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Hate struck again Friday with a horrific massacre in a pair of New Zealand mosques.
A self-professed, self-radicalized white supremacist and “actual fascist,” reportedly believing he could spark an American civil war, stormed into the houses of worship and began firing indiscriminately.
The attacks left 49 innocent Muslims dead and as many others wounded.
Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, stands accused as the gunman. Adding to the horror, he livestreamed the attack on Facebook, a video that quickly spread to YouTube, where it stayed up for hours.
In a bizarre 16,000-word Facebook manifesto, Tarrant said he deliberately chose famously peaceful New Zealand to show that “no where in the world was safe.”
Not that his twisted rant made much sense: It cited 1930s British fascist Oswald Mosely, yet also expressed admiration for the “political and social values” of the People’s Republic of China.
His other inspirations were darker still: As NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller said, this act of terror was clearly “borrowing from the ISIS playbook.”
It also showed ISIS’ knack for exploiting social media in hopes of spreading and publicizing the attacker’s venom. (When will Big Tech face its responsibilities here?)
It’s a disheartening fact of the modern world that one mass killer seems to inspire another, even when they claim to be on opposite extremes.
This is what all terrorists share: Their true enemy, and target, is civilization itself.



