Neo-Nazis go bush: Grampians gathering highlights rise of Australia’s far right
"Far-right terrorism grows in West as global deaths from attacks hit five-year low [...] Of all Western nations, the United States ranked the highest at number 29, with 53 attacks and 39 deaths last year."
By Nick McKenzie and Joel Tozer January 27, 2021 — 11.45pm
The first thing hiker Nathaniel Maxwell noticed as he trudged towards an ancient rock cavern in the Grampians National Park last Saturday was the sound of dozens of voices singing Waltzing Matilda.
It was the Australia Day long weekend and as Mr Maxwell peered into the cave-like formation known as the Cool Chamber in central Victoria, he noticed that many of the men were wearing black T-shirts bearing a distinctive Celtic-style symbol. Others were wearing army fatigues. Some raised their arm in a Nazi salute. As Mr Maxwell walked away, he heard shouts of “white power!”
IMAGE Alleged members of a far-right extremist group seen at Halls Gap and the Grampians.
Other hikers and residents of nearby Halls Gap watched members of the same group marching through the small tourist town on Sunday and Monday. They assembled around the local barbecue area, some shirtless with Nazi tattoos, and sipped coffee outside the Black Panther Cafe, which is staffed and owned by an Indian family.
“We are the Ku Klux Klan,” one of them belligerently told a local, who declined to be named for fear of repercussions. Another heard the group screaming racist slogans as they got drunk on Sunday night while camping illegally at Lake Bellfield, a beautiful body of water at the foot of the Grampians’ granite peaks and ridges.
When Halls Gap resident James passed the group on his mountain bike on Sunday afternoon in town, he was addressed with a Sieg Heil.
“There were 40 white males, many with skinheads, some chanting ‘white power’. That is intimidating for anyone, let alone the young Asian families sharing the barbecue space,” he says.
IMAGE A group member in Halls Gap.
James, who also declined to use his full name for fear of repercussions, was one of several residents who called the local police only to be promptly called back by detectives working with Victoria Police’s Counter Terrorism Command intelligence-gathering division. The division is monitoring right-wing extremist groups in Australia, alongside intelligence agency ASIO, which was also notified about the gathering.
The detective asked James to take photos, which he did using his helmet camera. It sparked a confrontation with two “big burly guys”.
“It was pretty terrifying at that point. I told them I was a tourist and wasn’t filming them,” he says.
Luke Baker also called the police and was contacted by a force intelligence officer. Luke says he feared for the local Indigenous children and teenagers in town.
“They have a right to feel safe,” he says.
IMAGE Tom Sewell of the Lads Society. Credit:YouTube
On Monday, six police officers from Stawell confronted the group, whose members filmed them and later posted their police identification name tags online. On Tuesday morning, two uniformed officers collected surveillance vision from Halls Gap stores.
The decision of Halls Gap locals to call the police and the immediate law enforcement response is indicative of a change in the way authorities, and many in the general public, are viewing extreme right-wing groups.
They were once widely dismissed as little more than disorganised attention-seeking misfits spruiking racist political manifestos, but Australia’s policing and security agencies are increasingly concerned about the capacity of a group adherent or lone wolf feeding off social media posts to commit an act of domestic terrorism.
---- There were 40 white males, many with skinheads, some chanting ‘white power’. That is intimidating for anyone.” Halls Gap resident James ----
The 2019 terror attack by an Australian on a mosque in New Zealand that left 51 dead served as an ideological rallying point for some far-right groups, and a reminder of the potential consequences of underplaying the potential threat.
ASIO recently revealed that 40 per cent of its priority case load involved right-wing extremist groups.
ASIO’s deputy director-general, Heather Cook, told a parliamentary committee last year the COVID-19 pandemic was fuelling a surge in radicalisation because “of the amount of time individuals are spending in isolation, working from home or not in school”.
