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\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eRight-wing terrorism has been a major threat in the United States for at least a decade. According to the FBI, hate crimes, the majority of which target a person’s race or ethnicity, \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hate-crimes-rose-17-percent-last-year-according-to-new-fbi-data/2018/11/13/e0dcf13e-e754-11e8-b8dc-66cca409c180_story.html?utm_term=.de19dcb02fd7\u0022\u003erose 17% in 2017\u003c/a\u003e, while anti-Semitic crimes in particular rose 37%. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism indicates that far-right or white-supremacist movements were responsible for 387 extremist-related fatalities, or 71%, in the US between 2008 and 2017, compared with 100 fatalities, or 26%, for Islamist extremists.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eThis data contravenes the Trump administration’s claim that most terrorists are \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/magazine/FBI-charlottesville-white-nationalism-far-right.html\u0022\u003e‘foreign-born’\u003c/a\u003e. Given the excited reaction of right-wing extremists to presidential rhetoric, and the angry political polarisation that appears to be both a cause and an effect of the Trump presidency, it is logical to expect right-wing terrorism in the United States – some of it overtly pro-state – to rise further.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eWere it not for 9/11, right-wing terrorism might have become a central US government concern. In the 1990s, terrorism was at a crossroads. The ethno-nationalist type in Europe was on the wane, as the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Basque nationalist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna or ETA wound down their armed campaigns and moved towards predominantly non-violent political approaches. Far-left ideological outfits like the Red Brigades in Italy and Greece’s 17 November Group were enervated.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eIn the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, in itself constituted a dramatic spike in right-wing terrorism. But, though he did enlist several accomplices, the FBI assessed McVeigh to be essentially a lone-wolf operator, increased surveillance and infiltration of right-wing militias that had already been spurred by the violent campaigns of the Aryan Nations in the 1980s, and considered the phenomenon contained by the end of the decade.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eDuring this period, although incidents such as the Ruby Ridge and Waco stand-offs and the growth of the internet were quietly galvanising right-wing extremists in the United States, transnational jihadist terrorism steadily intensified. The failed 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, al-Qaeda’s 1998 US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, and its attack on the USS \u003cem\u003eCole\u003c/em\u003e in Yemen are just a few examples.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eThe 9/11 attacks were and have remained aberrationally catastrophic, but they stimulated concerns about jihadism in the United States and Europe – sustained by the 2004 attacks in Madrid, the 2005 attacks in London and many others – that almost completely crowded out residual worries about right-wing terrorism. In 2005, the US Department of Homeland Security had only one analyst working on non-Islamist terrorist threats.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eAmerican populism and white nationalism\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eCurrent US political tensions are conducive to right-wing extremism. President Donald Trump has used racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Racial and anti-immigrant anxieties, stoked beforehand by Barack Obama’s two-term presidency, appear to have motivated a significant minority of American voters and given rise to a broader white nationalism.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eThe current president, meanwhile, has falsely claimed, among other things, that Latin American immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, and that large numbers of jihadists are infiltrating the US–Mexico border. He has appeared tolerant of white supremacism, drawing moral equivalence between those protesting Confederate memorials and ‘Unite the Right’ demonstrators – including self-identified neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists and white nationalists, as well as various militias – who killed one of the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eHe has derided black professional football players for protesting police violence against African Americans by kneeling during the national anthem, and routinely insults African-American journalists. Indeed, in advance of his campaign to become president his main political platform was the promotion of ‘birtherism’ – the allegation that Barack Obama was born in Africa and not the United States – a conspiracy fantasy that can only be understood in racial terms.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eIn the run-up to the recent mid-term elections, Trump characterised a group of several thousand economic migrants making their way to the Mexican border as a ‘caravan’ seeking to ‘invade’ the United States. Even though the migrants were nowhere near the border, he deployed thousands of active-service US troops there, arguably in violation of the federal Posse Comitatus Act, in a pre-election stunt.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eIn late October, a fanatical Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to 12 of his political opponents, and an anti-immigration extremist – having disparaged online a Jewish charity for helping Latin American immigrants enter the United States – shot dead 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. It was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in US history.