Before the mosque shootings, Christchurch, with a a whiter demographic than the country's north, was the center of New Zealand's small but persistent white supremacist movement.
In this Saturday, March 16, 2019, file photo, flowers lay at a memorial near the Masjid Al Noor mosque for victims in last week's shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. The leafy New Zealand city where a self-proclaimed racist fatally shot 50 people at mosques during Friday prayers is known for its picturesque meandering river and English heritage. For decades, the southern city of Christchurch also has been the center of the country's small but persistent white supremacist movement.
The attack has upended New Zealand’s image as one of the world’s safest and most tolerant countries. It also has highlighted apparent failings by security and intelligence services to view white supremacists as a real threat or to take seriously warnings from Muslim groups of a rise in Islamophobic and xenophobic incidents in recent years.
In a video posted on Facebook on Saturday, he said he complained in late 2017 to an arms officer — a local police officer who monitors people’s gun licenses — about the disturbing behavior of members of a rifle club in the southern city of Dunedin that Tarrant reportedly joined. A business owner in Christchurch has also attracted media attention since the massacre because his company’s vans were emblazoned with neo-Nazi references including the “black sun” symbol that Tarrant’s guns were covered with. The same images, which are used as the company’s branding, appear on its website.
“There’s a reluctance to see equivalence between the risks presented by right-wing extremist groups and radical Islamic and leftist groups,” he said. But he quickly found more than 70 extreme-right groups, many of them in Christchurch. He attributes three murders in New Zealand since 1989 to white supremacists, including two that were ideologically motivated — a South Korean tourist in 2003 and a homeless gay man in 1999.
The country does not have an official hate crimes database, making it difficult to measure the trend, but some incidents have been widely reported, causing outrage but sparking no real official measures.
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