There are two possible responses to the slaughter of 50 people in two New Zealand mosques last week. We can either make do with Donald Trump’s cursory expression of “warmest sympathy and best wishes” to victims’ families or we can interpret this atrocity as a stark symptom of malignant trends engulfing our world — a wake-up call. The attacker — and let’s call him a terrorist — was part of an online network of far-right figures, not all of whom advocate mass murder, but who have vigorously incited hatred against Jews, Muslims, minorities and immigrants. The internet and media act as an inflammatory feedback loop: Far-right meatheads were once marginalized, deluded individuals, laboriously typing and photocopying their frenzied ideas for sharing with like-minded neighborhood ghouls. The Christchurch attacks exemplify how hatemongering has mutated into a globalized, postmodern phenomenon; streamed live online for consumption and inspiration to fascists around the world. Extreme right attacks masquerade as vengeance against “radical Islamic terrorism.” Yet, in their barbaric actions, online propaganda and strident incitement, they are indistinguishable from Daesh. The radicals of Al-Qaeda were succored within a wider milieu of anti-Western sentiments, and far-right ideologies are likewise nourished in a climate where racist anti-immigrant demonization has become normalized. The perpetrator of the New Zealand attacks expressed admiration for Trump and drew inspiration from the alt-right media, which amplifies the US president’s xenophobic worldview. Trump did not describe the attacks as terrorism. His reaction contrasts with the compassionate but resolute response from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her nation, expressing solidarity with the many victims. The massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October exemplified an escalating pattern of attacks against places of worship, including a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, an Islamic center in Quebec, and nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist in a South Carolina church. During 2017, there averaged two attacks every week against US mosques. The same crazed hatred is at work in attacks by Daesh against Shiite mosques and Coptic churches. To avoid electoral defeat, Benjamin Netanyahu is cynically dealing with an alliance of extreme-right factions that advocate the forced transfer of Palestinians living in Israel. Jewish Power is an offshoot of Kach — a terrorist organization designated by the US. One candidate proudly displays a huge picture of Baruch Goldstein, the terrorist who in 1994 gunned down 29 Palestinian worshippers, in his living room. What kind of world do we live in when someone who glorifies such atrocities is active in national-level politics? Attacks against worshippers in far-off places are a warning that soon the fascists and demagogues will be coming for our rights and freedoms Baria Alamuddin As with Muslim communities, the number of white xenophobes willing to commit murder is vanishingly small. Yet the racist tendencies that nourish such extremism have infected the global mainstream and the corridors of power. Demagogic European autocrats in Hungary, Austria, Poland and Italy mobilize credulous publics and the media against minorities as a cynical gambit for monopolizing the state. The radical left similarly seethes with anti-Semitism and intolerance. The post-communist, liberal democratic global consensus was previously so unassailable that even dictators like Bashar Assad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei staged sham elections to burnish their legitimacy. Autocratic states were perceived as relics from history that would eventually “evolve” into mature democracies. Today this teleological clock has been thrown into reverse. Populist autocrats are in the ascendency, while liberal politicians are on the defensive or banished to the political wilderness. Dictators and fundamentalists begin as populists. Extremists like Daesh gain localized strength by offering support networks to marginalized peoples neglected by the state. The violent imposition of repressive ideologies comes only after becoming firmly entrenched. Hezbollah gained a stranglehold in Lebanon through similar tactics. In the “civilized” West, anti-liberal tendencies hijack the state and the media by demonizing minorities, exploiting rhetoric about “white genocide” and “refugee swarms.” Then comes suppression of the press, subverting institutions, rigging elections, and the repression of oppositionists. Attacks against mosques and synagogues by over-zealous supporters are a symptom of this all-pervading strangulation of tolerance and freedoms. Muslims shouldn’t be angry about the New Zealand attacks because they are Muslims, but because they are human beings. Demonization of difference, whether by Daesh or the Ku Klux Klan, is foremost an attack on humanity. Attacks against worshippers in far-off places are a warning that soon the fascists and demagogues will be coming for our rights and freedoms. I fail to value freedom of speech because I’ve always enjoyed this right. But these fundamental rights risk extermination within this rapidly encroaching world order, not just in fragile states like Iraq, the Philippines and Eritrea, or even Turkey, China, Brazil and Russia, but within the liberal fortress of the West itself, all the way to the White House. Even Britain has imploded into political anarchy as Brexit tensions unleash radical nationalist and extreme leftist tendencies. Human rights aren’t abstract philosophical postulates, but the floodgate that prevents us being deluged within a Stalinist dystopia. As politicians either embrace this populist tsunami or stand like rabbits in headlights, we are the only bulwark against this authoritarian dark age, where freedoms from torture, state surveillance and arbitrary detention have been cast to the wind. Genocide has been perpetrated against the Rohingya, 1 million Chinese Uighurs have been interned, and tens of thousands of Syrians murdered in prison, with scarcely a whimper from the world. If we accept such phenomena as an inextricable part of our world, then they become an inextricable part of our world — they become our future. The New Zealand killings were a wake-up call, but only if we choose to wake up and act decisively together to halt these authoritarian hatemongers in their tracks. Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state. 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