White supremacist extremism is as deadly as is of the militants alleging their association with Muslims in the United States.
Data shows more plots and attacks were carried out by far-right extremists rather than “Islamist extremists” in America.
A report of The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal noted that “there were almost twice as many terrorist incidents by right-wing extremists as by Islamist extremists in the US from 2008 to 2016”.
The report also highlighted that most of the right-wing extremist attacks were conducted by men of purely white origin.
The number of attacks carried by white supremacists were more often deadly than those by “Islamist extremists” – one-third to 13 percent respectively.
Viewing all these statistics one wonders that President Donald Trump has focused his policies on a whole on countering Islamist extremism while completely ignoring the far-right extremism.
Also Read: White nationalist terrorism in the US
“As with a lot of things related to Trump and the Islamophobic right, the reality is viewed through an upside-down looking glass. The reality is the most significant domestic terror threat we have is right-wing extremism,” a reporter David Neiwert said.
A report by The New America Foundation also finds an almost 2:1 ratio of attacks by white supremacists to Islamist extremists — 21 deadly attacks to 11 respectively.
“I think the larger perception in the public ― and this includes many progressives and liberals ― is the inversion of the reality: that the greatest threat we face is Islamist radicals. And it’s reflected in the way the press report upon various kinds of domestic terror attacks: When it’s a white domestic terrorist, they underplay it, write it off to mental illness,” said David Neiwart.
The American media has a history of double standard while reporting the incidents of terrorism as it would not label an attack by a white man as terrorist as quickly as it would do this to an attack by a Muslim.
The US government had received condemnations for not calling Dylann Roof a terrorist after he killed nine black people in South Carolina, in 2015, though he had confessed to killing the black people after proper planning.
Neiwart said white extremism could only be controlled after it was taken seriously and accepted as a threat.