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eAmerica unprepared\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eAs recently reported in the \u003cem\u003eNew York Times\u003c/em\u003e, almost a decade ago, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis warned of a rise in right-wing extremism. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s secretary of homeland security, recognised the threat and the potential synergies between far-right movements and a rising number of unhappy US veterans, and the need to ramp up domestic counter-terrorism.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eUntil Eric Holder, the attorney general under Obama, reconvened the Justice Department’s Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee in 2014, it had not met for 13 years and had no budget or staff. But congressional Republicans objected to the Obama administration’s nascent domestic counter-terrorism mobilisation, casting it as a partisan effort to demonise those whose views diverged from the liberal mainstream that Obama represented. At the same time, continuing high-profile jihadist terrorist operations such as the Boston Marathon attacks tended to obscure concerns about right-wing terrorism.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eThe Justice Department concedes that it has a ‘blind spot’ as to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, and that both state and local authorities are lax about reporting them. The FBI has about 1,000 open cases of domestic terrorism – about the same size as its file on the Islamic State (ISIS).\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eIn sum, American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies remain unprepared to address right-wing terrorism. So far, operatives have seemed amateurish and incompetent, and more inclined towards loose bluster and hooliganism than focused action. But military and paramilitary connections suggest a potentially dangerous trajectory, and it is a hallmark of terrorism that relatively few committed individuals are required to make a serious impact.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eThe transatlantic dimension\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eEurope is hardly immune to right-wing terrorism. On 22 July 2011, Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed a total of 77 people and injured over 300 in two attacks: a van bomb in Oslo followed by a far more lethal gun attack on a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on Utøya Island, 38 kilometres northwest of Oslo. The operation demonstrated just how much carnage a single competent and determined terrorist can wreak on an unsuspecting population.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eIslamist terrorist threats are still the most salient ones, and Breivik himself was assessed to be mentally disturbed (though legally sane) and to have acted alone despite his claims of networked support. In retrospect, however, his militantly anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant agenda appeared to presage a right-wing, fascist disposition that would become an influential political trend in Europe, due partly to the accelerating influx of mainly Muslim refugees on account of persistent unrest in the Middle East.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eYet counter-terrorism priorities in Europe have paralleled those in the United States, heavily privileging Islamist threats over right-wing ones. In Germany, \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opinion/chemnitz-maassen-afd-far-right.html\u0022\u003esynergistic relationships\u003c/a\u003e have arisen between right-wing groups and elements of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. In June, French authorities rolled up \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/world/europe/france-far-right-plots-muslims.html\u0022\u003eOperational Forces Action\u003c/a\u003e, a far-right, anti-Muslim group headed by a former policeman, for conspiring to commit acts of terrorism and on weapons charges.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eThere is a transatlantic dimension to countering right-wing terrorism, as there is to thwarting Islamist terrorism. Although the right-wing variety is more localised, and is unlikely to engender a transnational powerhouse similar to al-Qaeda or ISIS, the dynamics of each phenomenon appear to be broadly convergent. Before and immediately after 9/11, al-Qaeda contemplated Europe as a kind of staging area for attacks on the United States. But as the group was forced to decentralise, it increasingly regarded Europe as a target in its own right and encouraged self-initiated, home-grown terrorism on both sides of the ocean; ISIS has broadly followed this pattern. Thus, jihadism has become more localised, and more like right-wing terrorism.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eTransatlantic cooperation on jihadist terrorism became robust after 9/11, and has since evolved and adjusted quite nimbly to changes in threat perceptions and patterns. While the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union may initially compromise Europe’s transnational counter-terrorism capabilities, the negative effects can probably be mitigated.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\u0022color: #1a1a1a;\u0022\u003eAccordingly, there are no major institutional, bureaucratic or operational reasons that transatlantic partnerships and modes of cooperation painstakingly developed since 9/11 to deal with jihadist terrorism could not be readily applied to structurally comparable right-wing terrorism. The resurgence and, to varying degrees, political mainstreaming of xenophobic nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic, however, could constitute formidable political impediments.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_yzUXMjH69k61iJJ9gJO4dg"))});
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #1a1a1a;\"\u003eBy focusing their counter-terrorism policies on the activities of Islamist groups, the United States and Europe are neglecting the more potent threat posed by right-wing extremists, argues Jonathan Stevenson.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e
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