The shooting attack on a synagogue in
Halle, Germany, by a suspected white supremacist – an attack that
was livestreamed and otherwise reminiscent of the Christchurch and
Poway shootings – is further evidence that white supremacists in
Europe and the U.S. are sharing violent tactics as well as hateful
ideologies.
“This attack on a synagogue in
Germany is part of a continuum of extremist violence that knows no
borders,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “While we are
still learning about the motives of the shooter in Halle, the attack
needs to be understood within the context of the growing
internationalization of white supremacy and online radicalization.
Halle, Christchurch, Poway and Pittsburgh did not happen in a vacuum,
and these attacks share important elements – not only in the
ideology that inspired them but also in the methods and language of
the perpetrators.”
The globalization of violent white
supremacy has been accelerated by social networking sites like
Twitter, Gab, Minds, Telegram and message boards like 8chan, 4chan
and Reddit.
Analogous to online activity
around the U.S. 2016 presidential election, a network of German
far-right new and old activists tried to copy the strategies of
"memetic warfare" by organizing on Discord servers, a chat
and messaging platform, fighting "SJWs" (a derogatory term
for progressive "social justice warriors") and promoting
the far-right party Alternative for Germany using memes.
Global access to white supremacist
ideology, and its easy dissemination across borders via various
social media platforms, means many of the ideas promoted by the
white supremacist movement, curtailing of non-white immigration,
attacks on globalization and the accompanying conspiracies about
elitist globalists, are increasingly part of mainstream political
and social rhetoric.
The German terrorist organization
National Socialist Underground (NSU) followed the concept of Beam’s
leaderless resistance. Authorities believe that the NSU was inspired
by the race war depicted in The Turner Diaries. The NSU
killed 10 people in Germany (nine of them immigrants) and carried
out bombings, robberies and attempted murders between 2000 and 2007.