U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists
On
Sunday, a man shot and killed a 14-year-old boy and his grandfather at
the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and then drove to a
nearby Jewish retirement community where he shot and killed a third
person. Police arrested a suspect, Frazier Glenn Cross,who shouted "Heil Hitler" after he was taken into custody.
Cross, who also goes by Frazier Glenn Miller, is
a well-known right wing extremist who founded the Carolina Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, according to the Southern
Poverty Law Center.
Now
let's do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting "Heil
Hitler" after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted "Allahu Akbar."
Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon
bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly
increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.
Yet
the death toll in the shootings in Kansas is similar to that of last
year's Boston Marathon bombings, where three people were killed and the
suspects later killed a police officer as they tried to evade capture.
(Many more, of course, were also wounded in the Boston attacks; 16 men,
women and children lost limbs.)
Peter Bergen
In
fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing
ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and
anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States
than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology. According to a
count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed
34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The
total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).
By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.
(Although
a variety of left wing militants and environmental extremists have
carried out violent attacks for political reasons against property and
individuals since 9/11, none have been linked to a lethal attack,
according to research by the New America Foundation.)
Moreover, since 9/11 none of the more than 200 individuals indicted
or convicted in the United States of some act of jihadist terrorism
have acquired or used chemical or biological weapons or their precursor
materials, while 13 individuals motivated by right wing extremist
ideology, one individual motivated by left-wing extremist ideology, and
two with idiosyncratic beliefs, used or acquired such weapons or their
precursors.
A
similar attack to the one that Frazier Glenn Cross is accused of in
Kansas occurred in August 2012 when Wade Michael Page killed six people
in a shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Page was a member of a white supremacist band and associated with the Hammerskins, a white supremacist group. Page committed suicide during the attack.
Page
is not, of course, the only right wing extremist to have used lethal
violence to achieve political ends. In 2009, for instance, Shawna Forde,
Albert Gaxiola, and Jason Bush raided a house in Arizona, killing Raul
Flores and his daughter Brisenia. The three attackers sought to use the burglary to finance their anti-immigration vigilante group, Minutemen American Defense. Forde and Bush were convicted and sentenced to death. Gaxiola was sentenced to life in prison.
Also in 2009, Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller, who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. In 2010 Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Roeder not only had ties
to the extreme anti-abortion movement, but he also had been pulled over
while driving with a fake license plate bearing the markings of the
Sovereign Citizens, a movement of individuals who deny that the government has authority over them.
Of course, the deadliest terrorist attack on
American soil prior to 9/11 was the Oklahoma City bombing, which was
masterminded by Timothy McVeigh, a man with deep ties to far-right
militant circles. McVeigh killed 168 people when he bombed the Alfred P.
Murrah federal building on April 19, 1995.
Kansas shooting victim loved to sing 02:15
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Expert: Suspect hated by supremacists 03:08
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Son of shooting victim speaks to CNN 02:31
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Despite
this history of deadly violence by individuals motivated by political
ideologies other than al Qaeda, it is jihadist violence that continues
to dominate the news and the attention of policy makers.
Some
of this is quite understandable. After all, on 9/11 al Qaeda's 19
terrorists killed almost 3,000 people in the space of a morning. Since
then al Qaeda's branch in Yemen tried to bring down with a bomb secreted
on a passenger an American commercial jet flying over Detroit on
Christmas Day 2009 and al Qaeda's branch in Pakistan tried to launch
bombings on the New York subway system a few months earlier. Luckily
those plots didn't succeed, but certainly if they had the death toll
would have been on a large scale.
Yet
the disparity in media coverage between even failed jihadist terrorist
attacks and this latest incident in Kansas is emblematic of a flawed
division in the public's mind between killing that is purportedly
committed in the name of Allah and killing that is committed for other
political ends, such as neo-Nazi beliefs about the need to kill Jews.
Part
of the reason for this disconnect might be that when a Department of
Homeland Security report warning of violent right wing extremism was
leaked in 2009, it generated a substantial political controversy.
In a 2011 interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Daryl
Johnson, the leader of the team that produced the report, argued that
following the controversy, DHS's examination of such threats suffered,
stating "Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single
report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic
domestic extremism—whether it's anti-abortion extremists, white
supremacists, 'sovereign citizens,' eco-terrorists, the whole gamut."
The
threat from al Qaeda and its associated forces has changed
significantly since 9/11. Today, almost 13 years after 9/11, al Qaeda
has not successfully conducted another attack inside the United States.
And since 2011, no individual charged with plotting to conduct an al
Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack inside the United States has acted with
more than one accomplice. This demonstrates the difficulties today of
forming a jihadist group sufficiently large enough to conduct a complex
attack anything on the scale of 9/11, and is a tribute to the success of
law enforcement agencies in detecting and deterring jihadist terrorist
activity.
Today
in the United States, al Qaeda-type terrorism is the province of
individuals with no real connection to foreign terrorists, aside from
reading their propaganda online. Given this, it becomes harder to
explain, in terms of American national security, why violence by
homegrown right wing extremists receives substantially less attention
than does violence by homegrown jihadist militants.
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