![]() ![]() But all are part of a pattern of violence and viral incitement in which the extremes of intolerance react to and further radicalize one another online. The attack in Morocco was not of the same magnitude as the mass shooting that killed 51 people at mosques in New Zealand three months later, or the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka five weeks after that, when more than 200 people attending church services were killed. Many were expressions of condolences, but some were gestures of astonishing cruelty, saying their daughters deserved to die and attaching links to the video of their slaughter. Their mothers were inundated with messages on Facebook. (Charlotte Schmitz for The Washington Post) (Charlotte Schmitz for The Washington Post)įor families of the victims, the aftermath compounded the pain. The picture was taken by Irene Ueland, who had it framed for her daughter's funeral. When officials in Norway and Denmark pleaded with the public to stop sharing the video, that effort was denounced by far-right groups as a betrayal of religion and race - censorship of content that revealed the true nature of Islam.Ī picture of Maren Ueland hangs in her mother’s home in Bryne, Norway. ![]() “It’s God awakening us Germanic men to action. “Look at this video of the one girl being decapitated alive,” wrote a far-right figure in Norway as he posted a link to his Twitter account. Extremists posted gruesome scenes of the women’s deaths on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms alongside condemnations of Islam and calls for a civilizational clash. Within days, the one-minute, 16-second recording spread rapidly across networks associated with the far-right and white-nationalist movements. The most alarming audience, however, was one that the attackers had not envisioned. An attack that had gone unheard and unseen ended up being viewed millions of times by Islamic State supporters who didn’t share the group’s selectivity, by dark-Web bottom dwellers devoted to gore and by the morbidly curious. The Islamic State did not distribute the video, refused to acknowledge the attack and to this day has ignored the Moroccans’ pledges of loyalty. ![]() The targeting of defenseless women and the abysmal quality of the recording managed to violate the standards of a terrorist group not known for having any. Their overriding aim was to impress the Islamic State, earn the status of soldiers in its apocalyptic struggle and see their own recording distributed across the group’s propaganda platforms. The killers, poor and uneducated, became absorbed in a violent Islamist universe they saw on the screens of their cellphones, then sought their own place in it. The December 2018 attack, like so many in this age of mass killings and social media, was an act of senseless and performative violence. They attacked Ueland, a Norwegian, and her Danish friend, Jespersen, in their sleeping bags, stabbed them until their bodies went limp and severed their heads in a ghastly sequence recorded on a cellphone. The men waited until after nightfall, then approached the women’s tent with knives and misplaced hopes of becoming Islamist heroes. Maren Ueland, 28, and Louisa Jespersen, 24, Scandinavian students who revered the outdoors, were descending North Africa’s highest peak in December when they encountered four men searching for Westerners to kill. MARRAKESH, Morocco - Their screams must have carried for miles in the thin air of the Atlas Mountains, anguished sounds of a terrorist attack that no one was there to hear, see or stop.
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