Coup attempts in Germany and the US confirm it:
the key terror threat is the far right
Jonathan
Freedland
The danger of violent jihadism persists, but the
growing menace is from racist extremists – even if some in the UK government
can’t admit it
.jpg)
Fri 9 Dec
2022 18.11 GMT
Perhaps it
was the tweed jacket and cravat. Or maybe the medieval title: Heinrich XIII,
Prince of Reuß. Either way, the man at the head of a suspected plot to
overthrow the German government, exposed in a series of raids on Wednesday, was
easy to dismiss as a joke. The country’s late night TV talkshows went right
ahead, mocking the 71-year-old aristocrat and his deluded dreams, along with
his wardrobe.
A week
earlier, the sartorial derision was aimed at Ye, the rapper formerly known as
Kanye West, his face entirely obscured by a ski mask, praising Hitler and the
Nazis on the set of Infowars as a guest of the bankrupted conspiracy theorist
Alex Jones.
Some of
Ye’s rantings were too much even for Jones’s stomach, prompting an online
chuckle – not least because a few days earlier Ye had dined with Donald Trump,
along with the Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes. What crosses
the line for Jones was apparently just fine for Trump.
But none of
this is a joke. Instead, both events – a disrupted terror plot by armed
would-be “citizens of the Reich” and the legitimising of extreme racism by the
de-facto leader of one of the US’s two governing parties – point to a rising
global threat, one that is too often regarded as either too ridiculous or too
marginal to be menacing. That threat lives almost entirely on the internet, its
regular foot soldiers neither European nobility nor rap superstars but, says
one who monitors it closely, “young, white, anti-immigrant neo-Nazis, networked
in an online subculture that glorifies and generates terror”.
The danger
may incubate on screens, but it doesn’t stay there. That much has been clear
for a while. Recall the massacre of 92 mostly young Norwegians in 2011. Or the
slaughter of 49 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Or the
mass killing at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh six months earlier. Or
the gunning down of 10 Black shoppers and workers in a supermarket in Buffalo
by a white teenagerMay this year.
These
horrors follow a pattern in which the killer seeks not only to murder but to
livestream his butchery, accompanying it with the release of a supposed
manifesto, a long screed identifying all the same enemies: Black people, LGBT
people, Jewish people.
In October,
a Slovakian teenager followed the familiar template when he opened fire on a
gay bar in Bratislava, killing two. Hours before, he had posted a 65-page text
setting out, yet again, the case that there is a worldwide conspiracy to
degenerate and destroy the white race, with racial diversity and gay rights the
conspirators’ chosen weapons. And who might be behind this wickedness? The
document opens: “It’s the Jews. It’s the Jews. It’s the Jews.”
For two
decades after 9/11, any talk of global extremism or a “war on terror” meant
only one thing: confronting violent jihadism. Make no mistake, that threat has
not gone away, even if analysts believe it has receded in the UK in the past
two or three years. But when it comes to international terror, jihadism no
longer has the stage to itself.
That
requires a shift. This week, Australia’s home affairs minister warned that
counter-terror laws would have to change if the country was to tackle the
surging threat of far-right violence. In Germany, after the identification of
some 52 suspected coup plotters, the governing party declared, “Rightwing
terrorism is still the biggest threat to German democracy.”
In Britain,
those operationally involved in fighting this danger have got the message.
Where once MI5 brass were privately liable to dismiss the far right as no more
than a bunch of “football hooligans, louts and drunks”, they now pay them
serious time and attention. A turning point was the murder of Jo Cox in 2016,
and the attack on Finsbury Park mosque the following year.
Police now
describe the extremist right as the fastest growing terror threat in the UK,
with 41% of counter-terrorism arrests in 2021 involving far-right suspects.
Three in four advanced plots disrupted by police involved extremists of the far
right.
This shift
demands a change in policing but also in our thinking. For one thing, while
jihadists dreamed of establishing their own government somewhere – the Islamic
State vision of a new caliphate – those arrested in Germany this week, like the
insurrectionists who stormed Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021, aim to topple
existing governments in the west and install themselves. (And they are
encouraged when Trump calls for the suspension of the US constitution to
restore him to power, as he did this week.)
The content
is different, but so too is the form. Yes, jihadism was always a broad
category, but there was at least an organisational infrastructure that could be
proscribed and targeted: IS even published a magazine out of Raqqa, offering
tips on how best to stab someone. The far right is much looser and entirely
leaderless, radicalising its followers chiefly by means of memes and online
content. Its home comprises platforms such as 4chan or the “Terrorgram” network
of channels on Telegram, where recent mass murderers are venerated – the
killers of Christchurch and Pittsburgh are depicted as “saints”, complete with
haloes – and where footage of their acts of slaughter is presented in the
manner of a first-person shooter game, complete with scores awarded for each
“kill”.
“I’ve been
doing this for 30 years and I’ve never seen stuff like this,” Nick Lowles, who
runs the anti-racist campaign group Hope Not Hate, tells me. In these forums
they egg each other on, sinking to ever more nihilistic depths: fantasising about
rape and the sexual abuse of children and more. Those seeing this material are
getting ever younger. The Metropolitan police reports that of the 20 people
under 18 arrested last year for terrorism offences, all but one were linked to
the ideology of the extreme right. The youngest arrested was 13.
Action is
possible, starting with the companies who provide web-support services for the
likes of 4chan. “They’re the security guards on the door while the terrorists
are inside,” says Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, which monitors and
combats antisemitism.
But that
takes political will. And while the counter-terrorism agencies seem to be in
the right place, the same cannot be said of their political masters. Lowles
detects an “ideological backlash” in the Home Office and in Michael Gove’s
levelling-up department, “actively pushing for a change in strategy away from
the far right”.
Note the
leaked extracts of William Shawcross’s review into the Prevent
counter-terrorism programme, complaining that there’s been too much focus on
the racist right and not enough on jihadism. It seems a corner of the political
right was jolted when last year, for the first time, the number of referrals to
Prevent relating to the far right outstripped those for Islamist extremism.
You can see
why some are more comfortable chasing Muslim extremists than extreme haters of
Muslims (and of every other minority), perhaps fearing a definition that might
encompass anti-Muslim rhetoric found on the mainstream right. But ideology
cannot be allowed to intrude here, not when the danger is so grave. Our
protectors have to fight those bent on wreaking deadly havoc wherever they
appear – and whoever they are.
Jonathan
Freedland is a Guardian columnist
.jpg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário