Nothing Found

The modern wave of international right-wing terrorism began in the US and Western Europe in the 1970s, and in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Right-wing terrorists in the West aim to replace democratic governments with nationalist or fascist regimes, and in Eastern Europe with authoritarian regimes they can control from behind the scenes.

Although extreme right-wing groups often produce ‘manifestos’, they generally lack a specific ideology and embrace a range of ideologies and attitudes, including neo-Nazism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, homophobia, neo-fascism and Islamophobia.

They espouse the view that the state must ‘rid itself of the foreign elements that undermine it from within’ so that the state can ‘provide for its rightful, natural citizens’. Characteristics of the extreme-right are the encouragement of opportunistic attacks on ethnic minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, leftists and the LGBTI community.

Australia hasn’t been isolated from extreme-right violence. In 2005, during the Cronulla riots, it didn’t take long for right-wing extremists to encourage attacks against mainly Lebanese Muslim young men from the western suburbs of Sydney. They were enthusiastically supported by drunken bogans from Sydney’s southern beachside suburbs. At one stage around 5,000 people were involved.

The NSW government moved quickly to contain the situation, passing laws to give police new powers, including the ability to seize cars and mobile phones for up to seven days, close licensed premises, and prohibit alcohol from being brought into lock-down zones. A new offence of ‘assault during a public disorder’ was introduced and both ‘rioting’ and ‘affray’ had their minimum sentences increased.

The right-wing Party for Freedom planned to mark the 10th anniversary of the Cronulla riots with a rally on 12 December 2015. It was refused permission in the NSW Supreme Court ‘on the grounds it would stir up racial hatred’. In a separate case, the Federal Court ruled that no other person or groups could commemorate the anniversary.

In some countries, including Australia, far-right activists have attracted unspoken support from members of the mainstream population concerned about issues like city overcrowding, stress on the environment, competition for unskilled jobs, and the perceived threat of people from imported ‘alien’ cultures that don’t integrate with the rest of the population.

Right-wing politicians like Pauline Hanson and Fraser Anning have tapped into these popular concerns for political purposes, but in the process have probably generated recruits for extremist organisations.

Australian antipathy towards immigrants is not a new phenomenon—it seems to have followed each wave of immigration to the country. There doesn’t seem to have been a survey on Australian attitudes on immigration sources for some while, but in 2005 Monash University research showed significant public antipathy towards immigrants from the Middle East and Asia.

In 2018, the Lowy Institute reported a sharp spike in anti-immigration sentiment. For the first time in Lowy polling, a majority of Australians (54%) said the ‘total number of migrants coming to Australia each year’ was too high. That result appears to be related more to the volume of migrants than the source of migrants, although Lowy commented that ‘Australians also appear to be questioning the impact of immigration on the national identity.’

Andrew Markus from Monash University observed that far-right political groups have been ‘a constant feature on the fringes of Australian politics’.

In the 1950s and 1960s, they included the League of Rights and minuscule neo-Nazi parties. In the 1980s, there was National Action, the Australian Nationalist Movement, Australians Against Further Immigration and the Citizens Electoral Council.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of groups that combine online organisation with intimidating street activity: Reclaim Australia, Rise Up Australia, the Australian Defence League, the United Patriots Front, True Blue Crew and Antipodean Resistance.

In Australia, groups associated with the fringes of the right also include ‘pop-up’ white-power gangs, far-right hooligans and people who just want to engage in street fights.

While hostility between—and within—far-right groups is typical, they are united by nationalism, racism, violent opposition to ‘alien’ immigration and disdain for democracy. In Australia, they often take their lead from overseas groups with similar views, prominent among them being the UK’s National Action and Combat 18.

National Action is a neo-Nazi organisation formed in 2013. The group is secretive, and members are constrained from talking openly about the organisation. Since December 2016, it has been a proscribed organisation in the UK and is the first far-right group to be proscribed since the World War II. Since then it has gone underground and adopted a cellular structure to make it harder to penetrate.

Combat 18 is another neo-Nazi terrorist organisation, with ties to similar movements in the US. Combat 18 members have been suspected of being involved in deaths of immigrants, non-whites, and members suspected of being informants.

From a security intelligence perspective, a problem posed by extreme right-wing groups in Australia is that they are difficult to penetrate and aware of covert monitoring technologies and, from a law enforcement perspective, much of what they do is not illegal.

The major security concern is the hard-to-detect lone-actor who acts on his right-wing extremist views—as did Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Brenton Tarrant, who allegedly killed 50 in Christchurch last week.

After the deaths of Osama bin Laden and several other leaders in 2011 and 2012, followed by the rise of Islamic State, many considered al-Qaeda ‘a spent force’. But in an important brief, (with an expanded version for the Lowy Institute), leading terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman argues that Ayman al-Zawahiri has used the past seven years to rebuild al-Qaeda. So while counterterrorism specialists have celebrated the rolling up of Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’, al-Qaeda’s resurgence shows that much work remains to be done.

Zawahiri cut his teeth in Egypt’s jihadi culture—he was arrested at 15, joined the Muslim Brotherhood and later led Egyptian Islamic Jihad—but he’s no charismatic leader. Following the death of Osama bin Laden and the rise of the Islamic State, Zawahiri opted to focus on three key objectives.

Survival: In 2011, al-Qaeda faced irrelevancy. It lacked an operational space and existed at the mercy of the Afghan Taliban. That may explain why Zawahiri swore allegiance to Mullah Mansour, Mullah Omar’s successor, in 2015. When Mansour was killed in a US drone attack and Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada became the new leader of the Taliban, Zawahiri pledged allegiance to him. That allowed Zawahiri to remain hidden somewhere along the Afghan–Pakistan border.

Reorientation: In the 1990s and 2000s, as al-Qaeda was asserting itself on the global stage as the premier Salafi–jihadi terrorist group, its ideology and action inspired tremendous bloodletting, especially among Muslims. By the 2010s, Zawahiri recognised the limited value of that approach and reoriented the organisation away from mass casualty-terrorism, especially against Muslims.

To highlight how attuned Zawahiri is to shifting perceptions, he clearly noted that by the late 2000s, pollsters were pointing out that public opinion, especially in Muslim-majority countries, had shifted against suicide bombing. In Lebanon, for example, 74% of the population thought that such attacks could be justified in 2002; by 2007, that support had fallen to only 34%. At that time, WorldPublicOpinion.org noted that large majorities in Egypt (88%), Indonesia (65%) and Morocco (66%) opposed attacks on civilians.

Zawahiri’s al-Qaeda even chastised Islamic State, accusing it of ‘deviation and misguidance’ and saying that the group ‘exceeded the limits of extremism’. That has meant that the prospect of another al-Qaeda–inspired 9/11 has decreased, as Zawahiri appreciates that such an attack is likely to harm his cause more than to help it.

Rebuilding: Zawahiri has had to deal with an organisation that had been decimated. It had lost leaders, key ideologues, strategic thinkers and fighters. Al-Qaeda was also facing a major challenge from Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who publicly rejected Zawahiri’s order to keep al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra affiliate separate from Islamic State.

Because Zawahiri couldn’t compel Islamic State’s compliance, he opted to engage in a franchising program. A key aspect of the rebuilding was using secure communications to spread al-Qaeda’s message. Secure communications have also allowed Zawahiri to reconstitute al-Qaeda’s Shura Majlis (advisory councils). This allows al-Qaeda to adopt a ‘glocalist’ strategy that links local grievances to its globalist campaign.

Zawahiri’s careful three-prong strategy has enabled al-Qaeda to knit together ‘a global movement of more than two dozen franchises’ through which it now commands around 20,000 men in Syria, 4,000 in Yemen, 7,000 in Somalia and 3,000 in Indonesia. These are all strategically important locations from which al-Qaeda can and will seek to advance its brand.

Interestingly Zawahiri appears to have adapted the ideas of his arch-enemy, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who argued that after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, it was time for the Arab Afghans (Arabs who had made the hijrah (migration) to Afghanistan) to shift their attention to the near enemy—‘apostate’ Muslim regimes and Israel. Zawahiri had argued that the mujahedeen should focus on the far enemy (the US and the West in general), as it was Washington that was keeping the Arab leaders in power.

Zawahiri’s current strategy seems to indicate that al-Qaeda is moving away from its initial focus, the far enemy, and focussing instead on the near enemy, specifically Arab countries with fragile governments. There are many such governments across the Muslim and Arab World, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb.

‘So where are you,’ Zawahiri asks his followers in his latest message. ‘Where is your Islamic zeal? Where is your eagerness? Where is your settlement of your duties for the inheritance of your fathers?’

