[Peace-discuss] NYT: Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html

Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.
By SCOTT SHANE
JUNE 24, 2015

WASHINGTON — In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York
and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal
assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online
manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as
a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been
killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim
extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who
are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to
a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last
week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a
particularly savage case. But it is only the latest in a string of lethal
attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and
theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies
the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of
police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random
civilians.

Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11,
according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America
program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By
comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in
the same period.

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police
officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s
departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent
extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment
violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according
to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and
David Schanzer of Duke University.

“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from
Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing
extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the
Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and the Police Executive
Research Forum.

John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts
Lowell, said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases has
become steadily more obvious to scholars.

“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi
terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And
there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has
been underestimated.”

Counting terrorism cases is a notoriously subjective enterprise, relying on
shifting definitions and judgment calls.

If terrorism is defined as ideological violence, for instance, should an
attacker who has merely ranted about religion, politics or race be
considered a terrorist? A man in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was charged with
fatally shooting three young Muslim neighbors had posted angry critiques of
religion, but he also had a history of outbursts over parking issues. (New
America does not include this attack in its count.)

Likewise, what about mass killings in which no ideological motive is
evident, such as those at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut
elementary school in 2012? The criteria used by New America and most other
research organizations exclude such attacks, which have cost more lives
than those clearly tied to ideology.

Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as
terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in
the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in
Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three
others. Mr. Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white
supremacist group called the Northern Hammerskins.

In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple
with radical antigovernment and neo-Nazi views, entered a Las Vegas pizza
restaurant and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On
the bodies, they left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t
tread on me” and a note saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then
they killed a third person in a nearby Walmart.

And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close
calls. In November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams
fired more than 100 rounds at government buildings that included the Police
Headquarters and the Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit
no one, and he was killed by an officer before he could try to detonate
propane cylinders he had driven to the scene.

Some Muslim advocates complain that when the perpetrator of an attack is
not Muslim, media commentators quickly focus on the question of mental
illness.

“With non-Muslims, the media bends over backward to identify some
psychological traits that may have pushed them over the edge,” said Abdul
Cader Asmal, a retired physician and a longtime spokesman for Boston’s
Muslim community. “Whereas if it’s a Muslim, the assumption is that they
must have done it because of their religion.”

On several occasions since President Obama took office, efforts by
government agencies to conduct research on right-wing extremism have run
into resistance from Republicans, who suspected an attempt to smear
conservatives.

A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an
ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a
violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of
conservative criticism. Its main author, Daryl Johnson, later accused the
department of “gutting” its staffing for such research.

William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the
Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of
Maryland, said the outsize fear of jihadist violence reflects memories of
Sept. 11, the daunting scale of sectarian conflict overseas and wariness of
a strain of Islam that seems alien to many Americans.

“We understand white supremacists,” he said. “We don’t really feel like we
understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.”

The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates
back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal
building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early media speculation about
the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The
arrest of Timothy McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end
to such theories.

The bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains the
second-deadliest terrorist attack in American history, though its toll was
dwarfed by the roughly 3,000 killed on Sept 11.

“If there’s one lesson we seem to have forgotten 20 years after Oklahoma
City, it’s that extremist violence comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Dr.
Horgan, the University of Massachusetts scholar. “And very often it comes
from someplace you’re least suspecting.”

===

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1
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