The New Zealand Attacks Show How White Supremacy Went From a Homegrown Issue to a Global Threat

With an attack on a peaceful nation at the bottom of the world, white supremacists widen their violence.

A few years back, some members of Christchurch’s Linwood mosque suggested installing security cameras outside. Anwar Alisaisy thought they were being ridiculous. Since immigrating to New Zealand from the Kurdish region of Iran in 2002, he’d seen no sign of trouble–not at the hairdresser’s where he worked nor at the mosque directly across the street where he prayed every Friday. “I said, ‘Nobody steals from the mosque. There’s no extremists,’” says Alisaisy. “New Zealand is the safest place.”

The safety of a South Pacific island nation was not the only illusion destroyed that day. Also undone was the popular conception of international terrorism. The Christchurch attacks on two mosques that took at least 50 lives established white supremacy as a threat to Western societies nearly as formidable as terrorism carried out in the name of fundamentalist Islam–and one that, if anything, appears to draw even more oxygen from the Internet.

Long pigeonholed as “homegrown” or “domestic” terrorism, the violence of right-wing extremists emerged in remote New Zealand as a transnational threat. Here, a widely traveled and heavily armed Australian invoked white nationalism in the name of an international campaign against immigration. The magnitude of the attacks would have thrown the spotlight onto rightist extremism even if the killer had not streamed them on Facebook Live.

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