Two reports on extremist attacks in the United States document a marked decline in the number of Muslim Americans associated with extremist acts.
Extremists in the U.S. killed 50 people in 2018, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which looked at fatalities from all groups. Only one of those attacks was perpetrated by someone associated with a radical Islamist group.
The rest were carried out by right-wing extremists of various ideologies, mostly white supremacists like Robert Bowers, who killed 11 members of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October.
Another report by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security examined Muslim American extremism in particular. Its findings suggest that U.S. law enforcement leaders and counterterrorism experts pay a disproportionate amount of attention to “troubling but rare” violent incidents involving Islamists.
“My overall question is whether these scattered incidents constitute a threat to national security, which is how they’re presented,” said Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of a report from Duke University’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.
Overall, violent incidents by extremists are relatively rare in comparison with the approximately 17,000 killings in the U.S. each year.
Islamist-inspired killings in the U.S. are growing even more scarce. In addition to the one killing in 2018, 14 Muslim Americans were arrested last year for alleged involvement with violent extremism, the lowest total in a decade.
“Domestic Extremist-Related Killings in the U.S. by Perpetrator Affiliation, 2018.” Graphic courtesy of ADL
None of those arrests involved Muslims who entered the country illegally, despite President Trump’s claims that thousands of potential terrorists have attempted to cross illegally from Mexico. Experts say there has never been a case of a known terrorist sneaking into the country through open areas of the southwest border.
The Triangle Center’s report concludes: “The wave of Muslim-Americans associating themselves with the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ appears to have dwindled.”
One reason, wrote David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, is that movements such as the Islamic State group have lost battles and territory and, possibly, their ability to recruit online.
“The incidence of violence by extremist Muslim-Americans rises when foreign insurgent movements are successful,” he wrote. “When these movements don’t seem to be doing much themselves, their use of guilt or shame to compel violence by diaspora Muslims loses its bite.”
Click here to read more.
Source: Religion News Service
BCNN1 WP 