The Grand Illusion
I’m fed up with the propaganda from the White House about the “overwhelming” danger to U.S. citizens from radical Islamic terrorists. Yes, there are radical Islamic terrorists, but here in the United States, radical Islamic terrorists are far less of a threat than home-grown right-wing terrorists. Overseas, that’s another question, which is why so many law-abiding members of the Islamic faith want to get to the U.S. – or did before Donald Trump became President.
While consensus on hard numbers is difficult to come by, and numbers vary by source, whatever the source, those numbers suggest that radical Islamic terrorists are not the major threat to Americans – not even close. Other Americans are.
On terms of terrorist attacks in the United States, the numbers are lopsided, to say the least. According to a study by the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, domestic right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks in the U.S. in the decade after 9/11, accounting for 254 fatalities, while, depending on the study and the definitions, between a total of 20 and 24 terrorist attacks in the U.S. were carried out by Islamic radicals with between and 50 and 123 fatalities.
In the last several years, the vast majority of police deaths have come from domestic extremists. An ADL report states that of the forty-five police officers killed by extremists since 2001, ten were killed by left-wing U.S. extremists, thirty-four by right-wing U.S. extremists, and one by domestic Islamic extremists.
As far as Trump’s proposed travel ban goes, there has not been one single terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the last four decades that has been carried out by citizens of any the seven countries on Trump’s ban list. Out of the 240,000 Americans who have been murdered since the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, exactly 123 of those deaths were linked to Muslim-American extremists. In other words, .05123 percent of the murders in the United States in a sixteen year period were carried out in the name of radical Islam. Even figures from the right-wing National Review only list 88 deaths in the U.S. from radical Islamic terrorists since 2009.
Yet at the same time that Trump is citing the danger from radical Islamic terrorists, reports have surfaced that he plans to shut down Homeland Security’s watch list for domestic extremists. Not only that, but bowing to the NRA, he decided to void an Executive Order by former President Obama that would have put people declared to be mentally incompetent by a court on a do-not-buy list for firearms. The NRA argued that mentally incompetent people should have the same right to firearms as anyone else.
And we’re worrying about Islamic terrorists?
I’m fed up too, and utterly speechless on a daily basis. He is building on fear, one might even say preying on fear, with baseless convictions to further whatever agenda he has convinced himself he is the author of, and the evidence to me seems to indicate someone else is the author.
Fear has always been the single greatest lever to achieving political power.
I don’t think that those willing to resort to violence should be characterized as right (or, I suppose, left either), insofar as that tends to become an attempt to blame that side for the corresponding portion of the extremists.
But while vaguely right-aligned extremists may well be on the rise, I think there’s definitely room to question whether they account for the majority of domestic politically or religiously affiliated violence:
https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/what-threat-united-states-today/
(definitely not a right-wing think-tank, so they may be predisposed to understate the left-affiliated violence)
http://markhumphrys.com/left.right.violence.html
(clearly this guy is not left-wing, but the re-interpretation he offers is interesting, and contrary to the generally promulgated view)
One thing I forgot: the problem with putting the “mentally incompetent” on a do-not-buy list, is that it takes away rights administratively, without a judge having ruled. Also, not all mental incompetence is equal; someone may choose to have give another power of attorney over their finances rather than be plagued by the difficulty of handling that themselves, but be quite capable of understanding basic firearms safety, and that they shouldn’t endanger others except in self-defense – yet another reason to deal with such matters on a case-by-case basis rather than by administrative fiat (contrast that with denying admittance to non-citizens, which have NO right to receive a visa).