Hoffman has provided a powerful reminder that we can’t bask in the defeat of Islamic State. We must reorient our attention to al-Qaeda, which remains committed to freeing Muslim lands, ending the suffering of Muslims at the hands of the infidels and restoring the Muslim umma (nation) to its old glory.

In recognising that al-Qaeda remains a potent force, counterterrorism policymakers face several challenges, such as how to disrupt its operations through activities such as limiting its use of encrypted messaging, which terrorists seem to increasingly rely on, without undermining basic rights.

An additional challenge is addressing low-intensity conflicts, civil wars and flagrant abuses such as those ones inflicted on the Rohingya, the Cham and others, which feeds the Salafi–jihadi narrative of the West’s moral relativism. There’s evidence that both Islamic State and al-Qaeda are using the Rohingya as a rallying cry.

Clearly, the demise of the caliphate has been a huge boost to the counterterrorism world, but Hoffman’s briefs are a timely reminder that we ignore al-Qaeda at our peril.

Media and terror are inextricably linked. The media is expected to report and analyse terror as a matter of international priority. Yet striking the right balance between informing the public without unnecessarily stoking fear or giving disproportionate publicity and attention to a terrorist organisation is a complex task. To make matters even more complicated, since the emergence of new media—social media in particular—‘traditional’ media has had to adapt to and compete in an accelerated news cycle of reporting, commentary and analysis.

Digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have changed the flow of information in a way that enables unverified user-generated content (UGC) to appear alongside media outlets’ fact-checked content. Unlike traditional media, UGC isn’t subject to strict editorial, ethical or practical guidelines—and the speed and scale at which this information is created and disseminated is hard to contain. This presents challenges to news reporting on terror, such as the spread of misinformation and ‘fake news’.

While there are many advantages in removing hierarchical barriers to news distribution, there are also drawbacks. Falsehoods, hate speech and conspiracy theories penetrate vast areas of unpoliced online spaces. These narratives have real socio-political and security implications, particularly in creating or promoting community tension and public disorder, which can play out offline as well as online.

Research by the UK-based think tank Demos found spikes in the use of ‘anti-Islamic’ language on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks. This happened after Charlottesville when Russian propagandists employed hundreds of Twitter bots to peddle far-right extremist content. The dissemination of these provocations increases the risk of ‘reciprocal radicalisation’, where extremist views on different ends of the spectrum fuel each other’s conspiracies and hatred. Opposing ideologies rooted in mutual grievances about the ‘other’ are reinforced in an escalating cycle.

For example, the far-right attack on Muslim worshippers at London’s Finsbury Park mosque last year allegedly aimed to avenge the sexual abuse of white girls by Muslim men. On the other side, avenging the suffering of Sunni Muslims at the hands of imperial white Crusaders is often cited as the justification for jihadist extremism. Another example: Britain First’s Islamophobic tweets that were shared by Donald Trump reinforced existing grievances of the far right, while simultaneously strengthening growing anxiety among Muslims.

Communicating accurate information and minimising the spread of rumours and conspiracy theories is vital to supporting the public during a time of crisis. News media outlets and social media platforms should play complementary roles in this process: news media must try to ensure that correct information is disseminated, and social media platforms should be more vigilant in preventing bots and propagandists from flooding online platforms with misinformation.

The role of independent, nuanced and responsible journalism has never been more important—and yet there’s a growing distrust of mainstream media’s reporting on terror. This stems from Trumpian rhetoric and accusations of fake news, as well as from public perceptions of media bias when reporting on attacks.

For example, there’s a perception that the ‘terrorist’ label is reserved for Muslims, while white Caucasian criminals are reported to be suffering from mental health issues or called murderers. The fatal attack on British Labour MP Jo Cox wasn’t reported as an act of terrorism, but as a ‘murder’. The perpetrator of the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017 that killed at least 58 people was not labelled a terrorist. In contrast, the Westminster Bridge attack in March 2017, perpetrated by an equally disturbed criminal with tenuous links to Islamic State was clearly treated as a ‘terrorist’ attack and was ‘squeezed for every conceivable ounce of sensation and emotion’ by the media. Research has highlighted that terror attacks carried out by Muslims (in Western countries) receive more than five times as much media coverage as attacks carried out by non-Muslims, which has further damaged trust in media reporting on terror.

