During his first speech to a joint session of Congress current White House Resident and popular vote loser Donald Trump stated the following:
“According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted for terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country,” Trump claimed in his speech. “We have seen the attacks at home -– from Boston to San Bernardino to the Pentagon and yes, even the World Trade Center.”
That is a lie. The vast majority of terrorist attacks inside the U.S. are committed by American Citizens, and the vast majority of them are not Islamic Jihadists — the vast majority of them are Right-Wing Terrorists.
Trump in his speech made a big deal and a flourish out of saying the word “Radical Islamic Terrorists” even though his own freshly minted National Security Adviser said that doing so was a mistake.
Politico reports that Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president’s newly minted national security adviser, tried to convince the president to delete references to “radical Islamic terrorism” in his upcoming speech on Tuesday night.
It seems, however, that his ploy was not successful.
“The phrase will be in the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, according to a senior White House aide — even though McMaster reviewed drafts and his staff pressed the president’s chief speechwriter and senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, not to use it,” Politico writes.
McMaster, who developed counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq last decade, believes that the United States must seek out allies inside the Muslim world, and that labeling terrorism as “Islamic” only serves to isolate people who could be sympathetic to the American cause.
Trump has been flogging this particular fear-monster since he began his campaign for the White Hosue, so it’s not that much surprising that he would ignore McMaster. His argument is that he’s just “telling it how it is” and not resorting to “political correctness”, but in fact what’s he’s really doing is pandering, fear-mongering and hate-speech.
And that becomes far more obvious when you look at the raw numbers.
Since 9-11 there have been 82 fatalities in America as a result of Islamic rationalized attacks, more than half of those attackers were born in the United States.
A recent Department of Homeland Security draft report did not find evidence that the people excluded because of the Muslim ban pose a terror threat to the country. As the Washington Post reported, “more than half of the 82 people who died in the pursuit of or were convicted of any terrorism-related offense inspired by a foreign terrorist organization, slightly more than half were native-born U.S. citizens.”
The Post further points out that:
The male San Bernardino shooter was born in Illinois; his wife, with whom he carried out the attack, was born in Pakistan. (The FBI said the male gunman had been plotting attacks for years before he met her.) The Boston Marathon bombers were brothers born in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Neither country was mentioned in Trump’s original ban, nor are they expected to be on the revised version. (The younger of the brothers, who was sentenced to death for the bombing, was a naturalized U.S. citizen.) None of the Sept. 11 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 were from countries on the ban list. (Most were from Saudi Arabia, while the rest were from Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.)
Maj Nidal Hasan who committed the Ft. Hood attack was born in the U.S. The shooter at the Pulse Nightclub in Florida was a born in the U.S. None of the Paris attackers were refugees from Syria, most were from Brussels. The Nice and Berlin truck attackers were from Tunisia.
When Homeland Security was asked to justify Trump’s Muslim Country Travel ban they refused, so the regime decided to reject and ignore their intelligence report.
Donald Trump reportedly rejected an intelligence report on his “Muslim ban” because it did not corroborate his claim that it improved national security.
Compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, the report said that banning all citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries was an ineffective way of stopping terrorists coming to the US because “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”
The White House dismissed its findings as politically motivated and poorly researched.
“The intelligence community is combining resources to put together a comprehensive report using all available sources which is driven by data and intelligence and not politics", said Spokesman Michael Short.
Trump considers "brand new" travel ban “The president asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for,” a senior administration official added.
It was also covered by Rachel Maddow that an additional DHS report was created which said that most foreign born jihadists don’t become radicalized until years after they enter the U.S. so the entire idea of “extreme vetting” being needed to help keep us safe is basically bunk.
Going further the report argues that the ban could help fuel radicalization, not prevent it.
