The teens who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego were latest to cite prior atrocities

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In rambling articles full of harsh criticism against a wide variety of people, young people Attack on San Diego Islamic Center Their killings of three men and themselves this week left little doubt about their pattern of violence.

The most important of these is the gunman who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Researchers who study extremism have long noted that: Echoes of the Christchurch attack Among far-right attackers, the extent of violence is attributed to the document published by the killer regarding his views and actions, and especially his decision to broadcast the massacre live. Among those who apparently modeled the attacks on Christchurch was a shooter who killed 22 people at a Texas Walmart months later.

“Part of what we see in violent extremist communities online is a desire to emulate the attacks that cause the most deaths — it’s a disgusting thing to say, but it’s the truth,” said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism organization. “There’s this obsession, and it’s kind of a gamification of attacks.”

Officials said 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez were taken out by security guards after they raided the Islamic Center on Monday, and the security guard helped protect 140 children by initiating isolation.

Couple killed the guard Emin Abdullahand two other men before taking their own lives in a nearby vehicle.

Articles focused on hatred and grudges

They left behind a 74-page document the same length as the document written by the Christchurch attacker Brenton Tarrant. Like Tarrant’s, he touched on a number of far-right ideological inspirations, including the idea that white people were being replaced by other societies, and offered self-interviews detailing their motivations and goals.

And they called themselves “Sons of Tarrant.”

The articles include hateful rhetoric against Jews, Muslims, and Islam, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, women, and the political left and right. They stated that they were trying to accelerate the collapse of society. Vazquez wrote in his episode that he had “some mental health issues” and was rejected by women.

Brian Levin, founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, noted that white supremacist writings from the 1970s offer a narrative blueprint for decentralized terrorist attacks, an approach that neo-Nazis decades ago sometimes called “propaganda of the deed”; The attack alone was supposed to inspire imitators, even without written explanations.

The Internet made it easier for attackers to spread their writings, allowing a far-right attacker to killed 77 people Levin said writings accompanying such atrocities became more common when a 1,500-page document was published in Norway in 2011. The articles frequently quote past texts advocating white supremacy.

“The strategy of being another chapter in an ongoing chain of extremism shows not only that the movement is larger than it is, but also its resilience, re-emerging with different violent actors, some of whom die in the process,” Levin said.

Contagion of mass violence

The conflict was the last a series of attacks on places of worship. Threats and hate crimes against Muslim and Jewish communities have increased since the start of the war in the Middle East, force to increase security.

Keneally said he had mixed feelings about the media attention given to the attacks: The public needs to understand what happened, but it also risks amplifying the killers’ message and spreading mass violence. He said he has wrestled with questions about whether such attacks are motivated by nihilistic extremism or accelerator, neo-Nazi or white supremacist ideologies.

“We try to put people in a bucket and ask why, but we’re not going to look back and look at how,” Keneally said. “How did these kids end up on this path? What role does social media play in this?”

He said healthy young people, ages 17 and 18, should experience the excitement of graduating from high school or entering young adulthood rather than dealing with extreme ideologies.

Another form of inspiration

While hateful extremists encouraged young people to attack the Islamic center, it also inspired security guard Abdullah in another way: to defend it.

In an interview, his friend Khalid Alexander said that Abdullah was increasingly concerned about negative rhetoric towards Muslims, including from politicians.

“He recognized that there was some sort of direct correlation between the threat to the community he was protecting and the types of hate that were being spread on television with an anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant sentiment,” Alexander said. “And so he was very aware of the dangers of his job. That’s exactly why he chose to do this.”

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Johnson reported from Seattle. Associated Press writers Julie Watson in San Diego and Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed.