The Real Threat to America Comes From AmericansYou mean when the country’s attention was drawn to shooting of a woman by a Somali-America police officer named Mohamed Noor two weeks before. All of a sudden a mosque has a small bomb…in an area where no one is going to be…at 500am, when there are no people present in the building…where it takes the nation’s attention off the police shooting. And you think this was muted:
Just as the Arab world struggles to come to grips with jihadism, the United States has failed to grapple with its own demons.
BY KIM GHATTAS
Kim Ghattas is a BBC correspondent covering international affairs and a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She is the author of The Secretary: A Journey With Hillary Clinton From Beirut to the Heart of American Power.
This month, a man was arrested in Oklahoma City for trying to detonate 1,000 pounds of explosives in a cargo van parked downtown. The attack, he hoped, would cripple the government and start a revolution. Last October, three men were arrested in Kansas for plotting to bomb an apartment complex and a mosque using four cars laden with explosives.
In these febrile days, where terrorists have sought to wreak fear and chaos from Orlando to Paris, and now Barcelona, you’d expect wall-to-wall coverage on cable news about these foiled plots. Terrorism experts would be wheeled out to opine for hours on all angles, from the explosives used to the profile of the would-be attackers to how and why they were radicalized.
Instead, the two incidents got barely any coverage — some brief news spots here and there and a few mentions online. Ask any Arab-American or Muslim in America why those incidents weren’t covered ad nauseam and they’ll reply deadpan: because the would-be attackers were white.
So why has this growing threat not received the same coverage as attacks carried out by Islamist jihadis or Muslim lone wolves? The answer goes to the heart of what every society struggles with: admitting that it can produce darkness.
The alternative explanation — that the plots were ignored because they failed — doesn’t hold water. Just think of the alarmist coverage every time a plot hatched in Yemen targeting the United States is foiled. Nor were these isolated incidents. The FBI just warned that white supremacist groups have already carried out more attacks in the years since 9/11 than any other domestic extremist group and were likely to carry out more.
These attacks happen regularly — and receive barely any media attention. When a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, was torn apart by a homemade bomb on Aug. 5, the response was muted. When an Indian man was shot dead in February in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by a white man who shouted, “Get out of my country,” I struggled to find any coverage on American cable television. The BBC was one of the few media outlets to cover the story in any depth…
BOMB EXPLODES AT MINNESOTA MOSQUE DURING MORNING PRAYERS; FBI TERRORISM TASK FORCE INVESTIGATING
Supporters stream past Bloomington mosque after fire-bombing
‘You Are Minnesota & You Are America’: Hundreds Gather At Bloomington Mosque
FBI Investigates Bombing at Bloomington, Minnesota, Mosque
Or that there was not good coverage of Srinivas Kuchibhotla murder:
Hate Crime Is Feared as 2 Indian Engineers Are Shot in Kansas
The Fatal Shooting Of An Indian Man in South Carolina Is Under Investigation
Suspect in Kansas bar shooting of Indians apparently thought they were Iranians
Indian Man Killed in Shooting at Kansas Bar, Witnesses Say Gunman Shouted 'Get Out of My Country'
Ms Ghattas, this “muted coverage” was found with two Bing searches. Looks like it was covered extensively in America media, not counting foreign news services.
...People prefer to think evil comes from the outside, not from within. White nationalists and supremacists get treated as a curiosity and described as “dapper” even in progressive magazines like Mother Jones (the magazine was mocked and promptly changed the headline). It’s much easier to believe that the real threat emanates from people from “over there,” who wish Americans harm and threaten their way of life, than to ask hard questions about one’s own society and its unresolved issues.OK, I’ve had enough, read the rest of the article if you choose to. But not counting the 9/11 attacks (conveniently), lets look at the number of people who haven’t been murdered in white racist attacks since 2001:
Until last week, there was no liberal-conservative divide here. From Fox News to MSNBC, the approach was the same. This double standard in media coverage and political discourse, which also feeds Islamophobia, has now received more attention in the wake of the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, but it took a horrific car attack that killed a woman and white men brandishing torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” for the threat of domestic terrorism to rise to national attention.
The repeated invocations of those appalled by the Charlottesville violence has been: “We are better than this” or “this is not who we are.” It reminds me of friends in the Arab world shaking their heads at the violence meted out by the so-called Islamic State or the many awful suicide attacks of jihadi Islamists across the region. In the Middle East, too, the response of many to these crimes is to create distance from the perpetrators, often by blaming outsiders. The Islamic State is the creation of America, these people might say, or 9/11 was a Mossad plot to make Arabs look bad.
Yet the hard truth is that those who perpetrate terrorism are a product of their societies, even if they’re a minority. They’re the result of unresolved issues, deep-seated problems that have been glossed over.
Societies in the Arab world have long struggled with this conversation. Only when militants conducted suicide attacks inside Saudi Arabia in 2003 did the kingdom acknowledge that its austere interpretation of Islam had opened the way for some on the fringes to take it to violent extremes. The rise of the Islamic State again brought to the fore the debate about intolerant religious teachings used by radical clerics to whip disenfranchised youth into a frenzy. But only now is the sectarian hate speech favored by some clerics finally being called out forcefully and very publicly in the kingdom.
In the United States, Republicans harangued Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign for allegedly refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe the crimes of the Islamic State and other jihadis. Donald Trump apparently needed convincing to condemn Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan after Charlottesville but wasted no time in tweeting about the threat of Islamic terrorism after the Barcelona attack. Understandably, Democrats and many others are wary of using broad terms that could alienate 1.8 billion Muslims, who find their own world wrecked by a minority of radical violent extremists…
Dylann Roof murders nine in a church in Charleston, S.C
And the driving over of several people in a riot in Charlottesville VA.
Radical Muslim terrosit attack since 9/11:
Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad murder 21 more people in a crime wave that stretched from coast to coast.
Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian-American seeking to “avenge the deaths of Muslims worldwide” and “punish” the U.S. government, intentionally runs down nine people on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A 62-year-old Jewish man, Paul Schrum, who had gone to the movies in a heavily Jewish area near Baltimore, Maryland, is shot by Muslim gunman Mujtaba Rabbani Jabbar, 24. Jabbar shot Schrum three times in the upper body.
Michael Julius Ford, a 22-year-old convert to Islam, uses a long-barrel handgun to shoot four co-workers and a police officer at a Denver, Colorado, Safeway, claiming the attack was “Allah’s choice.”
Muslim Pakistani man Naveed Afzal Haq shot six women, killing one, at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building in Seattle, Washington. Haq grabbed a 14-year-old girl and used her as a hostage during the attack. Officials classified the attack as a “hate crime” rather than terrorism.
Jan. 1, 2008 – Egyptian-born cab driver Yaser Said shoots and kills his two daughters in Irving, Texas, because they were dating non-Muslim boys. The daughters had run away from home a week earlier, fearing their father would kill them.
July 6, 2008 – Muslim Pakistani man Chaudry Rashid, 56, strangled his 25-year-old daughter in Jonesboro, Georgia, after she said she wanted out of an arranged marriage. Police said the daughter, Sandela Kanwal, had argued with her father about the arrangement of her marriage to a man in Chicago. An officer explained, “At some point during the altercation, he ended up killing his daughter.”
Feb. 12, 2009 – Pakistani-American Muzzammil Syed Hassan was the CEO of the first American Muslim TV network broadcast in English, Bridge TV. Hassan beheaded his estranged wife, Aasiya Zubair, after she filed for divorce. Her body was found at the TV station. When he was arrested, he said he “felt an incredible amount of relief” after he killed the woman.
April 12, 2009 – Upon learning that they had patronized a strip club, a Muslim man shoots and kills his brother-in-law and another man in Phoenix, Arizona.
June 1, 2009 – In a drive-by shooting, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad – a convert to Islam who had traveled to Yemen and was deported to the U.S. for overstaying his visa – opened fire on U.S. soldiers standing in front of a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting office. Muhammad killed one private and injured another. When he was arrested Muhammad explained that he had planned to kill as many soldiers as possible and was given the assignment by Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
November 2009 – Iraq-born Muslim man Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, intentionally hit his daughter with his car and killed her because she had become “too Westernized.” He also attacked the mother of the girl’s boyfriend. Police said, “It occurred because [of] her not following traditional family values. He felt she was becoming too westernized, and he didn’t like that.” His daughter had backed out of an arranged marriage.
