San Diego mosque shooters, who met online, called for genocide of Jews and Muslims |
The two US teenagers who shot and killed three people in an attack on a California mosque were radicalized online, where they first met and shared white supremacist views, including antisemitism, according to authorities and writings they authored.
The pair “didn’t discriminate on who they hated,” Mark Remily, the lead FBI agent in San Diego, said Tuesday.
The writings, some of which were circulating online in the days after the attack, glorified other terrorists and included hateful rhetoric toward Jews, Muslims, LGBT people, African-Americans, and both the political left and right.
They were also vitriolically sexist, asserting that “after the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman.” At least one of the shooters identified as an “incel,” a term used by men online to refer to their failure to have sex with women.
In a lengthy manifesto, which police said they believed to be authentic, the shooter declared Jews “the universal enemy,” responsible for war, famine, child abuse and various social ills, and wrote that the only solution is “to just kill them all.”
The document heaped praise on Adolf Hitler, yet denied the Holocaust.
It also bore the trademarks of more recent antisemitic conspiracy theories, claiming that Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes were religiously motivated, and fixating on supposed Jewish hatred for “goyim,” or non-Jews.
The latter rhetoric, long used by white supremacists, has also started to take root on the American left in recent years, amid openly hateful language ostensibly directed at Israelis.
The shooters expressed beliefs that white people are being eliminated, explicitly citing the “Great Replacement” theory that Jews are facilitating mass migration to the West in order to wipe out white people.
Muslims were described as one such “invading” force, who must be “exterminated.”
The two suspects met online before discovering they both lived in the San Diego area, the FBI said. “In terms of how the radicalization occurred, we’re still digging into that,” Remily said.
Investigators found at least 30 guns, ammunition and a crossbow at two residences after Monday’s attack in San Diego and were trying to........