Last month, two US teenage gunmen opened fire at an Islamic center in San Diego, California, murdering three men outside the mosque.

The two suspects, Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, fled the scene and got into a white BMW. They placed a camera used to livestream the attack on the car’s dashboard.

The footage showed Vasquez urging Clark to kill him by bringing the barrel of Clark’s rifle to his forehead. Clark shot Vasquez twice in the head, then killed himself, the footage showed.

Investigators found that the two teenagers had met and radicalized online, where they glorified terrorists and shared white supremacist hatred toward Jews, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, women, black people, and both the political left and right.

The attack, and other recent shootings, illustrate the dangers and allure of nihilistic online violence and hatred. The phenomenon is growing in the dark corners of the internet that bring together a hodgepodge of hatreds and conspiracies. Lacking any single ideology, it is saturated with antisemitism.

While the movement is terrible and dangerous, the more horrifying aspect is “how impactful, how meaningful it is” for those involved, said Oren Segal, who heads the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

“I don’t know that people are joining these [online groups] because they want to commit violence. I think they’re joining them because it’s interesting, it’s different, they’re finding a community, and maybe they just end up believing it,” Segal said.

The average person viewing these forums “wouldn’t be surprised by the horrible images — they would be surprised by how compelling it is,” he said.

Monitoring the internet’s dark corners

The ADL’s Center on Extremism, in Midtown Manhattan, employs dozens of investigators and analysts who lurk in the dark spaces of the internet to understand trends, monitor bad actors and pick up on threats. The researchers share information with law enforcement, as well as Jewish communal security groups, Segal told The Times of Israel during a visit to the center last month.

Last year, the center analyzed nearly 30 million social media posts, and this year, it has sent 101 threat alerts to 258 law enforcement agencies, the ADL said.

The center is part of an interlocking network of Jewish security groups that serve different functions to protect American Jews, from training volunteer guards and patrolling streets to teaching krav maga and conducting security assessments at synagogues.

“Our job is to tell communities who’s coming after them,” Segal said.

The Center on Extremism also publishes analyses of antisemitism and trends on platforms such as Cloudflare, Instagram and AI video generators.

Security has become paramount for American Jews since the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.........

© The Times of Israel