The Canadian Parliament is now debating a move to declare the far-right group the Proud Boys a terrorism entity. In Melbourne last November, a lone-wolf extremist on the fringe of local far-right groups, Philip Galea, was jailed for 12 years for planning a terrorist attack on Trades Hall, the Socialist Alliance’s Melbourne headquarters, and the Melbourne Anarchist Club.
The mainstay ideology of Australian far-right groups remains viciously racist and incoherent, experts and police say. The danger in reporting on them is that it risks feeding their craving for attention as they trawl for fresh members and resources.
According to one policing intelligence official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak with the media, some of the groups are attempting to “shed their history of being disorganised and fracturing”.
In other words, they are getting organised. In doing so, they potentially pose fresh and difficult policy challenges for state and federal governments, some of which will be canvassed in a recently launched federal parliamentary committee inquiry into far-right extremism.
According to extremist experts, two right-wing groups, the Lads Society and Antipodean Resistance, recently helped form a new Australian extremist outfit, the National Socialist Network, which in turn helped organise the 38 young white men to assemble in the Grampians over the Australia Day weekend.
[Insert: Note: "National Socialist" gives them a Hitler connection while also giving the right wingers ammunition to claim it has left-wing roots.]
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have identified some of the key organisers and participants of the Grampians gathering. Some show the faces of young men who would prefer to stay in the shadows — posing in their own online posts with faces covered.
Alleged members of the group were seen visiting a general store, meeting and camping at Halls Gap.
Mr Sewell has claimed in a social media post that the Grampians event was aimed at providing “content” for a new neo-Nazi group, the European Australian Movement.
He has the hallmarks of some far-right activists in the US, including those who stormed the Capitol three weeks ago, a move which Mr Sewell said in one online message had lessons for Australian extremists.
His posts indicate that he is a racist conspiracy theorist appealing to marginalised, underemployed young Australians on the fringes of society. He is also ex-Australian Army.
Several in his Grampians group may have also been ex-military. Photos show some wearing army-issued boots and packs.
Mr Sewell is shunning mainstream social media sites, which are increasingly seeking to ban extremist content, and instead posting on new online platforms popular with extremists. On one site, he has posted videos of the name tags of the police that approached his group in Halls Gap on Monday, along with audio in which he belligerently challenges a policeman to “Google me, mate”.
Key questions for the parliamentary committee and legislators will be how to regulate these online sites, as well as whether to proscribe far-right groups as terrorist organisations.
Extremist expert Lydia Khalil of the Lowy Institute says that while the proscription debate is important, it faces several legal and political hurdles and should not be viewed as a catch-all solution.
She says early prevention is critical and that government agencies – having “belatedly” expanded their focus from programs targeting would-be jihadists to right-wing extremists – must concentrate on tailoring interventions to far-right groups. But this, too, was no easy task, given such organisations are more diverse than some jihadist groups.
Khalil says anti-terror agencies successfully worked with the Muslim community to deradicalise at-risk youths but there are far fewer levers to target Australians drawn to neo-Nazism, extreme patriotism or other far-right ideologies.
“You are dealing with a small, discrete threat that resides within the larger Anglo majority,” she says. “That makes it much harder for policymakers to not only tailor, but given the polarised political environment, justify these interventions.”
Mr Sewell spews a mix of anti-government and anti-society comments, patriotism and white supremacy in his calls for action. He is also virulently anti-Semitic.
On Wednesday, federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who is Jewish, described the presence of far-right groups at Invasion Day rallies as “frightening for us all”. He also announced federal support for a new Holocaust museum in Canberra.
Groups like those linked to Mr Sewell appear to want to terrify.
“They looked like Nazis from a Hitler movie,” a Halls Gap cafe owner said of her experience confronting the group of men over the weekend. “And they were.”
New Zealand Police Kill ‘Extremist’ Who Stabbed 6 in ISIS-Inspired Attack
Far-right terrorism grows in West as global deaths from attacks hit five-year low [...] The Taliban was the world's deadliest terrorist group in 2019. (Reuters: Evgenia Novozhenina, file photo) P - Mr Killelea said because 96 per cent of all deaths from terrorism occur in war zones, "we need to reduce the number of conflicts around the globe" if we want to maintain this downwards trend.
