Christchurch terror attack: 5 things you need to know

By Samuel Smith, Deputy Managing Editor Friday, March 15, 2019

5. Tarrant’s 'manifesto'

Before the attack took place, Tarrant reportedly posted multiple photos of machine gun magazines and a link to what has been called a “manifesto.” The 73-page document is titled “The Great Replacement.”

The document appears to lay out Tarrant’s beliefs that mass murder is justified by immigration.

In a section called “The White Genocide,” he claimed that mass migration will destroy his culture, community, and people “long before low fertility levels ever could.”

“Thus, before we deal with the fertility rates, we must deal with both the invaders within our lands and the invaders that seek to enter our lands,” he wrote. “We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.”

In the document, Tarrant claims to be “just [an] ordinary white man,” born to a working class, a low-income family of Scottish, Irish and English descent. He also claimed to have little interest in education and barely achieved a passing grade.

Tarrant claimed that he carried out the attack to “show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.”

“To take revenge on the invaders for the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders in European lands throughout history. To take revenge for the enslavement of millions of Europeans taken from their lands by the Islamic slavers,” he wrote. “To take revenge for the thousands of European lives lost to terror attacks.”

Although Tarrant was born in Australia, he’s been disavowed by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who called the 28 year old "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist."

American evangelical leader Johnnie Moore, founding president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, called for Christians across the world to stand in solidarity with their Muslim neighbors.

‎"Muslims have stood in solidarity w/ Christians when their churches have been terrorized," Moore, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, wrote in a Friday morning tweet. "[T]oday, Christians stand in solidarity w/terrorized Muslims‎Mourning w/those who mourn; Weeping w/those who weep."