Media outlets should remain grounded in facts in the aftermath of an attack, rather than speculating about the perpetrator and their potential terrorist links. A disproportionate response to terror only cultivates further chaos and fear.

Violent extremists across the spectrum have capitalised on the spread of misinformation that creates knowledge vacuums and pushes myths and rumours into mainstream society. Media outlets have a responsibility to dispel such myths and rumours, to minimise harm—both physical and rhetorical—when reporting on terror.

In this age of social media, the spread of misinformation, or ‘fake news’, has made the job of journalists much harder. There are examples of sincere efforts to maintain journalistic integrity, but there are many challenges to overcome, especially related to UGC on social media.

So what is the solution? Calling for greater government control or a ‘content watchdog’ to police online platforms isn’t necessarily the right approach. It echoes precisely the ‘Orwellian’ sentiments that Silicon Valley tech companies are pushing back against. Rather, as a first step, it should be in their own interest for online platforms to work with news media outlets to develop appropriate ethical, editorial and practical guidelines, and then to regularly adapt and revise those guidelines.

When terrorism struck Belgium last month after hitting France twice in 2015, the attacks bound our two countries in the same unspeakable experience of blind horror. While Europe was the immediate target for these assaults, terrorism remains a scourge that concerns the entire world.

Other continents have been targeted in recent months. Tunisia, Mali and Ivory Coast in Africa; Jakarta and Lahore in Asia.

Terrorism has declared war not only on Europe but on universal values. It’s a terror that seeks to destroy what we are and how we live. The horrifying events in Paris and Brussels hit people out of the blue as they sat on café terraces, took flights or trains, travelled to work.

A total of 147 people lost their lives in the Paris attacks in 2015. Around 30 people have been linked to the terrorist attacks to date, 11 of whom are deceased and 12 of whom are incarcerated.

Terrorism is a global threat which requires a global response, most importantly in terms of information-sharing.

It’s a long-term fight that we must continue with weapons of the law: legislatives provisions that are efficient and respectful of fundamental rights and freedoms. Our weapons also include determination, lucidity and seamless self-control, always maintaining a true awareness of the seriousness and the extent of the threat we face.

It’s a fight which requires constant vigilance. That’s the reason why the French Government has taken new measures to strengthen border control mechanisms and ensure the presence of police, gendarmerie and military at every airport and railway station.

Fundamental action must be carried out to fight the threat at its root: in our societies through de-radicalisation programs that neuter violent extremism.

Cooperation and information exchange as we rail against terrorism is essential.

In this spirit, Australia’s Minister for Justice and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Counter-Terrorism, the Hon. Michael Keenan, visited Paris last month to discuss efforts to counter Islamic extremism.

Combatting terrorism must be based on a common effort to take the money out of crime. Money is the sinew of war—terrorists require finances to buy weapons, vehicles and caches. The international fight against terrorist financing is the fundamental bastion for peace and security in the world. It’s a long-term action which has been ramped up since January 2015.

France has placed a number of its specialised agencies at the frontline of this effort by adopting the 4th European Regulation against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing on 5 June 2015. France has also sought to place the fight against terrorist financing on the agenda of the G20 and also that of the European Council of Finance Ministers.

While the Paris and Brussels attacks challenge the world, they’re especially jarring for Europeans.

The attacks, perpetrated in some cases by our own citizens, challenge our identities as individual nations, our unity, cohesion and solidarity as French and Belgian citizens and as members of the European Union.

The attacks attempted to threaten the identity and unity of the EU’s 28 Member States. Europe’s border security is urgently being addressed. We know Daesh has stolen large numbers of passports in Syria and is using those otherwise legitimate travel documents to move its people into Europe.

France has pushed to implement a European Passenger Name Record protocol, and earlier this month it was finally approved by the European Parliament.

The security of Europe is the fundamental prerequisite for both our free society and our economic growth and development.

France won’t bow to the threat of terror as it seeks to take away the life of our nation, and the contribution we make to the world. Euro 2016, the Tour de France 2016 and our other major sporting and cultural events will go on.

We’re free people in a free and dynamic society and economy. We’re not scared.

France is facing the terrorist threat head-on by both resisting it and by every day demonstrating that our identity, our society and our culture is the better alternative. And we won’t forget those around the world who are also targeted by the terrible torment of terrorism.