Recent cases in Turkey and Singapore demonstrate that radicalization by white supremacist content coming from the West can happen just about anywhere. The recent arrest of an “East Asian supremacist” of Chinese ethnicity in Singapore, and the case in Turkey of the perpetrator of the Eskişehir stabbings on August 14, 2024, are a reminder that online networks that spread supremacist hate don’t just impact so-called white countries, but are a global menace.
In both cases above, the perpetrators were radicalized online by white supremacist networks, idolized prominent mass shooters such as the Christchurch, N.Z., mosque attacker and the killer in the 2011 mass shooting on the island of Utøya, Norway, made use of Nazi symbols, and either planned or carried out acts of violence on members of a minority community in their respective countries.
In Singapore, an 18-year-old student named Nick Lee Xing Qiu (Lee), who referred to himself as an “East Asian supremacist” and was planning to attack Muslims in the country, was issued an Order of Detention (OD), a special use of preventative detention under Singapore’s Internal Security Act (ISA) reserved for extreme cases that can inflame ethnic or religious sensibilities, and Restriction Order (RO), which bans him from leaving Singapore, accessing the internet, or making public statements without authorization from Singaporean authorities. According to Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD), Lee was radicalized online by extremist content, where he eventually developed hostility towards Muslims in early 2023.
Singapore’s security agency claimed that this interest in anti-Muslim content was due to “online algorithms” on social media that recommended “far-right extremist material” to him. Lee, who is Singaporean of Chinese ethnicity, believed in the superiority of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ethnicities, and supported white supremacy because he considered Islam to be a threat to “white culture.” He also developed hatred of Jews, Mexicans, Black people, and Indians.
He came to believe in a version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory tailored to the population makeup of Singapore. ISD claimed that Lee “believed that violent action had to be taken to prevent the Chinese majority in Singapore from being supplanted by what he perceived to be a rapidly growing Malay population,” with the end goal of sparking a “race war” between Chinese and Malays, who are predominantly Muslim.
Lee’s radicalization was driven by outside influences, particularly his idolization of Brenton Tarrant, who was the killer in the March 2019 mass shooting at mosques in Christchurch, murdering 51 and injuring 89. In June 2023, Lee searched for the livestreamed video of the 2019 attack, watched it repeatedly, and role-played as Tarrant in modified online games where he could reenact the attack.
Lee was interested in carrying out a Tarrant-style attack of his own using homemade guns, knives, and Molotov cocktails, along with other radicalized individuals that he met online. He wanted to dedicate his attack to Tarrant. In September 2024, Lee got a tattoo of a sonnenrad (black sun) and custom-ordered t-shirts with Totenkopf images on them, symbols used by both the original Nazis and their modern-day successors.
The Sonnenrad tattoo on Lee’s elbow. Source: Internal Security Department Singapore
Far from being an anomaly, Lee’s is the third case in Singapore of individuals who were radicalized by anti-Muslim hate in recent years. In December 2020, a 16-year-old was detained for planning machete attacks on mosques, while a restriction order was placed on another 16-year-old authorities identified as a white supremacist in November 2023, who aspired to conduct attacks overseas.
Another such case happened in Turkey, where a far-right individual committed a knife attack outside of the Tepebaşı Mosque in Eskişehir on August 12, 2024. He was identified by police to be 18-year-old Arda Küçükyetim, who wore a helmet and bulletproof vest with a Nazi sonnenrad on it (see GPAHE’s reporting on this event here). The knife attack ended up injuring five people, and leaving two in critical condition.
As with Lee, Küçükyetim was a supporter of neo-Nazism. He regularly used demeaning slurs to refer to ethnic minorities in his manifesto, held a special hatred for Jewish people, and included images of the Nazi Totenkopf and “lightning” Sig runes in his manifesto.
Like Lee, Küçükyetim adapted this hateful rhetoric to his own culture in Turkey, writing in detail about his hatred for the Kurdish population. He repeatedly mocked their desire for a separate state, claimed that Kurds were controlled by Jews and the United States to “tarnish the reputation of [the Turkish] race,” praised the founder of the Turkish state Kemal Atatürk and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for having “eliminated” them, and even mentioned his desire to attack political parties viewed as sympathetic to the Kurdish people.
Again, there are clear signs that Küçükyetim was influenced by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the West. Among the images that he included in his manifesto were the logo of the Atomwaffen Division, a pan-European neo-Nazi network of individuals online that plans terrorist attacks, and an image of the “Groyper” frog, the symbol used by supporters of American Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes.
Like many white supremacists in the West, he drew inspiration from “Saints,” a term used by neo-Nazis and other racial extremists to praise white supremacist killers including Tarrant. Like Anders Behring Breivik, who committed the horrific attack in Utøya, Norway, that killed 77 people and injured dozens more, Küçükyetim sought to “gameify” white supremacist terrorism by introducing a “point system” for different victims and locations, and referring to victims and others as “NPCs” (non-playable character), a reference intended to demean them.
White at first glance these cases may seem inexplicable, the idea of “non-white” individuals from non-European ancestry being influenced by National Socialism (Nazism) and racial supremacism actually has a very long history. Far-right belief systems based primarily on hatred of others are highly malleable and can evolve, leading racist, ethnic nationalist groups in other countries to adopt them, even in countries without a “white” population. Here in the U.S., there have been recent examples of violence perpetrated in the name of white supremacy by people of color, such as the Allen, Texas, shooter, Mauricio Garcia, who killed eight people at a mall in May 2023, and left behind hundreds of white supremacist posts and a diary filled with extremist material.
Different variations of “replacement”-related conspiracy theories, such as “Eurabia” and the “Great Replacement,” which both allege that immigrants from non-white countries, especially Muslims, are secretly attempting a take-over of European countries, can be found in other countries as well. In India, the idea takes the form of the conspiratorial concept of “Love Jihad,” or a “plan” by Muslims to convert Hindus by marrying them. This conspiracy is widespread among the Hindu Nationalist (Hindutva) far right.
Also in India, the far-right Hindu nationalist paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps, RSS) was infamously influenced by the original Nazi party and advocated for an India that was both independent of British rule, and that enforced strict segregation of Hindus from other groups. Other historical examples exist in parts of Latin America, Arab countries, and parts of Asia as well.
Many of the hateful, extremist tendencies we find in the West, such as fascism and neo-Nazism, have a long history in the rest of the world as well, where their supremacist attitudes have adapted to racial hierarchies in their own national context. Fascist ideologies with influences from Italian dictator Mussolini and Portuguese dictator Salazar are particularly popular in many parts of the “non-white” world because of their focus on extreme civic nationalism over ethnic nationalism (although bigotries against many groups still exist among these factions). Some examples include the “4th Position” Duginists in Russia and Integralist groups in Brazil (see Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) country report for Brazil here).
Even in the case of Nazism, with its necessarily race-based extremism, examples of their influences can be found in many countries as well. While the original Nazis conceived of the “superior” in-group as “Aryans,” more recently, modern-day neo-Nazis usually conceive of the “genetically-pure” in-group more broadly than the Nazis did. In Europe and North America, they began conceiving of the in-group as “whites” as opposed to just Nordic peoples only in the 1960s, which included people from Southern Europe whom the Nazis viewed as non-Aryan. In Eastern Europe, Slavic people, who previously were considered “untermensch” (subhumans) by the Nazis, now have neo-Nazi movements of their own that consider Slavic people to be superior to other minority groups in the region.
These cases from Singapore and Turkey are painful reminders that hateful, violent content online is a global threat where white supremacy can inspire violence against vulnerable communities.
