A new Washington Post “analysis” of domestic terrorism argues that attacks from white supremacists and other “far-right attackers” have been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency, and “surged since President [Donald] Trump took office.” It’s a familiar storyline meant to assure liberals that, yes, Trump-motivated right-wing terrorists are running wild. There are, however, a few problems with this narrative.
The numbers hardly warrant the use of the word “surge” — meaning a sudden, powerful forward or upward movement. There’s no evidence of a “surge” either in historical context and it appears more the Post is bolstering its own findings to push preconceived partisan notions about the state of the nation.
Or, in other words, fewer homicides were committed by political terrorists of any stripe in the United States in 2017 than were committed by illegal immigrants in the state of Texas alone–not that we should worry about that, right?
Then again, even if we use the criteria offered by GTD, we need to be exceptionally generous to even get to 36 incidents of right-wing violence in 2017 (it seems more like around 30?).
Part of the problem is how events are categorized. The Las Vegas shooter’s motivations are still unknown, yet the CTD had no problem categorizing the murderer of 59 people as an “anti-government extremist.”
You need these kinds of assumptions to create the narrative of a “surge” in right-wing terrorism.
In some cases, the perpetrators are only “suspected” of being right-wing terrorists. Some of these incidents could have been the work of one person, as in the pellet-gun shootings of Muslims in New York. In other incidents, we are asked to treat patently insane people as if they have coherent political agendas. In still others, the attacks could easily have non-terroristic motivating factors.
In San Juan, Puerto Rico — apparently a hotbed of white supremacy — an incendiary device was thrown into a gay night club. No one was injured,and no one was caught and no one claimed responsibility for the act. The episode doesn’t even earn a “suspected” designation from GTD. And the Washington Post almost surely added this to its right-wing terror stats.
If the definition of domestic terrorism is muddy at best, the definition of “right-wing” terrorism is often arbitrary. To help bolster right-wing terrorist stats, for instance, we would have to include every anti-Semitic act. The Washington Post even mentions an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study showing “a 57 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.”
If anything, the ADL study is the kind of cautionary document demonstrating how difficult it is, not only to quantify these incidents, but to categorize them ideologically. The ADL’s faulty data was self-reported, and most of the “surge” can be attributed to a single Jewish teen in Israel calling in a number of bomb threats to Jewish centers.
In the real world, a Jewish American is probably more likely to encounter anti-Semitism at a college campus or progressive march in the guise of “anti-Zionism” than he is anywhere else, because Jew hatred is non-partisan.
Then there is the matter of inconsistently defining terrorism. If throwing a rock through the window of an Islamic center is an act of right-wing terrorism, why isn’t it an act of left-wing terrorism for anti-capitalists to throw rocks through the window of a business in Portland? Surely both fall under the description of terror, which is “the threatened or actual use of violence by nonstate actors seeking to attain political, economic, religious or social goals through fear or intimidation.” Oddly, only one of these genres makes the cut at GTD.
According to their own data, the Post shows that there were more fatalities due to domestic Islamist terrorism than to all other types combined over the past three years. In 2017, there were 16 fatalities due to Islamic extremism. Fatalities from Islamic terrorism in 2016 — which includes 49 killed in a gay Orlando nightclub by an ISIS-inspired jihadi — and 2015 were higher than all alleged right-wing terror attacks. There’s just as strong a case to be made that there has been a “surge” in Islamic terrorism in the United States since Donald Trump ran for president.
Then again, none of the three authors of the article take the time to mention a single one of those Islamic attacks. So while we learn that Trump is being blamed for a pipe bomb being thrown “yards” away from an Islamic enter by the “White Rabbit 3 Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia,” we read nothing about the man who pledged his allegiance to ISIS before killing eight people on the West Side Highway in Manhattan.
So it goes.
Paul Plante says
Thank God we have the Cape Charles Mirror to deal with this kind of fake news or false news, or clearly, one-sided news from the Washington Post, and there I am quite serious.
Paul Plante says
The Cape Charles Mirror says: In other incidents, we are asked to treat patently insane people as if they have coherent political agendas.
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Amen to that in spades.
Insane people are insane.
They are insane because they lack the ability, for whatever reason, to act rationally in society, so that they are a danger to themselves and/or others.
People who are insane by definition cannot have a rational, coherent political agenda.
