Non-Muslims Carried Out More than 90%
of All Terrorist Attacks in America
Global Research,
January 24, 2015
Washington's
Blog and Global Research 1 May 2013
Region: USA
This
article was first published May 1, 2013.
Terrorism
Is a Real Threat … But the Threat to the U.S. from Muslim Terrorists Has Been
Exaggerated
An
FBI report shows that only a small percentage of terrorist attacks carried out
on U.S. soil between
1980 and 2005 were perpetrated by Muslims.
Princeton
University’s Loon Watch compiled the following
chart from the FBI’s data:
Terrorist
Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database
According
to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States
than Islamic (7% vs 6%). These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism
in the name of their religion. These were not terrorists who happened to
be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based
on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.
(Loon
Watch also notes that less than 1%
of terror attacks in Europe were carried out by Muslims.)
U.S.
News and World Report noted in
February of this year:
Of
the more than 300 American deaths from political violence and mass shootings
since 9/11, only 33 have come at the hands of Muslim-Americans, according to
the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.
The Muslim-American suspects or perpetrators in these or other attempted
attacks fit no demographic profile—only 51 of more than 200 are of Arabic
ethnicity. In 2012, all but one of the nine Muslim-American terrorism plots
uncovered were halted in early stages. That one, an attempted bombing of a
Social Security office in Arizona, caused no casualties.
Wired
reported the
same month:
Since
9/11, [Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, writing for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and National
Security] and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism
launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were
murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention
killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American
terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team.
Law
enforcement, including “informants and undercover agents,” were involved in
“almost all of the Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered in 2012,” the
Triangle team finds. That’s in keeping with the FBI’s recent practice of using
undercover or double agents to encourage would-be terrorists to act on their
violent desires and arresting them when they do — a practice critics say comes
perilously close to entrapment. A difference in 2012 observed by Triangle: with
the exception of the Arizona attack, all the alleged plots involving U.S.
Muslims were “discovered and disrupted at an early stage,” while in the past
three years, law enforcement often observed the incubating terror initiatives
“after weapons or explosives had already been gathered.”
The
sample of Muslim Americans turning to terror is “vanishingly small,” Kurzman
tells Danger Room. Measuring the U.S. Muslim population is a famously inexact
science, since census data don’t track religion, but rather “country of
origin,” which researchers attempt to use as a proxy. There are somewhere
between 1.7 million and seven million American Muslims, by most estimates, and
Kurzman says he operates off a model that presumes the lower end, a bit over 2
million. That’s less a rate of involvement in terrorism of less than 10 per
million, down from a 2003 high of 40 per million, as detailed in the chart
above.
Yet
the scrutiny by law enforcement and homeland security on American Muslims has
not similarly abated. The FBI tracks “geomaps” of areas where Muslims live
and work, regardless of their involvement in any crime. The Patriot Act and
other post-9/11 restrictions on government surveillance remain in place. The
Department of Homeland Security just celebrated its 10th anniversary. In 2011,
President Obama ordered the entire federal national-security apparatus to get
rid of counterterrorism training material that instructed agents to focus on Islam itself,
rather than specific terrorist groups.
Kurzman
doesn’t deny that law enforcement plays a role in disrupting and deterring
homegrown U.S. Muslim terrorism. His research holds it out as a possible
explanation for the decline. But he remains surprised by the disconnect between
the scale of the terrorism problem and the scale — and expense — of the
government’s response.
“Until
public opinion starts to recognize the scale of the problem has been lower than
we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their
policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance
— not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism
has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the
internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not
just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we treat
the rights & liberties of everyone.”
We agree. And so do most Americans.
Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors,
risky sexual behavior or just about anything other than
terrorism.
Kurzman
told the Young Turks in February that Islamic terrorism “doesn’t even count for 1 percent” of the 180,000 murders in
the US since 9/11.
While
the Boston marathon bombings were horrific, a top terrorism expert says that
the Boston attack was more like Columbine than 9/11, and that the bombers are
“murderers not terrorists”. The overwhelming majority of mass shootings were by non-Muslims.
(This is true in Europe, as
well as in the U.S.)
However
you classify them – murder or terrorism – the Boston bombings occurred after
all of the statistical analysis set forth above. Moreover, different groups
have different agendas about how to classify the perpetrators (For
example, liberal Mother Jones and conservative Breitbart
disagree on how many of the perpetrators of terror attacks can properly be
classified as right wing extremists.)
