What Group Is The #1 Terror Threat In The U.S.?

White Americans: radical anti-government groups or white supremacists.

Click here for an article at PRI (Public Radio International), by Peter Gelling, entitled "White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States." Despite widespread belief otherwise, the article says:

The Washington-based research organization [the New America Foundation] did a review of “terror” attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and found that most of them were carried out by radical anti-government groups or white supremacists. Almost twice as many people have died in attacks by right-wing groups in America than have died in attacks by Muslim extremists. Of the 26 attacks since 9/11 that the group defined as terror, 19 were carried out by non-Muslims.

So what's a "terror" attack? The article says:

Terrorism is hard to define. But here is its basic meaning: ideological violence. In its study, the New America Foundation took a narrow view of what could be considered a terror attack. Most mass shootings, for instance, like Sandy Hook or the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting — both in 2012 — weren't included. Also not included was the killing of three Muslim students in North Carolina earlier this year. The shooter was a neighbor and had strong opinions about religion. But he also had strong opinions about parking spaces and a history of anger issues. So that shooting was left off the list.

The killing of nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina last week was included. The shooter made it clear that his motivation was an ideological belief that white people are superior to black people. The shooting has cast new light on the issue of right-wing terrorism in the United States. But since it can't really use Special Forces or Predator drones on US soil, it remains unclear how the government will respond.

The article links to another, also at PRI, entitled "Turns out people get angry when you say white Americans are terrorists, too," by Timothy McGrath.

More after the jump.




PRI published an article entitled "“White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States," and it got a lot of flak. The article was referring to:

"... a new study that found non-Muslim extremists in the United States had killed nearly twice as many Americans since 9/11 as Muslim “jihadists.” Many of the non-Muslim extremists — whom we’ll just call terrorists from now on — were motivated by right-wing anti-government beliefs or white supremacist ideologies. Nearly all of them were white US citizens.

We chose to describe those terrorists as “white Americans” not just because they were Americans and they were white, but because we were highlighting how the study unraveled a common post-9/11 assumption about terrorism in the United States — that it’s mainly the work of Muslims and foreigners. It’s not.

The article goes on to say:

Some of them [commenters on the article] objected to our decision to call the terrorists “white Americans” instead of “some white Americans” or “white American extremists.” Without qualifying the term, they argued, we were claiming that ALL white Americans were a terror threat. Other readers worried that the headline, though correct, was unnecessarily divisive. Some thought it was unfair to focus on racial data when the study's summary didn't call attention to it.

Other readers reported us to Facebook for posting hate speech. They called us racists and race-baiters. They said we were ignoring “white genocide.” They asked why were weren’t talking about “black-on-white crime.” One person threatened to file a discrimination lawsuit.

About the methodology of the study, the article says;

The New America study, which defines "extremist violence" or terrorism as "the use of violence in pursuit of any political ideology," drew on court documents and news reports to compile a database of information about individuals who had either carried out acts of terrorism in the United States or had been charged with a terrorism-related crime since 9/11.

The most dangerous group? The "sovereign citizen" movement:

According to a DHS-funded survey published in 2014 by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), law enforcement agencies considered sovereign citizen extremists the most dangerous terror threats in the United States — ahead of foreign Islamic extremists.

How many people associate themselves with a movement that law enforcement agencies consider the most dangerous terror threat in the United States? The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that there are as many as 300,000 people affiliated with the sovereign citizen movement living in the United States, although it's hard to know for sure, since it's a very diffuse movement without centralized leadership and organizations.

Four short points:

Non-jihadist terrorists, nearly all of them white Americans, have killed more people in the United States than jihadists have since 9/11.

Non-jihadist terrorists, including those who failed to kill or who were arrested before committing an act of terrorism, were nearly all white Americans.

The deadliest of the country's sovereign citizen extremists, whom some in law enforcement consider the most dangerous terror threat facing the United States, have been white Americans.

Terror threats posed by violent white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups can only, by the logic of their own ideology, be made up of white Americans.

The study findings run "... counter to the accepted wisdom that we've gotten from law enforcement, news media, and popular culture that Muslims and foreigners are the main practitioners of terrorism and the gravest terror threat facing the United States."

It's easy to see how that happened. Al Qaeda killed almost 3,000 people on 9/11. The United States' subsequent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — and more limited counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen — have meant the US public has spent over a decade imagining the enemy to be a foreign Muslim man with an AK-47 or a suicide vest. Combine that with a 24-hour news cycle that privileges simple narratives over nuance, and with policymakers who have too often shown a lack of knowledge about the history, politics, and cultures of the places where the US wages war and sees threats — and you're looking at some entrenched, perpetually reinforced stereotypes about Muslims, Islam, and terrorism.