Critics: Trump should not ignore domestic terrorist threats

OKLAHOMA CITY — Bud Welch knows something about the human cost of terrorism. His 23-yearold daughter was killed when a rental truck packed with explosives destroyed the Oklahoma City federal building.

That was in 1995, when domestic terrorism seemed to be the nation’s most immediate security threat. Now President Donald Trump sees the greatest risk in potential attackers who sneak into the U.S. from abroad. But Welch and others say the administration can’t ignore threats from home.

“ISIS, to me, is really not a hell of a lot different than the militia movement in the U.S.,” he said, referring to anti-government groups that were provoked by deadly standoffs with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas — two flashpoints cited by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

A list of worldwide attacks recently released by Trump’s administration left off many that were carried out by right-wing extremists and white supremacists. And organizations that track terrorist and hate groups say the government focuses too narrowly on threats from the outside instead of adopting a broader approach.

In a move that the administration described as an anti-terrorism measure, Trump last month suspended the nation’s refugee program and banned travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations, although a federal court soon halted his executive order.

Welch disagrees with Trump’s order banning travelers from certain countries, particularly when no terrorist attack in the U.S. has been tied to refugees from those places.

“You’ve got to be honest with people and quit making up these stories,” he said. “But that’s the problem nowadays. We let politics get too involved.”

Since the Oklahoma City bombing, the Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked domestic terrorist plots and attacks in the United States. It lists more than 100, including some that shocked the nation: A 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that killed six; the slaying of nine black churchgoers during a 2015 prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina; and the ambushes last year that killed eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Legal scholar William Yeomans said Dylann Roof, convicted in the Charleston attack, is a “classic example of a homegrown domestic terrorist.”

“He certainly was inspired by domestic organizations,” said Yeomans, who is on the faculty at American University and formerly served as a highranking official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “He spent a lot of time on the internet looking at far right-wing websites.”

Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen said taking a more balanced look at all terror groups is “a bipartisan failure” — something that President Barack Obama’s administration could have handled better as well.