So
we decided to look at the most current statistics for ourselves, to do
an objective numerical count not driven by any agenda.
Specifically,
we reviewed all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as documented by the
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
(START). (2012). Global Terrorism Database, as retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.
The
START Global Terrorism Database spans from 1970 through 2012 (and will be updated from
year-to-year), and – as of this writing – includes 104,000 terrorist
incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive open-source database
open to the public.
We
counted up the number of
terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims. We excluded attacks by groups
which are obviously not Muslims, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Medellin Drug
Cartel, Irish Republican Army, Anti-Castro Group, Mormon extremists, Vietnamese
Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation, Jewish Defense
League, May 19 Communist Order, Chicano Liberation Front, Jewish Armed
Resistance, American Indian Movement, Gay Liberation Front, Aryan Nation,
Jewish Action Movement, National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, or Fourth
Reich Skinheads.
We
counted attacks by Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Black American Moslems, or anyone who
even remotely sounded Muslim … for example anyone from Palestine,
Lebanon or any other Arab or Muslim country, or any name including anything
sounding remotely Arabic or Indonesian (like “Al” anything or “Jamaat”
anything).
If
we weren’t sure what the person’s affiliation was, we looked up the name of the
group to determine whether it could in any way be connected to Muslims.
Based
on our review of the approximately 2,400 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil
contained within the START database, we determined that approximately 60
were carried out by Muslims.
In
other words, approximately 2.5% of
all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1970 and 2012 were carried out by
Muslims.* This is a tiny proportion of all attacks.
(We
determined that approximately 118 of the terror attacks – or 4.9% – were
carried out by Jewish groups such as Jewish Armed Resistance, the Jewish
Defense League, Jewish Action Movement, United Jewish Underground and Thunder
of Zion. This is almost twice the percentage of Islamic attacks within
the United States. If we look at worldwide attacks – instead of just
attacks on U.S. soil – Sunni Muslims are the
main perpetrators of terrorism. However: 1. Muslims are also the main victims of terror attacks
worldwide; and 2. the U.S. backs the most radical types of Sunnis over more
moderate Muslims and Arab secularists.)
Moreover,
another study undertaken by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism
and Responses to Terrorism – called ”Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism
in the United States” – found:
Between
1970 and 2011, 32 percent of the perpetrator groups were motivated by
ethnonationalist/separatist agendas, 28 percent were motivated by single
issues, such as animal rights or opposition to war, and seven percent
were motivated by religious beliefs. In
addition, 11 percent of the perpetrator groups were classified as extreme
right-wing, and 22 percent were categorized as extreme left-wing.
Preliminary
findings from PPT-US data between 1970 and 2011 also illustrate a distinct
shift in the dominant ideologies of these terrorist groups over time, with the
proportion of emerging ethnonationalist/separatist terrorist groups declining
and the proportion of religious terrorist groups increasing. However, while
terrorist groups with religious ideologies represent 40 percent of all emergent
groups from 2000-2011 (two out of five), they only account for seven percent of
groups over time.
Similarly,
a third study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and
Responses to Terrorism Religion found that religion alone is not a key factor in
determining which terrorists want to use weapons of mass destruction:
The
available empirical data show that there is not a significant relationship
between terrorist organizations’ pursuit of CBRN (chemical, biological,
radiological or nuclear) weapons and the mere possession of a religious
ideology, according to a new quantitative study by START researchers Victor
Asal, Gary Ackerman and Karl Rethemeyer.
Therefore,
Muslims are not more likely than other groups to want to use WMDs.
*
The Boston marathon bombing was not included in this analysis, as START has not
yet updated its database to include 2013 terrorist attacks. 3 people died
in the Boston attack. While tragic, we are confident that non-Musliims
killed more than 3 during this same period.
We
are not experts in terrorism analysis. We would therefore defer to people
like Kurzman on the exact number. However, every quantitative analysis of
terrorism in the U.S. we have read shows that the percent of terror attacks
carried out by Muslims is far less than 10%.
Postscript:
State-sponsored terrorism is beyond the scope of this discussion, and was not
included in our statistical analysis. Specifically, the following
arguments are beyond the scope of this discussion, as we are focusing solely on
non-state terrorism:
- Arguments by University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole that deaths from 20th century wars could be labeled Christian terrorism
- Arguments that our recent use of torture and double tap drone strikes are terrorism
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