Domestic terrorismNumber of Muslim-Americans involved in domestic terrorism “vanishingly small”

The threat of domestic terrorism by Muslim-Americans has always been small, and it is declining further. Fourteen Muslim-Americans were indicted for violent terrorist plots in 2012, down from twenty-one the year before.

This brings the total the total since 9/11 to 209, or just under twenty per year.

In its fourth annual report on Muslim-American terrorism suspects and perpetrators, The University of North Carolina’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security notes that the number of terrorist plots also dropped from eighteen in 2011 to nine in 2012.

For the second year in a row, there were no fatalities or injuries from Muslim-American terrorism. For comparison: the United States suffered approximately 14,000 murders in 2012. Since 9/11, Muslim-American terrorism has claimed thirty-three lives in the United States, out of more than 180,000 murders committed in the United States during the same period.

The report notes that over the same period, more than 200 Americans have been killed in political violence by white supremacists and other groups on the far right, according to a recent study published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy.

Sixty-six Americans were killed in mass shootings by non-Muslims in 2012 alone, twice as many

fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all eleven years since 9/11.

Only one of the nine Muslim-American terrorism plots in 2012 led to violence: the bombing of a Social Security office in Casa Grande, Arizona, outside of Phoenix, on 30 November 2012. Nobody was injured by the homemade explosive, which was placed

outside a back door of the building.

Why are there so few Muslim-Americans taking part in terrorist plots? Kurzman says that there are several possibilities:

• One possibility is that aggressive counterterrorism policies may have effectively deterred more and more potential terrorists. In this view, the number of Muslim-Americans who would like to engage in violence may be constant, or even rising, but the number of those acting on this impulse has decreased.
• Another possibility is that government agencies may be disposing of potential terrorism cases more quietly than in the past. Perhaps some suspects who would have been indicted on terrorism-related charges in previous years are increasingly being charged with non-terrorism offenses, or are being identified at an earlier stage than previously and handled through mental health or other interventions without an indictment. In this view, the number of Muslim-Americans embarking on terrorist plots may be constant or rising, but the number which is publicly announced by law-enforcement agencies has decreased.
• A further possibility is that fewer Muslim-Americans are drawn to terrorism than in previous years. In this view, the decline in terrorism cases reflects a shrinking of violent extremism among Muslim-Americans.

“All of these possibilities might be true at the same time: perhaps more potential terrorists are being deterred, more are being thwarted without public knowledge of their cases, and more are drifting away from terrorism on their own,” Kurzman writes.

Yet another possibility is that the number of Muslim-Americans engaging in terrorist plots is so low that year-to-year shifts are essentially random. In this view, the difference between 3 arrests in 2008, 50 arrests in 2009, and 14 arrests in 2012, out of an estimated population of more than 2 million Muslim-Americans, does not constitute a trend but statistically insignificant variation.

— Read more in Charles Kurzman, Muslim-American Terrorism: Declining Further (Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, University of North Carolina, 1 February 2013); see also Charles Kurzman, The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford University Press in 2011)