PerspectiveThe Fight Against White Nationalism Is Different
Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have.
During the war with the Islamic State, I sometimes heard U.S. officials and analysts express something like relief that the group had declared a “caliphate” with recognizable borders in Syria and Iraq, even flying its flag atop Mosul’s historic Great Mosque of al-Nuri. A state was something the U.S. military could take away. An ideology is much harder to defeat. That’s the problem America faces as it grapples with the threat of white-nationalist terrorism today.
Against ISIS, America deployed drones, proxy armies, and hundreds upon hundreds of air strikes.
Mike Giglio writes in The Atlantic that last weekend’s shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which a gunman targeting Hispanic immigrants killed 22 people at a Walmart, is the latest in a series of painful reminders that Americans are under attack by adherents of another extremist ideology. U.S. authorities were quick to label it an act of domestic terrorism, amid a growing chorus of voices calling for Islamist and white-nationalist extremism to be treated as similar threats. “FBI classifies it as domestic terrorism, but ‘white terrorism’ is more precise. Many of the killers are lone-wolf losers indoctrinated to hate through the internet, just like Islamic terrorists,” Rod Rosenstein, who was the Trump administration’s deputy attorney general until May, wrote on Twitter. “Condemn and deter racists before they shoot, as we do terrorists and other violent criminals.”
Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have.