In fact, the report actually suggests that government activity that might be perceived as Islamophobic actually fuels radicalization in both native-born and foreign-born violent extremists. The perception that the U.S. treats Muslims unjustly, combined with feelings of anger and isolation and having witnessed violence as a child, is more likely to contribute to radicalization. In other words, actions like an arbitrary ban on immigration from various Muslim countries might do more to increase domestic terror activities than they do to prevent such violence.
Let me just reiterate that the only refugees who’ve entered the country and successfully pulled off a deadly terrorist attack were the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon, they were born in Russia and Kyrgyzstan, not Iran, Syria or Iraq. And remember the Russian Intelligence had identified them as potential jihadist and didn’t share all their information with the FBI prior to the bombing.
Russian officials had told the F.B.I. in 2011 that the suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, “was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer” and that Mr. Tsarnaev “had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”
But after an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev, according to the report, a review of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.
Also they’d been in the U.S. for so long he younger brother, who is currently facing the death penalty had become a naturalized citizen.
Still in the end the total number of attacks and the number of casualties by so-called Islamist pale by comparison to right-wing terrorists.
Historically, the U.S. has been home to adherents of many types of extremist ideologies. The two current most prominent threats are motivated by Islamist extremism and far-right extremism.
To help assess these threats, the Department of Homeland Security and recently the Department of Justice have funded the Extremist Crime Database to collect data on crimes committed by ideologically motivated extremists in the United States. The results of our analyses are published in peer-reviewed journals and on the website for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism & Responses to Terrorism.
The ECDB includes data on ideologically motivated homicides committed by both Islamist extremists and far-right extremists going back more than 25 years.
Excluding both 9-11 and the Oklahoma City Bombing we’ve had 136 Americans killed iniside the U.S. by an Islamic rationalized attack versus 272 — which is more than double — from right-wing affiliated persons.
Right-wing fostered attacks may have a lower body count per incident, but they have many many more incidents as the New York Times indicated in 2015.
University of North Carolina Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer found that Islam-inspired terror attacks accounted for 50 deaths since 9/11, but that “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”
Even if you add the 50 casualties from the Pulse Night Club and 14 from San Bernadino the count of Islam inspired fatalities during this period rises to 114, but then you have to add these attacks as well.
Last year, for example, a man who identified with the sovereign citizen movement — which claims not to recognize the authority of federal or local government — attacked a courthouse in Forsyth County, Ga., firing an assault rifle at police officers and trying to cover his approach with tear gas and smoke grenades. The suspect was killed by the police, who returned fire.
In Nevada, anti-government militants reportedly walked up to and shot two police officers at a restaurant, then placed a “Don’t tread on me” flag on their bodies.
An anti-government extremist in Pennsylvania was arrested on suspicion of shooting two state troopers, killing one of them, before leading authorities on a 48-day manhunt.
A right-wing militant in Texas declared a “revolution” and was arrested on suspicion of attempting to rob an armored car in order to buy weapons and explosives and attack law enforcement. These individuals on the fringes of right-wing politics increasingly worry law enforcement officials.
And these which were noted by Slate.
June 17, 2015. Dylann Roof murders nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
July 24, 2015: John Russell Houser, a 59-year-old man with a history of expressing extremist and anti-feminist beliefs, kills two women at a screening of the Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Nov. 27, 2015: A 57-year-old religious fanatic named Robert Lewis Dear shoots and kills three people, including a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.
When you look just at the last two years you get this:
Although our data for 2015 through 2017 are still being verified, we counted five homicide events perpetrated by Islamist extremists that resulted in the murders of 74 people. This includes the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, which killed 49 people. In the same time period, there were eight homicide events committed by far-right extremists that killed 27 people.
This bring us to our current 136 to 272 estimate.
And to this you also have to add the right-wing shooting of two Indian men last week as the attacker mistook them as illegal immigrants and/or Iranians demanding to see their visas and shouting “Get out of my Country” which led to yet another fatality.
If there is a “difference” between right-wing and Islamic sponsored terrorism as was claimed by Rep. Sean Duffy — the difference is that right-wing terrorism is more prevalent and ultimately more deadly.
