Our exaggerated terrorist fears
Who’s a bigger terror threat to the United States right now: Islamic extremists or white nationalists?
That’s been a big question on Americans’ minds, especially since a neo-Nazi killed a counterprotester and injured 19 others during an Aug. 12 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Democrats are more worried about white nationalists, while Republicans are more likely to identify Islamic extremists as the greater terror threat.
But here’s what neither side will tell you: In both cases, the threat is negligible. Whatever their politics, Americans radically exaggerate the danger of radical terrorism. They just point to different terrorists, depending on their point of view.
And that speaks to the real problem here, which doesn’t have to do with terrorism at all. It’s the hyperpolarization of our politics, which leads us to demonize the other team. Most Muslims are not Islamic extremists, any more than most supporters of President Trump are white nationalists. But the bogeyman of terrorism blinds us to these distinctions, transforming our political opponents into existential enemies.
Witness how both sides cite their own statistics, each designed to make the other look worse. After Charlottesville, liberals pointed out — accurately — that there have been more fatal attacks on U.S. soil by far-right extremists (62 incidents) than by Islamic extremists (23 incidents) since Sept. 11, 2001.
And conservatives said — again, correctly — that more people had died at the hands of Islamic extremists (119) than at the hands of the far-right attackers (106). But nearly half of the people murdered by Muslim terrorists died in a single incident, the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting; if you subtract that, liberals countered, the murder toll from the far right is almost twice as high as that from Islamic extremists.
But guess what? In the grand scheme, all of these threats are infinitesimal. Since 2001, your chance of being crushed to death by an unstable television or piece of furniture has been greater than your chance of dying at the hands of a terrorist. About 100 Americans die every day in automobile accidents. So this coming weekend, more of us will perish on our roads than the total number of deaths from terrorism since 2001.
Here liberals will insist that white nationalism is different from Islamic extremism, because racism is baked into America’s historical DNA. And it has recently received a big boost from the president of the United States, whose odious “violence on both sides” comments after Charlottesville placed white nationalists on the same moral plane as their opponents.
All true. It’s also true that the Trump administration recently cut federal funds for groups that fight white supremacists and neo-Nazis, focusing the government’s antiterror efforts on Muslims. Indeed, many Americans still don’t seem to regard white racists like James Alex Fields — the alleged killer in Charlottesville — as “terrorists” at all.
But it’s absurd to saddle all Trump supporters with the mantle of terrorism. And if you think otherwise, think back to the Orlando shooting and the ways that some conservatives used it to slander all Muslims.
When Omar Mateen murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub last year, conservatives were quick to note that Muslims are less likely to embrace equal rights for homosexuals than other Americans are. About twothirds of Americans support samesex marriage, for example, but only 4 in 10 American Muslims do.
And worldwide, majority-Muslim countries are overwhelmingly antigay. In a 2013 poll, 97 percent of people in Jordan said that homosexuality should “not be accepted by society”; in Egypt, 95 percent agreed; in Tunisia, it was 94 percent.
So Islam is an “intolerant religion” that provoked Mateen into mass murder, right? Wrong. Not every Muslim is antigay, of course. And even among those who denounce homosexuality, the vast majority don’t think it’s legitimate to take up arms against it.
Likewise, not everyone who voted for Donald J. Trump is a hard-core racist. About 30 percent of them were Latino and 8 percent were African American; indeed, Trump polled better among both groups than GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney did four years earlier.
Did Trump’s calls to “build a wall” and ban Muslims galvanize white racists to his side? Of course. There’s a reason the likes of David Duke have praised him, after all.
But no matter how much racism they harbor in their hearts, most of these voters would never wear Nazi regalia or carry a tiki torch in a white-supremacist parade. And, most of all, they would never consider murdering in the name of their beliefs.
There are plenty of bigots in the United States, of every creed and color. And yes, we have to be vigilant about identifying and neutralizing the real terrorists among them, whether Muslim or white supremacist.
But imagining everyone in the other camp as a potential terrorist — or as an apologist for the same — is the ultimate red herring. It’s bipartisan, infecting liberals and conservatives alike. And it’s time for it to stop.