Hussein Shobokshi

Terror has struck New Zealand, one of the quietest and most peaceful parts of the world. The victims were Muslims praying in mosques, and the accused is a right-wing extremist. This is not the first act of terror targeting Muslims, nor is it the first carried out by right-wing extremists. The time has come for the world to seriously confront the threat of right-wing extremism and not to consider it to be merely an “attack by individuals and anomalous groups.”

The extremism that we are witnessing today has roots in the past. It was associated with a primarily Christian-Protestant religious movement that produced extremist groups such as the Klan and the Third Reich, which produced Adolf Hitler and Nazism. After the disappearance of Nazism, armed militias appeared in the West calling for the freedom of the white man and the protection of his rights which they claimed were threatened by Jews, Muslims and others.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma killing 168 people and declared himself a member of a right-wing extremist group. In 2011, when Anders Breivik killed 77 people in a horrific massacre in Norway, he attributed his actions to the extreme fundamentalist right. In 2015, Dylan Roof massacred nine church worshipers in South Carolina and in 2018 Robert Bowers killed 11 Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, and both were attributed to right-wing extremism. Apart from these terrorist attacks, there were also shootings of worshipers in a mosque in Quebec, Canada and more recently attacks on a mosque in Manchester, England.

The growing right-wing extremist movement in Australia, America, Britain, Italy, France, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Sweden, and the literature on social media all confirm that the West must immediately deal with radical right-wing ideology as much as with traditional jihadist ideology and the Jewish Defense League.

The first group produced people, such as Al-Zawahiri, Hassan Nasrallah and Al-Baghdadi, and groups such as Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. The second group, the Jewish Defense League, included the criminal Meir Kahane and the terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who killed worshipers in Hebron. Today the world must take a united stand against terrorism, which has no religion and is fueled by hatred.

Muslims also have to work to purge their societies of racist ideas that create blatant discrimination in the idea of the equality of lineage and have led to the assassination of worshipers in mosques in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain carried out by Daesh, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah terrorists along with terrorist attacks on churches in the Middle East.

The legal community must take judicial, human rights and institutional action to make Islamophobia a legal offense just as Jews have made anti-Semitism a crime. The world must work together to prevent the recurrence of the New Zealand terror attack. If terrorism has arrived in New Zealand, then there is no place on earth safe from its reach.