Honestly this isn’t to say that this is a competition, it’s a comparison. Islamic justified violence isn’t less or more important than violence fostered by right-wing or even left-wing views. However we do clearly have a problem where we have a White House Resident who is willing to up-end the Constitution and generate mass chaos over the specter of “foreign Islamic terrorism” but can’t even say the words “Right-Wing Terrorism” and who retains an Attorney General who believes the ridiculous idea that “Legal Marijuana” is causing an increase in violence.
Mr Sessions said the Justice Department will try to adopt "responsible policies" for enforcement of federal anti-marijuana laws.
He added that he believes violence surrounds the sale and use of the drug in the US.
“I believe it’s an unhealthy practice, and current levels of THC in marijuana are very high compared to what they were a few years ago, and we’re seeing real violence around that,” the attorney general said.
When the Obama Administration began there were 47 documented Militia groups in the U.S., now there are over 276, anti-Government “Patriot” groups went from 512 to 998 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They are currently tracking a total 892 Hate groups around the nation.
SPLC maintains of fairly comprehensive list of Right-Wing Violence and Plots going back to 1995 which is frankly staggering and some are quite shocking.
What follows is a detailed listing of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City. These have included plans to bomb government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives and biological and chemical weapons. [Each of these plots aimed to make changes in America through the use of political violence.] Most contemplated the deaths of large numbers of people — in one case, as many as 30,000, or 10 times the number murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.
Since the election there were over 1000 violent hate inspired incidents most of them by those in the right-wing. What we’re seeing is real violence tied that that, not marijuana.
Overall, anti-immigrant incidents (315) remain the most reported, followed by anti-black (221), anti-Muslim (112), and anti-LGBT (109). Anti-Trump incidents numbered 26 (6 of which were also anti-white in nature, with 2 non-Trump related anti-white incidents reported).
Unfortunately rather than paying serious attention to any of that Homeland Security seems to think that Anti-Trump protests are the same as Domestic Terrorist Attacks. Yes, seriously.
A new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence wing has likened certain types of political protests to “domestic terrorism,” and specifically outlined anger at President Donald Trump’s election as a driving force.
The document, obtained by the Intercept, was prepared by the North Carolina Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAAC) and DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) with a particular focus on North Carolina. The document comes as Republicans in at least 18 different states have proposed anti-protest bills that seek to criminalize protesters engaging in property destruction and blocking highways, among other forms of protest.
The analysis focuses on acts described as “election-related physical and cyber incidents against political institutions,” and cited incidents that occurred in North Carolina in response to the 2016 presidential election. It draws specifically on acts of dissent targeting the GOP. For example, the report cited an arson attack that targeted a Republican office in October, as well as spray paint on a building across from the GOP office that read, “Nazi Republicans leave town or else.”
As reported by the Intercept, the DHS analysis did not mention graffiti on a wall in Durham that read, “Black Lives Don’t Matter and Neither Does Your Votes,” and also made no mention of a Democratic office in Carrboro that was spray painted with the words “Death to Capitalism.”
So I mean if they really cared about Terrorism and potential violence regardless of where it comes from or what the motivation is, this isn’t how to show it.
To paraphrase Trump: If the White House Resident and his administration can’t bring themselves to say the words “Radical Right-Wing Terrorism” how can any of us expect that they’ll be able to fight back effectively against it?
Friday, Mar 3, 2017 · 6:46:07 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Now some may object to leaving out 9-11 and it’s 4,000 casualties , but in fairness we’re also leaving out the 100 year terror and lynching reign of the KKK, which also killed 4,000 people, or counting the number of unarmed minority persons killed by police each year — which according to Guardian was 128 in 2015 which if extrapolated back 17 years to when 9/11 occured could be as high as 2,176 fatalities — and double that if you include unarmed caucasians — but since this data hasn’t been fully tracked it’s hard to say, so for the sake of simplicity most analysis of issues like this tend to leave these issues aside