Noted the Taliban were operating in a war zone during that period.
The man was under surveillance when he injured six people at a West Auckland supermarket on Friday, officials said. The prime minister called it a “terrorist attack.”
Supermarket staff and police officers after a man walked in, grabbed a knife off the shelf and stabbed several people in West Auckland, New Zealand, on Friday. Fiona Goodall/Getty Images Natasha Frost
By Natasha Frost Sept. 3, 2021Updated 8:25 a.m. ET
AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Six people were injured in a knife attack at a supermarket in New Zealand on Friday, an outburst of violence that the prime minister labeled a “terrorist attack” that had been carried out by a “violent extremist” inspired by the Islamic State.
The suspect, a Sri Lankan national, was shot and killed by the police, officials said. He had been under constant, active surveillance at the time of the attack at the market in West Auckland, they said. The suspect was not immediately identified.
“A violent extremist undertook a terrorist attack on innocent New Zealanders in the New Lynn Countdown in Auckland,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at a news conference, referring to the supermarket.
“What happened today was despicable, it was hateful, it was wrong,” she added. “It was carried out by an individual — not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity, but an individual personwho is gripped by ideology that is not supported here by anyone or any community. He alone carries the responsibility for these acts; let that be where the judgment falls.”
It was the first terrorist attack in the country since an Australian gunman, Brenton H. Tarrant, killed 51 people and injured 40 .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/world/asia/new-zealand-attack-death-toll.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer .. at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, the deadliest attack in the country’s history. Mr. Tarrant became the first convicted criminal in New Zealand’s history to be sentenced to life in prison without eligibility for release. The massacres also prompted a significant tightening of New Zealand’s gun laws.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, with Police Commissioner Andrew Coster on Friday, said: “This was a violent attack. It was senseless, and I’m so sorry it happened.” Robert Kitchin/STUFF Media, via Associated Press
Those injured on Friday were taken to hospitals in the Auckland area. Three were in critical condition, and one was in serious condition, said Glenn Metcalfe, an official from St. John’s Ambulance in New Zealand.
Ms. Ardern said the attack took place about 2:40 p.m. Auckland is experiencing a coronavirus outbreak driven by the more transmissible Delta variant, and it has been under a stringent lockdown .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/world/australia/delta-new-zealand-lockdown.html , with only supermarkets and other essential businesses open.
Officials said the assault was carried out with a knife that the suspect had taken from a shelf at the supermarket.
The prime minister said the suspect, who came to New Zealand in 2011, had been known to security forces since 2016. She described him as a lone actor who had been under constant monitoring because of concerns about his ideology.
“This was a violent attack,” she said. “It was senseless, and I’m so sorry it happened.”
Surveillance teams were as close as they could possibly be at the time of the stabbings, said Andrew Coster, New Zealand’s police commissioner.
“The reality is that when you are surveilling someone on a 24/7 basis, it is not possible to be immediately next to them at all times,” Commissioner Coster said. “The staff intervened as quickly as they could, and they prevented further injury in what was a terrifying situation.”
Ms. Ardern added, “We used every element and lever in the law that was available.”
Auckland is experiencing a coronavirus outbreak driven by the more transmissible Delta variant, and it has been under a stringent lockdown, with only supermarkets and other essential businesses open. Alex Burton/New Zealand Herald, via Associated Press
The assault on Friday has revived memories of the Christchurch attack, said Abdur Razzaq Khan, a Muslim community leader with New Zealand’s Federation of Islamic Associations.
“When we first heard about it, it resurrected the trauma that we had two years ago,” he said. “Such inhuman and vile acts don’t belong to any religion. This is a sheer act of hate.”
Since the massacres in Christchurch, the Muslim communities in New Zealand have played an active role in working with the authorities to counter terrorism in the country, he added.
