An accurate assessment of this landscape requires more than what was seemingly a very cursory examination of Telegram.
This is astonishing, especially given the high profile international manhunt saga of Rob Rundo, the founder of the Active Club model, who was extradited from Romania to the US in August 2023, jailed, released, and jailed again. www.theguardian.com/world/2024/m...
Federal prosecutors charged Robert Rundo in 2018 for rioting, a judge threw out the case last week – and another reinstated it
Shockingly, even Mike Burgess, Director General of Security at ASIO admitted at the inquiry he'd never heard of active clubs despite them being the Gold Standard for neo-Nazi organisations globally and in Australia. Apparently he hasn’t even read the Active Clubs Wikipedia.
This highlights a key problem with the Countering Violent Extremism industrial complex - people who have spent the past twenty years engaging in the Islamophobic war on terror often have very little idea as they chase grant money into the right wing space.
At the Senate hearings into right wing extremist movements in Australia, "CVE" practitioners from Counter Extremism Project gave an embarrassingly incorrect account of the state of the Australian extreme right landscape, particularly related to Active Clubs.
You can submit evidence through their Google Form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
If you're more concerned about Hamas than the genocide of nearly 10,000 innocent babies, children, men and women you need to urgently educate yourself and reevaluate your moral compass.
And for more on Claire Fox and the RCP/LM/Spiked network, see this piece that I wrote for Jacobin: jacobin.com/2023/08/revo...
The contrarian website Spiked is now at the heart of an influential right-wing network in British politics and media. But the group behind Spiked started off as an avowedly Marxist organization before...
There is no going back. This encourages terrorism and violence at home. Government policy about social cohesion means nothing. We must work together across all ethnicities, faiths and identities to humanise and protect each other.
There will be an attack on Australian soil if incidents like this continue not to be taken seriously. We will keep warning of the dangers of fascist and Nazi incitement to violence. Be vigilant. Challenge Islamophobia and Antisemitism. Look out for each other.