Whether in Manchester or Hawke’s Bay, extremism threatens all of us – Editorial

Members of the Jewish community comfort each other near to the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Crumpsall, Manchester, where two people died in a terror attack this week. Photo / Getty Images

THE FACTS

• Two violent extremism cases emerged this week: a deadly attack in Manchester, United Kingdom and a foiled plot in Hawke’s Bay.
• Police stopped a planned mass stabbing in Hawke’s Bay, finding a bayonet and extremist manifesto.
• In Manchester, an attacker ploughed a car into a crowd outside a synagogue before going on a stabbing spree. Two people died and three were wounded in the terror attack.

This week, Herald readers have seen two more shocking examples of violent extremism.

One was in Manchester. A heinous and hateful attack on the British Jewish community, which resulted in the deaths of two people as they came together for the holy day Yom Kippur.

The other was far closer to home, Hawke’s Bay.

After a tip-off from the FBI, police here were able to stop a young man in Hawke’s Bay from carrying out a planned mass stabbing attack.

It is obvious to every moderate Kiwi that extremism, often politically and religiously motivated, is rising globally. There are too many examples to list here, even just from this year alone.

We are, of course, familiar with our own recent examples of violent extremism – in Christchurch in 2019 and Auckland’s New Lynn in 2021.

When the Hawke’s Bay man’s home was raided by police, officers found a bayonet and a diary outlining his manifesto.

“His plans were to target either a mall or a mosque and kill men. He intended this to be a suicide mission,” police said in a summary of facts, reported yesterday by the Weekend Herald.

The young man, according to a note in his diary, also described himself as a “soldier of Christ, his country, people and religion” and stated in the diary he was radicalised at the age of 19. He also admitted to being part of a sadistic online exploitation group known as 764.

When police looked at his devices, they found a PlayStation logged in to a YouTube channel that featured a video containing anti-Islam narratives.

When investigators seized the man’s electronics, court documents showed, they found thousands of images and videos of child sex abuse material. They also found five video clips taken from the livestream of the Christchurch terror attack.

In the internet age, our geographic isolation is no longer the great protector it once was from worst of the world’s ideas.

It is naive to think the often emotive, hyperbolic and hateful rhetoric that has become synonymous with social media has not influenced the rise in these types of incidents.

Even in our mainstream politics, the language MPs use has grown more extreme. Some parliamentarians now seemingly treat the House of Representatives as an opportunity for a buzzword-heavy, viral TikTok video rather than a place for constructive debate.

After the attack in the UK, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who has a Jewish wife and children, told the Jewish community he would “do everything in my power to guarantee you the security that you deserve”.

Anti-semitism is not new. It has been a scourge on humanity for centuries and Jewish communities have been targeted repeatedly throughout history.

As Starmer expressed in his speech, “it is a hatred that is rising once again”.

Our small Kiwi Jewish community has faced increased threats, particularly since the war in Gaza began nearly two years ago, and in the coming week will be talking about what added security they might need to consider after the events in Manchester.

This newspaper doesn’t profess to know the solutions to the problem, but what is clear is that whether it’s in Manchester or Hawke’s Bay, extremism threatens us all.