There is a steady stream of reports that claim to show that “right-wingers” are a larger threat than Islamic jihadists. All of them come from the far-Left. This one is from the Nation Institute, which is connected to the Leftist flagship publication The Nation; the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute boasts of its reports receiving “Soros media fellowships.”
This study, which you can read about at the Investigative Fund’s site here but which was immediately (of course) picked up by Newsweek, merely counts the number of “right-wing” terrorist attacks and Islamic jihad attacks within the last nine years (why that span?), and claims that the number of “right-wing” attacks exceeds the number of jihad attacks. It claims that there have been only 63 Islamic terrorism cases in the U.S. in the last nine years, which any regular Jihad Watch reader will know strains credulity well beyond the breaking point.
But even taking these numbers at face value, we get this: “Islamist extremists killed more people overall, with a death toll of 90 people compared to 79.” That leads to the question of what criteria were used to determine what constituted a terror attack. Were attacks in which the perpetrators never intended to kill anyone, and did not do so, lumped together with attacks in which the objective was mass murder? Newsweek doesn’t tell us.
Above all, no consideration is made of the fact that Islamic jihad is an international movement, while there is no international conglomeration of “right-wing extremists” plotting terror attacks around the globe. And that is what makes all the difference. This bogus study, like the others before it, is plain disinformation, designed to foster ignorance and complacency about the magnitude of the jihad threat. Why the Leftist media wants to do that is as yet not fully clear.
“Most Terrorists in the U.S. Are Right Wing, Not Muslim: Report,” by Mirren Gidda, Newsweek, June 22, 2017:
U.S. President Donald Trump was elected vowing to get tough on “radical Islamic terrorism.” He has tried to implement a travel ban barring people from six Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. and has tweeted frequently about Islamist terrorist attacks around the world. On Thursday, a new report claimed the president has his facts muddled.
A joint project by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, a nonprofit media center, and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting has found that within the past nine years, right-wing extremists plotted or carried out nearly twice as many terrorist attacks as Islamist extremists. Of the 115 right-wing incidents, police only foiled 35 percent. Compare this to the 63 Islamist terrorism cases, where police foiled 76 percent of the planned attacks.
Right-wing extremists were not only more successful, they were often more deadly, too. From 2008 to 2016, a third of right-wing attacks involved fatalities, compared to 13 percent of Islamist attacks. It should be noted, however, that Islamist extremists killed more people overall, with a death toll of 90 people compared to 79.
In a statement pointing out the higher rate of successful, right-wing terrorist attacks, the Investigative Fund said: “This project quantifies just how irrational Trump and the GOP’s fixation on ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ as the greatest security threat is.”…