When Brenton Tarrant, a radicalised Australian white supremacist, committed the Christchurch terror attack in 2019, many claimed that the history of racism in Australian politics and media was partly to blame for his unspeakable crime. To be sure, expressions of racism and divisive political rhetoric influence the ways in which minorities are perceived and treated by majority populations. But there has also been a pervasive infiltration of extremist ideology and narratives into mainstream public and political discourse — channelled primarily through social media. Australia has played a disproportionate role in amplifying this extremist content.
Internationally, research into right-wing extremist ideologies have tended to be less concerned with the way victim groups are targeted and framed, and more focused on the “outcome” that extremists are seeking. But I argue this frame is too narrow and may help explain why commonly targeted communities continue to be dehumanised at scale, not least on social media.
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The sheer inhumanity expressed in the Christchurch massacre brought into sharp focus the connection between right-wing extremist ideology and the construction of Muslims and Islam as a threat to Western society. Prior to the murders in Christchurch, the wider population seems to have been unaware that this connection already permeated right-wing discourse online, or that anti-Islam/Muslim conspiracy theories also inspired Anders Behring Breivik, the terrorist who murdered seventy-seven people in 2011, the majority of whom were teenage Norwegians. Breivik reproduced a significant amount of these conspiracy theories in his online manifesto, and has since been identified by scholars as a white supremacist.
According to Benjamin Lee, there now exist multiple transnational ideological currents underpinning anti-Muslim activism and extremism. In a 2015 study, Lee focused on five websites which propound and promote the myth of “Eurabia” — an anti-Islam conspiracy theory adopted by Breivik. Lee tracks and maps the way that content from these five “seed sites” was disseminated and reproduced across different nodes in both social and traditional media. He identifies and summarises the themes of these “seed sites”:
- 1.Islam is portrayed as a totalitarian political force, and Muslims as a homogenised mass with hostile intent — “essentialising” Islam and Muslims as a religion that has been backward and barbaric since the time of the Prophet.
- 2.A pall of suspicion is cast over all Muslims, including “moderates,” due to the covert concept of taqiyya (lying to preserve their faith) — thus, all Western Muslims are involved in the same plot to eventually destroy or take over West.
- 3.Muslims in the West are depicted as being engaged in a process of “Islamisation” — examples of which are the increasing imposition of sharī‘a law and establishment of “no-go zones” for non-Muslims.
- 4.Muslims are presented as posing an existential threat (as Lee writes, “[h]aving established an understanding of ‘us’ based on shared cultural values, and a ‘them’ based on a homogenized and hostile Muslim world bent on conquering the West from within”) due to: weak and incompetent political elites who allow the West to be “run over”; progressives or multiculturalists (sometimes referred to as “cultural Marxists”) who act as enablers of the Muslim takeover; and the perceived failure of political and cultural leadership to prevent Islamisation as constituting a “sinister plot” on the part of political elites.
How these themes connect to extremist violence can be analysed using the framework of Jonathan Leader Maynard and Susan Benesch, who empirically identify a number of techniques commonly used in dangerous speech. Accordingly, the themes identified by Lee exhibit: “dehumanisation” (through the portrayal of Muslims as inherently violent, barbaric, and deviant), “guilt attribution” (alleging a whole community is deserving of punishment for the crimes of a few), and “threat construction” (in portraying Muslims as a frightening existential threat to the “in-group” of Western civilisation).
Maynard and Benesch highlight the role of dehumanising discourse in:
almost all major mass atrocities, prominently including those of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Japanese occupation of China. Often, outgroup members (or victims-to-be) are even compared with toxins, microbes, or cancer, suggesting that they are polluting, despoiling, or debilitating the entire in-group.
The qualitative analysis of content from of Lee’s seed sites that researchers working for the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN) conducted earlier this year identified “dehumanisation” as key effect, even though efforts were clearly made on these sites to avoid blatantly dehumanising language in order to circumvent platform moderation. Instead, factually skewed stories of heinous, deviant, and offensive activity, as well as the actions of overseas terror groups, are editorialised within an overarching narrative about demographic invasion and moral subversion by “Islam” — a term used as a proxy for Muslims.
But the clear intent to dehumanise Muslims becomes apparent in the comment threads, where users respond with classically dehumanising insults to convey their fury and disgust, graduating to expressions of wanting to expunge or harm Muslim people. This is the radicalising power of dehumanisation. Once a subject is dehumanised, the next step is to be able to commit or condone violence against them. That violence becomes proper, necessary, even righteous.
