Beware the Right-Wing Terrorists!

Yahoo has the most ludicrous headline: Most Terrorists in the U.S. are Right Wing, Not Muslim.  There is a picture of KKK members around a burning cross.  Well, this ought to be good.  The story quickly reveals that police have only foiled 35% of the 115 right-wing attacks vs. 76% of the 63 Islamic attacks.  Clearly, the focus is in the wrong place.  But wait, there's more!  Right-wing attacks were often more deadly.  Define "often."  This is a meaningless sentence that manages to send a very specific implication.  That is not accidental.  So I read on.  A third of right-wing attacks involved fatalities while only 13% of Islamic ones do.  However!  Oh, yes, there is a 'however.'  The Islamic death toll was 90 vs. 79 for the right-wingers.  Let's run some math!

 

Right Wing Terrorists: 115 attacks of which 35% (40 attacks) were foiled.  Of the 75 that succeeded, a third (25 attacks) had fatalities.  79 killed divide by 25 attacks with fatalities comes to 3.2 people killed per fatal attack or approximately 1 killed per attack that wasn't foiled.

 

Islamic Terrorists: 63 attacks of which 76% (48 attacks) were foiled.  Of the 15 that succeeded, only 13% (2 attacks) had fatalities.  90 killed divide by 2 attacks with fatalities comes to 45 people killed per fatal attack or approximately 6 people killed per attack that wasn't foiled.

 

Wow, I would far prefer to have the authorities foil the vastly more lethal Islamic attacks.  Of course, this is just math and it is right there in the story but the entire tone is that the country is Islamaphobic and ignoring the far bigger problem of these far right-wing terrorists.  Speaking of the right-wing terrorists, who are they?  The story offers zero examples but there was a link to Newsweek at the bottom.  Let's check that out.

 

Homegrown Terrorism and why the Threat of Right-Wing Extremism is Rising in America.  Well, that's a big headline.  The article opens with the murder of Richard Collins III, an African-American who was murdered by a racist who was a member of Alt-Reich: Nation on Facebook.  Why does being racist place him in the far right-wing?  Does the author realize that the Third Reich, to which Alt-Reich surely alludes, was a socialist state?  Socialism is not right-wing.  Still, this is one murder and doesn't explain the Yahoo story that links to it.  So I read on...

 

Arie Perliger states that domestic terrorism deserves more attention than it gets.  He then offers some numbers for 2002 to 2016: far-right perpetrators conducted 18 attacks that killed 48 while Islamic terrorists conducted 9 attacks that killed 45 people.  See!  Domestic terrorists are more deadly.  Well, except for this:

...excluding the Orlando nightclub massacre.

So if you eliminate more than half the deaths attributed to Islamic terrorism, right-wing terrorism has been deadlier.  See!!!!  After all, the Orlando shooting has a "mix of apparent motives" and is therefore "hard to categorize."  Seriously!  Omar Mateen swore fealty to ISIS on Facebook then talks to the police during the standoff and says it is for ISIS but he's hard to categorize.  He could be a far right-winger or Islamic so let's just remove him from our calculation.  This story has just lost all credibility.

Let's see some of these 'far right-wing' terrorists.  Oh, look, the Bernie Bro who voted for Jill Stein and stabbed two men to death on a train in Oregon is classified as far right-wing.  Huh.  He's openly racist and anti-Muslim and thus a clear right-winger.  The KKK, an organization founded by Democrats after the Republicans had freed the slaves, is also rated as right-wing.  Dylan Roof, who longed for the good old days of segregation (who were the segregationists?  Oh yeah, the Democrats), is a pot-smoking racist and thus classified as far right-wing.  Was Robert Byrd, the former KKK Exalted Cyclops and high-ranking Democrat Senator, a right-winger?

 

But let's ponder Professor Perlinger's definition of terrorism: "...the use of violence in a political and social context that aims to send a message to a broader target audience."  Would the Berkeley rioters who prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking meet that definition?  Yes, they would.  How about the rioters in Chicago last year who managed to upend a planned Trump Rally?  Yes, they would too.  What about James Hodgkinson, the man who shot several Republicans at a baseball practice?  Yes, he also meets the definition.  Would they be left-wing terrorists?

 

I briefly skimmed Perlinger's paper and it looks like even people with left-wing politics (e.g. socialist, communist, Democrat) would be counted as right-wing if their terrorism had a racist or ethnic foundation.  Therefore, when the KKK was at its peak in the 1920s, it was a right-wing terrorist organization that was supporting the left-wing political party, Democrats; that makes no sense but is really useful for left-wing propaganda.  After all, how many people would have dug this deep into the story?