The mass shooting at the Buffalo supermarket by an alleged white supporter reveals what one expert calls “blind spots” in the way authorities treat white and far-right terrorism.
In an interview with Mercedes Stevenson of The West Block, Queen’s University assistant Amarnath Amarasingham said that researchers studying violent extremism like him are learning from the many records the alleged shooter left behind about how he prepared for the deadly attack.
“I can guarantee you that if it was a young Muslim or a young man of color who walked around a grocery store, took pictures and drew a map of what the inside of the grocery store looked like, it would lead to much more than a security guard.” who waves a finger at him, “Amarasingham said.
“I think some of our blind spots on what white terrorism looks like, what far-right terrorism looks like, need to be reassessed. That is why I think that the Buffalo attack is quite interesting or important for future anti-terrorism.
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Amarasingham, one of Canada’s leading researchers on radicalization and violent extremism, described the recordings left by the attacker, who is now being held by police, as “quite unique”.
These include not only a so-called manifesto outlining the reasons for the supermarket attack and the killing of 13 people, most of them black, but also approximately 700 pages of what Amarassing describes as something like a diary with daily publications in Discord gaming platform.
These publications describe the killing of a cat, the surveillance of the Tops grocery store, which the shooter allegedly attacked later, and his user account was marked by Discord when he tried to upload the manifesto of the far-right extremist behind the deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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U.S. police have described the supermarket attack as “racially motivated” and is now being investigated as a federal hate crime. The Associated Press reported that the alleged shooter had spent some time on websites spreading the conspiracy theory about the “great replacement” or the “white replacement”. It is a baseless conspiracy theory that governments in countries where white people have political and demographic power are deliberately trying to displace white people by introducing non-white immigrants.
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Long since thrown out on the periphery of the Internet, the conspiracy is spreading online and gaining mass attention as far-right figures on cable and social media platforms spread it to their audience.
Amarasingham said the new popularity of the theory comes amid “a stream of this kind of populist anxiety or demographic panic about what increased immigration means.”
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And Canada is not immune, he said, adding that the attack on a mosque in Quebec and the attack on a Muslim family in London, Ont., Were influenced by such rhetoric. One of the prominent figures in the Ottawa blockade earlier this year, Pat King, also published content on similar topics.
“So this idea that a kind of far-right presence doesn’t exist in Canada, I think, is the result of intentional blindness, or at least amnesia,” he said.
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Race substitution theory is part of a spectrum of far-right conspiracies that are causing growing concern among police and national security agencies, prompting them to focus on the threat posed by ideologically motivated violent extremism.
The term, often abbreviated to IMVE, refers to a wide range of anti-immigrant, anti-government, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist extremist ideologies with overlapping and deep roots in white supremacy.
IMVE is a major concern for the Canadian national security authorities.
Global News reported in March that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service spends as much time monitoring domestic ideological extremism as it does the threat of religious terrorist groups such as Daesh and Al Qaeda.
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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