The Quebec Mosque Shooting Shows A Double Standard For Far-Right Extremism
27 April 2018
Shooter Alexandre Bissonnette mainlined anti-Islam, anti-refugee media
before killing six Muslim men in 2017.
By Nick Robins-Early
In the month before he shot to death six Muslim men at a Quebec City mosque
last year, Alexandre Bissonnette searched online for Donald Trump 819 times.
He obsessively checked Twitter accounts of alt-right figures and Fox News
pundits.
The day after the attack, 27-year-old Bissonette told a police interrogator he
committed one of Canada's worst mass shootings in decades to stop refugees
from resettling in the country. He believed they'd carry out terror attacks
and kill his family.
Bissonnette is currently awaiting sentence in a Quebec court after pleading
guilty to six counts of first-degree murder last month. Up until the release
of his online history, the full extent of his infatuation with the radical
right wasn't known. Discussions of his motive were often muddied with
characterizations of him as a nerdy and isolated young man.
But experts say the evidence that has emerged during the trial highlights how
in Canada, both society and law enforcement treat Islamist and far-right
attackers fundamentally differently ― a dynamic that downplays the danger of
the far-right.
"If Bissonnette was a jihadist attacking a church and it was found out that he
Googled Anwar al-Awlaki and he Googled ISIS, that would have been the end of
any discussion about motive," said Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior research
fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think
tank.
An Islamist-inspired attack in the U.S. or Canada is often followed by an
instant public demand for information about the assailant's links to terror
groups, the media they viewed and any interactions they had with other
extremists. But that's not always the case when it comes to far-right
attackers such as Bissonnette, whose actions are treated as anomalies that are
the product of mental health issues.
"It's not simply isolated cases of individuals who decide to do random things.
Much like global jihadism, there is a global extreme-right movement that has
its own network of writers and thinkers and activists and groups," Amarasingam
said. "It's about time that we start thinking about these individual cases as
part of that broader network as well, and see how these groups are impacting
these kids."
Despite ample evidence of Bissonnette's political ideology and advance
planning of the attack, prosecutors chose to not try him on terrorism charges.
Media and the court proceedings have also heavily focused on Bissonnette's
mental health, after he claimed to be suicidal and suffering anxiety issues in
his guilty plea.
A court-ordered psychiatric assessment of Bissonnette last month found him fit
to stand trial. A prison social worker testified this week that rather than
showing remorse, Bissonnette told her that he carried out the attack for
"glory" and regretted not killing more people.
"In cases of extreme right-wing violence and terrorism, there is a stronger
tendency in Western countries to look for mental health issues and an isolated
individual as explanation," said Daniel Koehler, director of the German
Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies.
Instead, experts say there should also be a focus on what kind of media and
extremist networks contribute to a far-right terrorist's radicalization.
Chalking up far-right, predominately white, attackers as simply a product of
isolation, bullying and mental health issues ignores important ideological
factors that would be the focus in another kind of attack.
In Bissonnette's case, it's become clear that he feverishly sought out
anti-Islam and anti-refugee viewpoints as well as information on how to commit
acts of mass violence.
Along with Trump and alt-right Twitter accounts, Bissonnette looked up other
mass shootings, including Dylann Roof's 2015 killing of nine black churchgoers
in South Carolina and Montreal's 1985 École Polytechnique massacre, where Marc
Lépine killed 14 women in an anti-feminist attack.
"It's quite clear from his browser history, from all that's been reported,
that he was very much inspired and influenced by the Trump-esque rhetoric,"
said Dr. Barbara Perry, professor in social science and humanities at
University of Ontario Institute of Technology and expert on the far-right.
"We would be making arguments about the role of the internet in radicalization
if we were looking at someone's Islamist-inspired extremism," Perry said.
"That seems to be a little watered down in this particular case."
Activist groups, including refugee support organizations, also said after the
attack that Bissonnette was known online for harassing their members. He often
also posted anti-feminist and anti-Islam views. But for years Bissonnette was
written off as just another internet troll or isolated bigot, rather than
someone who was potentially on a path toward extremism.
"In many respects Bissonnette's views, not his actions obviously, are very in
line with the history of Islamophobia nationally," Perry said.
"It's harder to point the finger at someone like Bissonnette, which is
pointing the finger at ourselves."
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