Racist & Islamist terrorists: Close kin
The slaying of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., was the latest in a recent stretch of white supremacist violence in America. That includes Dylann Roof’s 2015 massacre at a Charleston church to the Manhattan sword murder, this March, of Timothy Caughman, a victim randomly selected because he was African American. The accused in that case, James Harris Jackson, told the Daily News that he had found kinship and inspiration online in neo-Nazi forums such as the Daily Stormer, which finally became anathema to web hosting companies after Heyer’s death.
These and other crimes, supported by methods of escalating recruitment and incitement that mirror strategies employed by Islamist terror groups, underscore how critical it is not to ignore the overlap of Islamist and white supremacist groups when countering violent extremism.
In the United Kingdom, four soldiers were recently arrested under counterterrorism laws on suspicion of belonging to neo-Nazi National Action. The group endorsed the June 2016 murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, declaring that killer Thomas Mair put “Britain first” as Cox “would have filled Yorkshire with more subhumans.” National Action, which boasted “only 649 MPs to go,” was added to the UK’s list of terror groups in December; the government noted that the group is jonesing for a vicious “race war” and even lauded the ISIS attack on the LGBT Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
National Action’s “extremely violent” propaganda, disseminated via social media, is “particularly aimed at recruiting young people,” the UK guide states.
For anyone who studies Islamic terrorism, that’s all too familiar. Put their professed religious beliefs aside — and this isn’t that farfetched, considering Al Qaeda literally put religion on the backseat and said all jihadists “pious and immoral” are welcome — and Islamic extremists have core commonalities with white supremacists.
Both seek a society of exclusion or subjugation. Both find solace in their misogyny, and only want women in their ranks who wait on the men.
In militancy, both believe violence is justifiable, if not necessary, to achieve their aims.
At times, they’re pulling from the same recruiting pool: the vulnerable, those fond of projection for their own shortcomings, those obsessed with superiority, those prone to domestic violence.
Both have been targeting college students. Both, hampered by increased online censorship and hackers, will sink further into the dark web to evade detection.
Their respective anti-Semitism buoys the other, while both neoNazi and Islamist terror groups try to capitalize off racial strife. The latest issue of Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine exploited racial incidents in the U.S. and tried to recruit off “a powerful return of racist and nationalist tendencies amongst the vast majority of Western masses.” White supremacist groups also recruit off racist and nationalist tendencies.
With both, you have to worry not only about the card-carrying members but the sympathizers, whether networked or unorganized, who will cover up crimes, share propaganda, aid and abet, incite and stoke extremism. An ABC News/Washington Post poll after the Charlottesville murder found 9% of Americans think it’s “acceptable” to hold neoNazi views; 8% told pollsters they had “no opinion.”
The English-language opensource jihad manuals disseminated online for years by international terrorists have much to share with domestic terrorists in terms of low-tech tactics and do-it-yourself terrorism; before a white supremacist plowed into peaceful counter-protesters in Charlottesville, there were numerous ISIS tutorials on vehicle attacks.
Weeks after President Trump took office, reports indicated that the administration wanted to focus the federal government’s Countering Violent Extremism program solely on Islamist extremism. Detailing a past year of hatchet and knife attacks, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security in May warned that white supremacists “likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”
For a window into how that terrorism will organize and materialize in the future, look no further than the Islamist terrorists who have left their mark on America.