CNN: "U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In case you missed it, CNN yesterday posted a must-read piece by Peter Bergen and David Sterman on how Islamic jihadism is considered to be so much worse than domestic right-wing extremism -- among the public, in the media -- even though the latter is much more deadly than the former. Here are some highlights, starting with a reference to the Kansas City KKK killer, though you would do well to read it in its entirety:

Now let's do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting "Heil Hitler" after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted "Allahu Akbar." Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.

Yet the death toll in the shootings in Kansas is similar to that of last year's Boston Marathon bombings, where three people were killed and the suspects later killed a police officer as they tried to evade capture. (Many more, of course, were also wounded in the Boston attacks; 16 men, women and children lost limbs.)

In fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).

By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.

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Moreover, since 9/11 none of the more than 200 individuals indicted or convicted in the United States of some act of jihadist terrorism have acquired or used chemical or biological weapons or their precursor materials, while 13 individuals motivated by right wing extremist ideology, one individual motivated by left-wing extremist ideology, and two with idiosyncratic beliefs, used or acquired such weapons or their precursors.

This is to take nothing away from 9/11, which was obviously a horrendous attack, nor to suggest that jihadism is no longer a serious threat. Certainly part of the reason for its decline is that the U.S. has expended vast resources combating it, both overseas and at home, including building up the national security state. And of course America isn't jihadism's only target. Whether al Qaeda or related to al Qaeda or not, it has struck elsewhere, including in Mumbai in 2008.

But Bergen and Sterman are right that jihadism is blown way out of proportion in the U.S. and that the media deserve much of the blame for that. I suppose racial/ethnic/religious/cultural bias is to explain for that. Even a known KKK leader and virulent anti-Semite can be your friendly next-door neighbor in the mostly white and Christian parts of the U.S. He may look like you and act like you, for the most part, and in any event he may not seem all that their weird despite his extremist views, some of which, deep down, you may even share.

But anyone with even slightly brown skin, with an accent, with odd dress, with weird-smelling food, with strange religious or cultural practises, well, even it hardly matters whether that person is Muslim or Buddhist or Sikh or Hindu or whatever -- he or she is somehow the Other, and that frightens you, because difference terrifies you and because, of course, you've been told by the media -- and it's only worse if your media outlets of choice are Fox News or right-wing talk radio -- that the real threats to America, to your way of life, to you personally, are of the non-white, non-Christian, "foreign" variety.

The point, of course, is that while jihadi terrorism is very much a real thing, the more urgent danger within America's borders is right-wing extremism, which while appearing in different forms is very much a significant threat to the country and its inhabitants. Look no further if you're concerned about your way of life, about yourself personally. These are people who blow up government buildings and plant bombs and drive around major cities randomly shooting people or even targeting certain kinds of people -- people just like you in many ways, no matter your race, creed, color, or hue.

It's much easier to vilify the foreign Other, I know, to lump those "different" from you into one big huge threat from which you can cower in fear with those you think are like you. But I would say it's far more advisable to deal with the world as it is and to understand the real threats for what they are.

Sex torture: Mumbai suspect claims abuse

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This headline from Wednesday's Telegraph piqued my curiosity:

Female FBI officer 'tortured Mumbai terror attacks suspect with sex'

According to Fahim Ansari, one of the planners of the attacks, "three foreigners, including [a 'white woman], sexually abused him, causing him 'severe itching and wounds' on his body, including his genitals. A Muslim, he claims that "this amounts to torture because it is against his religion."

And I suppose it is, however little sympathy we may have for him, given that -- assuming this is true -- he was degraded and humiliated (and perhaps physically harmed).

Now, it may all be a lie aimed at discrediting Indian authorities, but -- again, if true -- it further undermines the non-Muslim world's standing in the eyes of Muslims, contributing (along with Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the CIA's black sites) to the massive gulf that separates us from them.

And, yes, I know, when it comes to human rights, the Muslim world has, on the whole, no credibility at all. But we, Indians and otherwise, should be better than this.

Grown-ups in charge

By Carol Gee

For a time prior to November 4 of this year, I was afraid to hope for a set of healthy-sized Democratic victories. Eight years of things going wrong with elections had worn my hopes thin. Then the positive numbers began to come in and I could breathe more easily. The grown-ups were going to take charge again. The adolescent was on his way to Texas.

For a time following the election, I was hopeful that Democrats would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Two years of near-impotence in the face of Republican leaders' obstructionism had worn out my faith in the Senate's Democratic leaders. Now the numbers are in and I must reckon with the necessity of bipartisanship to get anything substantive done in the 111th Congress. Grown-ups in both Executive and Legislative will rebalance their power. The bully on the see-saw has left the playground.

For a time following the official transition into the "Obama Transition," I was optimistic about a standard set of Progressive nominations fitting my agenda. A month of leaked names, intros and announcements has tempered my wide-eyed optimism. On the scale of left to right the numbers fall more toward the center than the left. Grown-up leaders can inhabit the Center and we will still be OK. Childish ideologues will be replaced with pragmatic over-achievers.

For a time after the world economic crash and attacks on Mumbai, I was anxious for the world's well-being. As the weeks have passed and I am out and about in my community, I see for rent signs in stores, empty parking lots, and fewer help wanted ads in bankrupting newspapers. And I hear tension in my grown-up children's voices as they ask without saying, "Am I grown up enough to handle what's coming?" While Bush president fiddles their Rome is burning.

For the time being I understand the recession has spread to my own, and my turf. My hope that the downturn is time-limited and finite is buoyed by my own history as a "Depression baby." I am grown up now and so are my children and most of my grandchildren. Our change-leaders are having to grow up fast as they face the worst challenges since the Great Depression. And we have grown desperately tired of Bush 43, the neocon's darling, manipulatable, boy wonder from Texas.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Bond lives

By Capt. Fogg

As I keep saying, it's not terrorism if you're not terrified. The notion of a United States with 300 million people cringing and cowering in fear that a dozen nutjobs from abroad might come and shoot us all is, quite frankly disgusting and reminding ourselves at every football game that we live in the home of the brave doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Very odd in a country where so many of us are heavily armed.

As one who grew up in the years immediately following WWII, I've long been impressed with the stories of the citizens of London going about their business, upper lips as stiff as Sheffield steel while the bombs and rockets fell from the sky, night after night. People slept in the underground and in the suburbs, houses such as my parents once lived in had a reinforced bomb shelter in the back garden. If they were terrified, they kept it to themselves. England was devastated, the English were not.

I have to be impressed by the story related today in the Daily Mail by an Englishman who took refuge in a restaurant in the Taj Mahal hotel while the shooting went on on the other side of an improvised barricade.

I was extremely lucky. I was with a very good bunch of people. Three or four of us were Brits,

said Nick Hayward. Remaining calm and sober, they conducted a search for booby traps and built barricades.

At 5 o'clock in the morning, as it began to seem that Indian troops would soon retake the hotel lobby, the group, stirred but not shaken, found some glasses and a bottle of vintage champagne:

[T]he head waiter came rushing across to me and said, "No, no, you can't do that!" and I said, "Well we're going to" and he said, "No sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes."

My kind of people -- and my kind of hotel.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)