The Media Mislead America about Domestic Terror Threats

David French:

It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west: When there’s an act of Islamic terror, some in the media will take great pains to minimize the threat. When there’s an act of white-supremacist terror, many of the same folks will overhype the threat from the right, often making it out to be greater than the threat of jihadist terror.

In either case, all too few will look past the political spin to recognize the truth: Violence is a problem at both extremes of the political spectrum, and jihadists are the most dangerous extremists of all.

Let’s look at a CBS News broadcast from yesterday.

While questioning Jeff Sessions about the Department of Justice’s response to right-wing terror, CBS ran this:

Between the end of ‘01 & Dec. ‘16 there were nearly 3 times as many fatal attacks by right-wing extremists than Islamist extremists in U.S. pic.twitter.com/VBk7iAJnNc

— Norah O’Donnell (@NorahODonnell) August 14, 2017

Citing a Governmental Accountability Office study as authoritative, it claims that since 9/11 there were 85 “extremist” attacks that resulted in 225 deaths. “Far right” extremists were allegedly responsible for 62 attacks and 109 deaths, while jihadists killed 116 people in 23 attacks. It deliberately paints a picture of a nation where right-wing terrorists are more likely to strike and almost as likely to kill as jihadists. And what about left-wing attacks? Apparently, they don’t exist.

This is all so absurd it’s hard to attribute the report to anything other than an ideologically motivated effort to mislead. First, why start the death toll after September 11? Do American casualty lists for World War II not include the thousands who died at Pearl Harbor before Roosevelt declared war? Include September 11 and you understand that the actual and potentialtoll from terrorists simply dwarfs the domestic terror threat from left or right.

Consider what has happened since 9/11. The United States military mobilized and invaded Afghanistan to deny al-Qaeda a safe haven. It’s been fighting there ever since, at a cost of thousands of lives and tens of thousands of often-dreadful injuries. Terrorists have proven capable of taking and holding cities on their home turf, striking in the great capital cities of Europe, and hitting us at home. Beyond our military actions, we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into a vast international and domestic security apparatus that monitors and seeks to control the jihadist threat. Yet even when its foreign safe havens are under siege, even when America has an unprecedented level of resources directed at homeland security, and even when the Muslim population is a very small part of the American whole, jihadists still claim more lives than any other terrorist movement.

Next, even the data about right-wing terror are a bit odd. For example, the two deadliest domestic right-wing terror attacks the GAO lists are Dylann Roof’s June 2015 Charleston church massacre and Christopher Harper-Mercer’s shooting spree at Umpqua Community College. Both men claimed nine victims, and Roof’s attack was unquestionably an act of race-motivated terror. But what about Harper-Mercer? The GAO calls him a “white supremacist,” but Harper-Mercer was a black man who hated organized religion, was frustrated that he didn’t have a girlfriend, and was fascinated by the fame of mass shooters. How is that clearly “far right” violence?

Moreover, the GAO report purports to chronicle “Violent Extremist Attacks in the United States That Resulted in Fatalities, September 12, 2001 to December 31, 2016,” but it omits left-wing violence entirely. It paints domestic terror as exclusively right-wing or jihadist. Yet this is plainly wrong, and it doesn’t take a government study to prove it. It just takes a normal memory and five minutes of research. The report does not include, for example, the following well-known incidents:

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