President Trump gave a much better statement Monday on the dismaying events in Charlottesville than he did on Saturday. But while he now is willing to call out the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists as “evil,” he still won’t use the T word—“terrorism.”
This is ironic. Trump spent years attacking Barack Obama for supposedly not being willing to “name the enemy”—meaning Islam—in the war on terror, yet now Trump is proving mealy-mouthed in discussing the attack carried out by white supremacist James Alex Fields, who allegedly drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters.
“Certainly I think we can confidently call it a form of terrorism,” the National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said. Other analysts agree. Yet Trump’s reluctance to use that word highlights his blind spot when it comes to terrorism from the far-right fringe.
Just last week, Sebastian Gorka, a White House aide who was previously a contributor to the alt-right website Breitbart, denounced the very idea of “lone wolf” terrorists, which, he claimed, was “invented by the last administration to make Americans stupid.” (In fact the term was invented decades ago by white supremacists advocating “leaderless resistance.”)
When Maggie Haberman of the New York Times brought up the example of Timothy McVeigh—a far-right terrorist who carried out the second-deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building—Gorka was dismissive. “White men” and “white supremacists” are not “the problem,” he claimed, adding: “It’s this constant, ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t, Maggie Haberman. Go to Sinjar. Go to the Middle East, and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.”
Gorka is right that Islamist terrorism is a bigger problem around the world than any other form of terrorism. It’s certainly a bigger problem in the Middle East. It’s also accurate to say that Islamist terrorism poses, on balance, a bigger danger to U.S. security than right-wing terrorism. The Islamists have shown a greater interest in, and capability of, carrying out mass-casualty attacks such as the 9/11 operation that dwarf even the Oklahoma city bombing, which killed 168 innocents.
But one does not have to dismiss the Islamist threat to note that domestic right-wing terrorist is also very real and very serious. The Government Accountability Office found that terrorist attacks between Sept. 12, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2016, killed 225 people in the United States. “Of these, 106 were killed by far right violent extremists in 62 separate incidents, and 119 were victims of radical Islamist violent extremists in 23 separate incidents.” These statistics suggest that successful Islamist attacks are more deadly on average but that white supremacist attacks are more common. The total number of victims is very similar—especially when one adds in the toll from Saturday’s attack, which killed one person and injured numerous others.
Charlottesville was a sign that the far-right threat is growing. A white supremacist adopted one of the signature tactics employed by ISIS—driving a car into a crowd of pedestrians—while other fascists paraded with military-style weaponry that, according to Virginia’s governor, would allow them to outgun state troopers. These developments could presage an increase in white supremacist violence.
Yet the Trump administration seems to be much more focused on the threat from “radical Islamic terrorism” than it is on the white-supremacist variety. The Department of Homeland Security recently cut off a grant to a group called Life After Hate working to deradicalize white supremacists even though it’s seen a twenty-fold increase in demand for its services since last November. This stands in contrast to DHS’s decision to set up an entirely new office, the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, to highlight offenses committed by undocumented immigrants even though the crime rate among immigrants is actually lower than among the native-born.
This emphasis is hardly surprising given how passionately Trump talks about victims of attacks committed by Muslims and immigrants. As Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star notes, the president was positively perfunctory, by contrast, in speaking Monday about Heather Heyer, the paralegal who was killed in Charlottesville in the white-supremacist car attack.
There is no need to pick and choose among different varieties of terrorism. Indeed, there are more similarities than differences between terrorists of different persuasions. All are driven by fanaticism that causes them to deny the humanity of their victims, and all are motivated as well by a desire for excitement and renown that they do not find in their drab everyday lives. Whatever cause they claim to kill on behalf of, terrorists are the enemies of civilized society. America’s leaders need to stand against them. All of them. No exceptions.
Max Boot is a Weekly Standard contributing editor, senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations and author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present.