Nov. 5, 2009 – Muslim gunman Nidal Malik Hassan, an Army psychiatrist, fatally shoots 13 people and wounds 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas.
Dec. 4, 2009 – A Muslim graduate student from Saudi Arabia, Abdulsalam S. al-Zahrani, stabbed his non-Muslim Islamic studies professor, Richard T. Antoun, to death to avenge “persecuted” Muslims.
April 14, 2010 – A Muslim convert, James A. Larry, 33, became angry that his family would not convert to Islam and shot his mother, pregnant wife, infant son and two nieces in Marquette Park, Illinois.
April 30, 2011 – Rahim Abdul Alfetlawi, 46, shot his step-daughter in the head at point-blank range in Warren, Michigan, after she refused to strictly adhere to Muslim customs.
Sept. 11, 2011 – Three Jewish men are discovered in Waltham, Massachusetts, with their throats slit from ear to ear and nearly decapitated. Authorities believed the murders were not random, and thousands of dollars in cash and marijuana were left at the scene. According to reports, authorities believe Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, both Muslims, may have been responsible for the triple homicide.
Jan. 15, 2012 – A Jordanian Muslim man, Ali Mahwood-Awad Irsan, 57, gunned down Iranian medical student, Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a friend of his daughter and a Christian convert who widely denounced Islam. He later killed his Christian son-in-law after his daughter married him without permission. Assistant Harris County District Attorney Tammy Thomas told a district judge, “He said, ‘I killed that b–ch, and you’re next. No one insults my honor as a Muslim and gets away with it.'”
Feb. 7, 2013 – Yusuf Ibrahim, 28, shot two Coptic Christians to death and beheaded them in Buena Vista, New Jersey. He also removed their hands before burying their bodies in the backyard of an abandoned house. Quran 8:12 states, “When thy Lord was revealing to the angels, ‘I am with you; so confirm the believers. I shall cast into the unbelievers’ hearts terror; so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them!”
March 31, 2013 – Reshad Riddle walked into an Ashtabula, Ohio, church and fatally shot his father after an Easter service. After the shooting, witnesses say, walked through the church holding the gun and shouted that the slaughter was “the will of Allah. This is the will of God.”
April 15, 2013 – Muslim Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonate two pressure cooker bombs during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring an estimated 264 others.
Aug. 4, 2013 – A Muslim convert, Daymond Agnew, 34, went to an Ace Hardware store on a “mission from Allah to help people” before he fatally stabbed employee Daniel Joseph Stone 17 times.
April 27, 2014 – A 30-year-old Muslim man, Ali Muhammad Brown, is accused of shooting to death two men in Seattle and a man in New Jersey. According to local reports, he told police the killings were “vengeance” for U.S. actions in the Mideast. .
Sept. 25, 2014 – Alton Nolen is accused of beheading a woman in Moore, Oklahoma. Co-workers reported that Nolen had been trying to convert them to Islam. Nolen reportedly used “some Arabic terms” during his attack and had an interest in beheadings. Nolen told a judge, “I’m Muslim. My question is, do you have any Muslims that can represent me as a Muslim?”
May 3, 2015 – In Garland, Texas, Pamela Geller, along with her group the American Freedom Defense Initiative, hosted a “Draw Muhammad” event. Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi of Phoenix responded to a call to “avenge the prophet” and traveled to Garland, where they were shot and killed by a security guard after opening fire in an apparent attempt to get into the building. The guard was wounded in the attack. Islamic radicals have since called for Geller’s head, and vow to kill anyone who “blasphemes” Muhammad.
July 16, 2015 – Four U.S. Marines have been shot dead in an attack, reportedly by a lone Islamic gunman, on U.S. Navy facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke said five people died in all, including the gunman. Two law enforcement sources told CBS News that the shooting suspect was identified as Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, 24. Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait and emigrated to the U.S. where he reportedly became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
So yes, there is a small issue with morons calling themselves white separatist, etc. However, the larger terrorist threat at this moment is radical Islamic followers. And as soon as people like this author get that around their heads, perhaps we can start handling it.
PS: I really love that she is a fellow at the “policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.” Wilson was one of the biggest racist in presidential history and was very comfortable with his party’s affiliation with the KKK.
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