On March 15 of this year 2019, the world woke up to a great tragedy: the massacre of two mosques in New Zealand, committed by an Australian right-wing extremist named Brenton Tarrant. He killed 49 people and injured 20 others during Friday prayers. The strange thing is that the main terrorist who carried out the attack was able to post a “live broadcast” video of him carrying out the attack on the social networking site “Facebook,” which he later deleted.
Who is Tarrant?
Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who committed the massacre, identified himself in a 70-page memoir he wrote before his crime, as an ordinary “white” man, born in Australia to a low-income working family, whose parents were of Scottish, Irish, and English origins. Tarrant was uneducated and, as he described it, barely passed every level of study. He did not go to university because “there was nothing worth learning there.” Although he is Australian, he insists on describing himself as European.
Planning the attack
The terrorist revealed in his memoirs that the terrorist act occurred as a result of previous planning and premeditation and that it was based on an extremist ideological position and racist vision that called for eliminating foreigners with violence and weapons, stopping waves of immigration, and attacking and terrorizing Muslims anywhere in Europe. In the view of the terrorist Tarrant, Europe is not a geographical spot in Eurasia. Rather, it includes the homes of Europeans that they colonized from the New World in Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas.
The goal of the attack
The goal of the attack, as he described it, was “to remind the invaders that our land will never be theirs, and that our homelands are only ours. As long as there is a white man alive, they will never be able to control our country and will never take the place of our people, so that I can take revenge on the invaders and on the hundreds of thousands of victims who died on European soil throughout history.” The terrorist added that his work also aims to take revenge for the enslavement of millions of Europeans who were enslaved by Muslims, and to take revenge on the thousands of European victims who lost their lives in attacks. Terrorist, and in order to directly reduce the rates of immigration to European lands by intimidating the invaders and effectively getting rid of them.”
Erdogan and Merkel
Tarrant describes himself as a “kebab remover,” a racist expression common among neo-Nazis and far-right supporters in Europe, meaning “ethnic cleansing,” in particular getting rid of Turks and Muslims, whom he describes in that document as “invaders occupying our land,” and that Turkey’s continued presence in NATO poses a grave danger to the alliance’s countries and the disintegration and loss of Europe. In his memoirs, Tarrant singled out the Turks. In a paragraph entitled “To the Turks,” he said, addressing them: “You can live in peace in your land, and no harm will come to you if you remain on the eastern side of the Bosphorus. As for you living on European land, in any spot west of the Bosphorus, we will eliminate you and expel you from our land like cockroaches. We are coming to Constantinople, and we will destroy every mosque and lighthouse in the city. We will liberate Hagia Sophia from those minarets, and Constantinople will become Christian again. Flee to your country before it is too late.”
Muslim positions
The perpetrator of the terrorist attack did not fail to point out that some Muslims hold important positions in European capitals, focusing on mentioning Sadiq Khan, the current mayor of London, the “Pakistani Muslim invader,” who called for getting rid of him so that this would be the beginning of the “White Baath” again. “Kill Angela Merkel, kill Erdogan, kill Sadiq Khan,” these are the most prominent public figures that Tarrant calls for getting rid of. He described them as “enemies,” a word he repeated in his statement 46 times.
Video games
In his statement, Tarrant is not shy about talking about the impact of video games and movies on his thinking about violence and extremism. He says that his ethnic nationalist feeling was strengthened thanks to the game “Spyro: Year of the Dragon,” and that he benefited from the game “Fortnite” to practice killing and not caring about the corpses of enemies.
Reproduction rates
At the beginning of his racist statement, Tarrant said he was concerned about “birth rates.” The numbers must change. “Even if we deport all the non-Europeans from our land tomorrow, we the European people are threatened with extinction,” he explained, with numbers and studies and citing Wikipedia and websites, how birth rates among whites must rise to ensure continuity after getting rid of the non-Europeans and closing the borders to an “invasion” to which the European peoples have never been exposed before, and which, according to him, may lead to a complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people. Therefore, Tarrant insists in his long statement that he is “intolerant and intolerant,” asserting that the idea of tolerance and compassion for others are “characteristics of a dying nation.”