And somebody in America today who glorifies the Nazis and/or the rug-chewing madman Adolph Hitler is neither sane nor rational and should be removed from society and institutionalized in a place for the criminally insane, which of course would violate their rights in a Democracy to be who they want to be, and that would have the liberals howling and the ACLU yowling, so it isn’t going to happen.
And besides, as any of us who follow the courts in this country know, and know well, Nazi hate speech is protected by the Supreme Court, and by extension then, so are the Nazis who make that kind of hate speech, so what is the failing Washington Post blathering about and whining about when some of these Supreme Court-approved Nazis act out on their Supreme Court-approved hate speech?
As to the protection of hate speech by Nazis in this country, and all other WHACK-JOBS and LOONIES and CRAZIES, as well, including the Democrat party paramilitaries known as ANTI-FA, we have this from an American Library Association site, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/hate to wit:
Hate Speech and Hate Crime
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content.
To be clear, the First Amendment does not protect behavior that crosses the line into targeted harassment or threats, or that creates a pervasively hostile environment.
But merely offensive or bigoted speech does not rise to that level, and determining when conduct crosses that line is a legal question that requires examination on a case-by-case basis.
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Now, you would think that a Washington, D,C, rag that thinks itself “venerable” would know all of that, and would draw the same conclusion that I do, which is that if we do have some right-wing WHACKOS out there doing violence, we have the United States Supreme Court and the liberals in this country to thank for it.
Getting back to the ALA site:
Hate Speech in the Law and the Courts
Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”
(Matal v. Tam, 2017)
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In Matal v. Tam, a recent U.S. Supreme Court case, the rock group “The Slants,” chose that name to dilute the term’s denigrating force as a derogatory term for Asians.
The Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) denied an application for registration of the name under 15 U.S.C. 1052(a), which prohibits the registration of trademarks that may “disparage . . . or bring . . . into contemp[t] or disrepute” any “persons, living or dead.”
The Supreme Court affirmed the Federal Circuit in finding the clause unconstitutional.
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Is the Supreme Court inciting people to violence here by encouraging hate speech?
Or is it really a case of where they are powerless to do anything about it, given how hate speech has been a part of American society since before these was a United States of America.
Getting back to the ALA site:
“Hate speech” doesn’t have a legal definition under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for rudeness, evil ideas, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn.
Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons.
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That of course, would have to include Hillary Clinton calling loyal American citizens a “BASKET OF DEPLORABLES” and Joe Biden refering to Trump supporters as “Dregs Of Society,” which are two prime examples of how hate speech has entered into our main-stream politics at the national level in this country, along with Nancy Pelosi attacking the Republicans for “trying to make America white,” which is a prime example of a form of expression through which the speaker, in this case Nancy Pelosi, intends to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons in this country with white skin, for partisan political gain.
Getting back to the ALA site:
In the United States, hate speech enjoys substantial protection under the First Amendment.
This is based upon the belief that freedom of speech requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear.
Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group.
In 1969, the Supreme Court protected a Ku Klux Klan member’s hateful and disparaging speech directed towards African-Americans, holding that such speech could only be limited if it posed an “imminent danger” of inciting violence.
The court ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that a state could only forbid or proscribe advocacy that is “directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
In 1978, the Supreme Court upheld an appellate court decision that allowed a group of neo-Nazis to march on the streets of an Illinois suburb housing a substantial Jewish population that included Holocaust survivors. (Collin v. Smith, 1978).
It 1992, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a teenager convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family’s home (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 1992).
In 2011, the Supreme Court set aside a civil judgment that punished a church group, the Westboro Baptist Church, for picketing a military funeral with signs displaying messages disparaging the dead officer, LGBTQ persons, and the U.S. government (Snyder v. Phelps, 2011).
Many Americans found the signs hateful and offensive, but the Supreme Court’s decision re-confirmed the Supreme Court’s historically strong protection of freedom of speech that does not promote imminent violence.
According to the Supreme Court, we “must tolerate insulting, and even outrageous, speech in order to provide adequate ‘breathing space’ to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.” (Boos v, Barry, 1988).
Tolerance of hate speech not only protects and upholds everyone’s right to express outrageous, unorthodox or unpopular speech; it also allows society and the targets of hate speech to know about and respond to racist or hateful speech and protect against its harms.
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Thus, the hate speech of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is protected,
And thus is life in our America today.