“Extremism, in this particular case or any other case — we have to really root it out from the grass roots in the sense of identifying who these people are and making sure the authorities are aware of them,” he said.
‘It was by design’: Black residents try to come to terms with horror of shooting
"Far-right terrorism grows in West as global deaths from attacks hit five-year low [...]" Of the 39 deaths due to terrorism in the US last year, 34 were attributed to far-right extremists.(Reuters: Go Nakamura) "
‘Who pushed this into his head?’ a Buffalo resident asks, while another asks, ‘What made you drive all this way and hit this?’
People embrace outside the scene of a shooting at a supermarket, in Buffalo, New York, on Sunday. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
Edward Helmore in Buffalo Mon 16 May 2022 01.47 AEST Last modified on Mon 16 May 2022 09.03 AEST
Vigils were held across Buffalo, New York .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/new-york , for the victims of the Tops Friendly shooting Sunday, as Black residents on the city’s East Side mourned and attempted to come to terms with the brief, brutal event that had been visited on the neighborhood hours earlier.
The square where the shooting took place, surrounded by vacant lots that residents said were the result of decades of segregation and systemic racism, is the community’s center, with Tops Friendly functioning as the only grocery store for the immediate area.
Karen Davis-Butler: ‘You’re not born hating Black people.’ Photograph: The Guardian
In striking Tops Friendly, the shooter – an 18-year-old self-confessed white supremacist – was not just hitting at a supermarket, but also a place where locals gathered as a community.
“No weapons formed against me shall prosper,” said Karen Davis-Butler, a nurse and mother of three, who had tears streaming down her face. “It means that’s formed against us God is going to make sure it doesn’t hurt us. But we weren’t covered yesterday and the guy wasn’t covered. And I feel bad for him too.”
Despite the horrors wrought on the neighborhood by the 18-year-old white shooter, Davis-Butler said others were to blame too for filling him with hate.
“He’s only 18. Damn nearly grown. Where did he learn all of this stuff from? Who pushed this into his head? Where was his parents when he was looking at this stuff on the internet? This is like a gang thing with them, but it’s white supremacy and racism, and it’s taught. You’re not born hating Black people.”
Davis-Butler said she was in Family Dollar next to the supermarket when the shooting began. “We saw everybody running, and they told us to stay in the store. It was crazy.”
“This is where Juneteenth started, where our community used to thrive. We have a food desert here, and that’s racism, too. If you go on the other side of the city you see grocery store after grocery store. The racism here is all day everyday.”
Maurice Burse: ‘It was by design, he knew what he was doing and that’s so sad. We’ve got sick people here.’ Photograph: The Guardian
To Maurice Burse, another resident, the journey that the shooter allegedly made from his home in Conklin, near Binghamton 200 miles south, meant that he passed other upstate New York cities, like Rochester and Syracuse. Advertisement
“It was by design, he knew what he was doing and that’s so sad. We’ve got sick people here, and some people would like nothing more than to have a race war and they’ll do anything to try to cause it. People really need to wake up,” Burse said.
The neighborhood, Burse said, had begun to come back from the blight of previous decades. “But to get up in the morning and see all of this …hmmm, it’s bad,” he said waving to the encampments of police and media trucks that had suddenly sprouted in the strong May sun. “Its bad enough what goes on in the area already.”
Twins Shameka and Tasheka Walker were standing on the corner of Riley and Jefferson, surveying the scene.
“He was telling them on livestream what he was going to do. But they probably took it as joke,” said Tasheka. But a joke it was not – the shooter had reportedly posted missives about the great replacement theory, the ideological underpinning of many racist mass shootings, including in Norway and New Zealand.
