferating. It would appear that the second new global terrorism challenge in 20 years is now plausible.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_fTO81LceUCqUPRLwY77zw"))});
\u003cp\u003eThe far-right terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch on 15 March, in which 50 people were killed, was the deadliest mass murder in New Zealand\u0027s history. Jonathan Stevenson examines the transnational threat posed by far-right extremists, indicating that Western counter-terrorism policies must confront their activities as well as those of jihadist groups.\u003c/p\u003e
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