is the title of this op ed in The New York Times. It is written by Charles Kurzman, who teaches sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by David Schanzer, who is director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University.
Using various data sets and surveys, it emphasizes two key facts.
1. Domestic anti-government terrorism is a far greater threat that Muslim extremism,
2. Terrorism pales in significance to other forms of murder in the US.
Allow me to quote a few relevant paragraphs (and please go to the linked op ed for embedded hotlinks).
Let me start with a survey the authors themselves conducted:
In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism.
Please keep reading.
Then two paragraphs of other data worth considering:
Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.
In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.
As for the comparison of the impact of Islamic terrorism compared to other kinds of murder:
There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,300 homicides from other threats.
There is no doubt that our perceptions have been shaped by big events. Despite the relatively small loss of life in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which killed 6 and injured many, many more, its impact pales in comparison to the Oklahoma City bombing two years later, which killed 168. Yet the first event was already shaping our reaction: remember that the immediate fear was that we had again been attacked by Muslims, and in fact one descriptive drawing circulated after Oklahoma City was of someone presumed to be Muslim.
Some might argue that statistics since 9-11 are deceptive, given the several thousand killed on that day. But even if we grant that argument, it does not diminish the idea that we face far greater threat on a day to day basis first from domestic anti-government terrorism, and second, from murder in general, the latter clearly attributable to our gun culture.
Let me return to the op ed and share the authors' closing paragraph, because it argues forcefully that our focus on Muslim terrorism at the expense of focusing on domestic terrorism is wrong:
Public debates on terrorism focus intensely on Muslims. But this focus does not square with the low number of plots in the United States by Muslims, and it does a disservice to a minority group that suffers from increasingly hostile public opinion. As state and local police agencies remind us, right-wing, anti-government extremism is the leading source of ideological violence in America.