[ Why Republicans may let Greene and Gosar's latest brushfire burn itself out ""[...]So, Paul Gosar, sitting United States Congressperson, is headed to yet another white nationalist shindig, this one in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Now, outside of the generally undesirable spectacle of a federal legislator CELEBRATING HITLER’S BIRTHDAY, I’m afraid I must insist upon registering a complaint here; a satirist’s job is tough enough without all this unfair competition from reality. P - I probably shouldn’t fixate on Congressman Szell, excuse me, “Gosar,” he’s an outlier, right? We should pay more attention to the GOP’s fine, upstanding moderates! You won’t catch wannabe Senator J.D. Vance baking cupcakes for Adolf; no, he’s far too busy cutting mega-racist campaign ads, and parroting the white nationalist “great replacement” theory…on reflection, probably not the best example. P - Okay, okay, Gosar AND Vance are outliers, let us rather focus on Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who, trailing in the pivotal Racist Idiot primary, announced a moronic “plan” to bus migrants from the border to Washington, D.C. Pretty standard Republican electoral politics here, by which I mean, “juvenile performance art, designed to elicit malicious cackling from the shittiest people alive.”""]
“They’re probably saying we’re having too many Black children but the community here is made up of all different races. The community here is like family, and Tops is always helpful, so how he had the audacity to come here and do this,” said Shameka. “What made you drive all this way and hit this. Why?”
Shameka and Tasheka Walker. ‘He was telling them on livestream what he was going to do. But they probably took it as joke,’ said Tasheka. Photograph: The Guardian
An analysis from the University of Michigan, based on data from the 2010 census, found that the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro area is the sixth most Black-White segregated in the nation. A University of Buffalo report in 2021 found that living conditions for Black residents in Buffalo had improved little and in some cases had declined over the preceding 30 years.
Local activist and chef Brandon Moses-Bonner, 26, said the problem is “everybody who is not addressing racism white supremacy” – an issue he believed had shaped his generation.
“These young guys get radicalized by the internet, by Q-Anon, by white supremacists, who seek out them because they feel like victims. Nobody wants to address the problem because they’re afraid of hurting their feelings because they think saying racism is bad is indoctrination. But it’s not – it’s basic human decency.”
Speaking to Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Buffalo mayor Byron Brown said the community had been experiencing fresh development and vowed that the awful event would not stop that happening.
“People have been hoping and waiting for investment and growth and opportunity. We are beginning to see that in this community, in all parts of the city, and we won’t let that progress stop. We won’t let hateful ideology stop the progress that we are seeing and experiencing in the city of Buffalo.”
Funny with the republican rights "the “Great Replacement" Theory", it's always black that get killed, not the way around,"attempting to replace white Americans with non-white people through immigration, interracial marriage and eventually violence." https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168864665
Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters. [...] By the time Trump unleashed the angry crowd on Congress, Pape, who is 61, had become a leading scholar on the intersection of warfare and politics. He saw an essential similarity between Miloševic and Trump—one that suggested disturbing hypotheses about Trump’s most fervent supporters. Pape, who directs the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, called a staff meeting two days after the Capitol attack. “I talked to my research team and told them we were going to reorient everything we were doing,” he told me. P - Miloševic, Pape said, inspired bloodshed by appealing to fears that Serbs were losing their dominant place to upstart minorities. “What he is arguing” in the 1989 speech “is that Muslims in Kosovo and generally throughout the former Yugoslavia are essentially waging genocide on the Serbs,” Pape said. “And really, he doesn’t use the word replaced. But this is what the modern term would be.” P - Pape was alluding to a theory called the “Great Replacement.” The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” P - Trump borrowed periodically from the rhetorical canon of replacement. His remarks on January 6 were more disciplined than usual for a president who typically spoke in tangents and unfinished thoughts. Pape shared with me an analysis he had made of the text .. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-second-impeachment-trial/card/fJwBp6fJTrqHGmS8Q0jk .. that Trump read from his prompter. P - “Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period,” Trump told the crowd. “You’re the real people. You’re the people that built this nation.” He famously added, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” P - Just like Miloševic, Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence, Pape wrote: “The survival of a way of life is at stake. The fate of the nation is being determined now. Only genuine brave patriots can save the country.” P - Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167072165
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