Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism Director Oren Segal said the Oct. 9 shooting at a synagogue in Halle, Germany, followed a similar template to white supremacist-led shootings over the past year.
Segal made his comments based on the alleged shooter’s manifesto and his livestreaming of the shootings.
Authorites identified the man as 27-year-old Stephen Balliet, attempted to enter the synagogue during Yom Kippur services but failed because the synagogue’s metal door wouldn’t open. He shot and killed a woman outside the synagogue and a man at a nearby kebab shop. He was arrested later the same day.
While it’s unclear when he posted the manifesto reportedly linked to him, the manifesto did state he wanted “to kill as many anti-whites as possible.
“If I fail and die but kill a single Jew, it was worth it,” the manifesto reads. “After all, if every White Man kills just one, we win.”
In the live stream on Amazon’s Twitch, the shooter blames “Jews for feminism, declining birth rates, and mass immigration.” He also denies the existence of Holocaust, according to Time magazine.
Segal told the Journal that while the manifesto and video don’t specifically list the October 2018 Pittsburgh shooting, New Zealand mosque shootings in March, the Chabad of Poway shooting in April, or the August El Paso shooting as inspirations, the manifesto’s rhetoric and the shooter’s tactics followed the same template.
“When he talks about his opposition to immigration, feminism and the Jews, there is a through line in that ideology with what we saw in El Paso, in Poway and Pittsburgh and Christchurch,” Segal said. He added that the shooter’s “tactic of filming it and leaving a manifesto” was also part of the template. “It’s becoming all too common,” Segal said.
He added the alleged shooter’s worldview was likely partially formed from “the online ecosystem of extremism. People are able to engage in hateful tropes and activity and find hateful communities and sometimes it has these deadly results.”
Twitch took down the video on Oct. 9 but it is still being circulated on various online platforms, including on an app called Telegram. According to The Hill, white supremacists have been flocking to Telegram in recent months since it allows users to “post relatively unfiltered content,” but also provides “a private encrypted messaging service where people can communicate without fear of surveillance,” The Hill notes.
Segal said that Telegram has had to deal with extremists “for years, and it used to be that al-Qaeda and ISIS were the early adopters and now white supremacists are there in full force as well.” He added, “We would want Telegram to not allow what are essentially snuff movies to be accessed on their platform.”
Telegram did not responded to the Journal’s request for comment.
Segal praised Facebook, Twitter and Google for “creating a sort of counterterrorism consortium” to ensure videos of shootings don’t spread on their respective platforms. However, he said too many tech platforms haven’t done what is necessary to combat the rise of the extremism.
“It starts with a willingness to try to even deal with the problem,” Segal said, “and it seems like there are still a lot of platforms that are not willing to even deal with it.”