It is no accident this dehumanisation found expression in the manifesto left by the Christchurch terrorist, Brenton Tarrant. In his analysis of Tarrant’s “manifesto,” Peter Lentini explains:
Tarrant’s solution to the crisis [posed by Muslim “invasion”] — indeed one on which he felt compelled to enact — was to annihilate his enemies (read Muslim migrants). This included targeting non-combatants. In one point, he indicates that [immigrants] constitute a much greater threat to the future of Western societies than terrorists and combatants. Thus, he argues that it is also necessary to kill children to ensure that the enemy line will not continue. In this respect, Tarrant’s attack resembled Breivik’s, who carried out his massacre at a Norwegian Labour Party Youth Camp. Tarrant indicated that, when trying to remove a nest of snakes, the young ones had to be eradicated. Regrettably, children were among those whom he shot and killed.
It is concerning, then, that many of the post-Christchurch responses have focused on “violent and extremist content” rather than deal with the ideological ecosystem that feeds this extremism.
At least two of the seed sites investigated by Benjamin Lee continue to be very active. Our analysis of one of these seed sites — conducted five years after Lee’s original study — shows how substantially amplified its content and reach has been by social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which allow extreme ideologies to reach hundreds of thousands more users than the site would on its own.
Our analysis has also shown that the United States and Australia lead in the number of active Facebook pages and groups dedicated to referring this dehumanising content. Our nations’ roles in the so-called “war on terror” and the media coverage associated with it, could explain why Australia and the United States are disproportionately represented. Media headlines conflating Islam with terror, opinion pieces arguing that Islam is largely to blame for underlying societal and global ills, and the lack of humanity afforded to the victims of terrorism and war (many of whom are themselves Muslim), are all examples of the extent to which the media produces content that is dangerously inciteful to violence and counterproductive to social cohesion. It may have also lowered community resilience to this radicalising content.
Unpublished research completed in 2018 by Dr Mario Peucker, Dr Debra Smith, and Dr Muhammad Iqbal at Victoria University, prior to the Christchurch massacre, also pointed to anti-Islam groups as a dominant gateway to right-wing extremism and the prevalence of very similar narratives on Facebook. This phenomenon not only endangers Australian Muslims by drawing more potential supporters into extremist forums, because of the inextricable connections that run between democracy, social cohesion, and security, the heightened risk of escalating tensions presents a danger to Australians more generally.
And so it is troubling that the political parties who ran in the 2019 federal election with an anti-Islam platform frequently regurgitated many of these same conspiratorial narratives: from their repeated misrepresentation that “radical Islam is Islam,” to their constant calls to ban mosques, ban any Islamic property developments, ban Muslims from entering Parliament, ban the burqa, and ban halal certification, to proposals to introduce a national profiling program for all Muslim children aged 10-14 years.
Senator Fraser Anning went so far as to claim that “the real cause” of the Christchurch massacre was “an immigration program that allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.” In line with the first theme identified by Benjamin Lee, Anning essentialised all Muslims as a monolithic hostile mass, claiming that “they are usually the perpetrators,” calling Islam “the religious equivalent of fascism,” a “savage belief,” and a “violent ideology.” During the 2019 election, Anning authorised posters stating “Islam is a major threat to our way of life including the so-called moderates” — in effect, claiming that all Muslims are involved in covert plot to take over and subjugate the West.
The Christchurch massacre was, undeniably, an atrocity — but it did not come out of nowhere. The seeds of Brenton Tarrant’s vile actions have been planted for decades by bad actors intent on fomenting hatred and violence against Muslims. Governments and tech companies must move against these actors, recognising that their project of dehumanisation, threat construction, and guilt attribution aimed at Muslims as a whole, is an integral part of the ideological eco-system that enables white supremacy and ethno-nationalism. Platforms must immediately combat the sharing of malicious third-party links and increase their monitoring to demote and remove pages, groups and accounts engaged in this project.
The Australian government must also consider the fitness of existing criminal and anti-discrimination laws, as well as of proposed instruments like the future Online Safety Act and a voluntary Misinformation Code. In the current Countering Violent Extremism policy, responding to online dehumanisation is barely a footnote. For the sake of preserving life and social cohesion, it has to become a central aim.
Rita Jabri-Markwell is a lawyer based with the Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN), a national body working to secure the physical and psychological safety of Australian Muslims through research and policy development. She is leading the organisation’s engagement with the tech industry and researchers, as well as its contributions to law and policy reform in Australia. In conjunction with Birchgrove Legal, AMAN began with an investigation into Facebook’s reporting tool earlier this year.