An insight into just who exactly is Blair Cottrell, an Australian far-right activist now infamous for his Islamophobic and xenophobic attitudes.

In the recent past, terrorism was commonly associated with Islam and the religion blamed for extremist attacks and sickening violence.

Now we live in an era of global white terrorism where mass shootings by men claiming racial supremacy for those of European descent have become the vision of fear etched on our hearts.

Videos of beheadings have been superseded by rambling manifestos attacking Muslim immigration, or complaining about sexual rejection.

Brenton Tarrant, the Australian charged with killing 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand, wrote in his manifesto he wanted to “directly reduce immigration rates to European lands”.

He called himself a “racist” and “ethno-nationalist ecofascist” and regularly posted on message boards popular with “incels” (involuntary celibates), an online subculture of men who claim they are unable to find sexual or romantic partners.

A shocking New York Times analysis has found at least a third of white terrorists since 2011 referred to previous mass murderers as “inspiration”.

Anders Breivik — a far-right nationalist who killed 77 people in a shooting and bomb attack in Norway — is perhaps the godfather of these terrorists. The killers also draw connections with previous mosque killings, the slaughter of Jewish people, shooting of black churchgoers and mass murder at temples across the Western world.

“I have read scripts by Dylann Roof and many others, but the one I was truly inspired by was Knight Justiciar Breivik,” wrote Tarrant in a long and sickening manifesto based on the one written by Breivik.

Dylann Roof is a white supremacist convicted of killing nine African-Americans in a mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.

Former Ku Klux Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller wrote on a white supremacist forum Breivik “inspired young Aryan men to action” before gunning down three people at a Jewish retirement home in Kansas.

Tarrant, 28, also claimed to have received a “blessing” from the “Knights Templar” — a historic Catholic order often associated with neo-Nazis and which Breivik said he commanded.

The alleged Christchurch gunman also cited actions of extremist Finsbury Park mosque attacker Darren Osborne.

In the days leading up to the attack, Tarrant posted photos to his now-suspended Twitter account of what appeared to be ammunition, a military-style vest and guns scrawled with references to ancient battles and more recent attacks against Muslims.

In one image, he wrote: “For Rotherham, Alexandre Bissonnette, Luca Traini”.

Bissonnette was sentenced to 40 years for shooting six people dead in a 2017 shooting at a mosque in Quebec.

Traini is serving 12 years in prison for the shooting of six African migrants in the city of Macerata in central Italy in October last year.

At least 1400 children were abused in Rotherham by a gang led by Arshid Hussain. One of the victims distanced herself from Tarrant after the massacre.

The header photo on Tarrant’s Twitter account showed a victim of the 2016 Bastille Day terror attack in Nice when 84 people were killed by a truck ploughing into holidaying crowds. The driver was Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, and the Islamic State took responsibility for the attack.

Tarrant described his attack as an act of “revenge on the invaders for the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders in European lands throughout history … for the enslavement of millions of Europeans taken from their lands by the Islamic slavers … (and) for the thousands of European lives lost to terror attacks throughout European lands.”

He said he was avenging the death of an 11-year-old girl who was killed in a 2017 terror attack in Stockholm, Ebba Akerlund, whose mother later condemned his actions.

The accused killer joins a string of terrorists following a template of claiming racial superiority, ethnic cleansing and blaming Islam and immigration for the wrongs of the world.

Their rantings mirror the way Muslim terrorists have blamed white, Western culture for the deterioration of society.

These latest alienated, unhappy killers are radicalised in a new but familiar manner, despising multiculturalism in society and turning to the internet to feed their growing hunger for violence. Government and religious leaders again need to address the deep-rooted problems sparking the anger.

In 2013, a mosque in Whyalla, South Australia was set on fire in what was labelled a hate crime. In 2016, a car was firebombed outside a mosque in Perth’s southeast and an offensive anti-Islam message graffitied on a wall.

Since 2015, nationalist group Reclaim Australia has held regular rallies against Islam. The far-right United Patriots Front roasted a pig outside the ABC offices to protest against the appearance on Q&A of Zaky Mallah, the first person charged under Australia’s anti-terrorism laws. They also beheaded a dummy outside the Bendigo City Council to protest the 2015 Parramatta shooting of Curtis Cheng by an Islamist 15-year-old and approval to construct a mosque in the Victorian city.

At a Q Society dinner in 2017, speaker Larry Pickering said “if they (Muslims) are in the same street as me, I start shaking”.

Senator Fraser Anning, who has pushed to restrict non-European migration and referenced the Nazis’ “final solution” while discussing the subject, was this week censured for blaming the Christchurch shooting on Muslim immigration.

On Wednesday, senators condemned him “for his inflammatory and divisive comments seeking to attribute blame to victims of a horrific crime and to vilify people on the basis of religion”.

The world is starting to fight back against a new kind of hatred and a breed of terrorism that looks just as deadly and dangerous as the last.