Extreme Right Wing groups have reframed a long-standing racialized and misogynistic narrative—the perceived threat of cultural annihilation and the elimination of the ethno-cultural identities of European people—in light of COVID-19. Anti-migrant, antisemitic, anti-Asian, racist and xenophobic tropes have been at the forefront of COVID-19 related conspiracies and another that claims 'infected' migrants were 'imported' to decimate white populations.[1]
51. This concern was echoed by the Australian intelligence community which has publicly expressed concern that the XRW are exploiting the pandemic to increase their influence. The Australian broadcaster ABC News reported in June 2020 that an assessment delivered by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had stated that Right-Wing Extremists now accounted for around a third of all its domestic investigations, and that Right-Wing Extremist rhetoric was potentially reaching a new audience who were increasingly socially isolated and spending more time online. ABC quoted an ASIO threat assessment sent to security professionals, which warned:
COVID-19 restrictions are being exploited by Extreme Right-Wing narratives that paint the state as oppressive, and globalisation and democracy as flawed and failing . . . We assess the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced an extreme right-wing belief in the inevitability of societal collapse and a "race war".[2]
52. On 9 December 2020, the Australian Minister for Home Affairs subsequently announced that he had requested the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) to undertake an Inquiry into matters relating to extremist movements and radicalism in Australia. He asked that the Inquiry should focus in particular on the motivations, objectives and capacity for violence of extremist groups, including, but not limited to, Islamist and Far Right-Wing Extremist groups, and how these have changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Inquiry would also address, inter alia, the role and influence of radical and extremist groups which currently fall short of the legislative threshold for proscription, as well as the role of social media.[3] The Inquiry is still ongoing at the time of writing this Report.
53. The potential of the pandemic to galvanise the XRW was a focus of the external experts who gave evidence to this Inquiry. Jacob Davey from the ISD observed:
If I were to characterise Far Right extremism, particularly for our online monitoring in the UK over the past year, we would say that it's particularly grown. This is correlated quite clearly with the Covid 19 pandemic. So in March of this year we saw a surge of Far Right activity across social media platforms with membership of groups increasing by as much as 100 per cent, discussion of key topics increasingly similarly . . . On the more sort of extreme and egregious side, we saw sort of a number of accelerationist communities discussing how Covid represented an opportunity for attacks
- ↑ UN Security Council, 'Member States Concerned by the Growing and Increasingly Transnational Threat of Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism', Counter Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), Trends Alert, July 2020.
- ↑ ABC, 'ASIO briefing warns that the far-right is exploiting coronavirus to recruit new members', 11 June 2020.
- ↑ Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Current Inquiries, Inquiry into extremist movements and radicalism in Australia, 9 December 2020, www.aph.gov/au/parliamentary/business/committees/joint/intelligence_and_security
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