Perspective: Exaggerations White Supremacy Has Triggered a Terrorism Panic

Our collective response to terrorism seems to swing on a pendulum between rank complacency and terrified myth-making. In January 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State as al Qaeda’s “JV team.” But by September of that year, after the group had captured Mosul in Iraq and launched a genocidal campaign of slaughter against the Yazidis, he started bombing it. Within the year, the Western news media was awash with alarmist stories about how the Islamic State spectacle would soon be playing in a town near you. It wasn’t just that some balaclava-clad ninja-jihadi might kill you; it was that he’d gaslight your teenage daughter into ditching her studies and becoming a jihadi baby-making machine. Whole reports and toolkits were published to help teachers spot signs of extremism.

Simon Cottee writes in Foreign Policy that asimilar dynamic can be observed in the case of white supremacy today. For a long time, governments and the media had slept on this threat, largely because they were so animated by the jihadi threat. That all changed in March, when an Australian right-wing extremist slaughtered 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter livestreamed his atrocity on the internet and beforehand had posted a 74-page manifesto in which he rationalized his massacre as a protest against “the great replacement”—the notion that Muslims, in concert with liberal multiculturalists, are seeking to erase white European culture.

In an historic move last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security signaled in no uncertain terms that it is now fully awakened to the threat of white supremacist terrorism, describing it as “one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism.” This is right and laudable and, as the author Colin P. Clarke recently noted, well overdue. Cottee writes, however, that just as many liberal leftists had earlier warned against the perils of overreacting to the threat of jihadi terrorism, we ought to maintain a sense of proportion and not overinflate the threat of white supremacist terrorism.

He adds:

None of this is to suggest that the threat of white supremacy is not real or that we should be complacent about it. Of course it is real, and of course we need to indict and seriously punish those who have committed or are plotting to commit terrorist atrocities in the name of white supremacy. But we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the past. One of the lessons of the last few years is that the media frenzy that surrounded every attack inspired or directed by the Islamic State in the West helped create the group’s monstrosity, feeding it and provoking it to carry out ever more monstrous acts. Another lesson is that focusing on so-called signs of extremism—in the form of what people say, what music they listen to, or how they dress—is a surefire way of antagonizing them. It is also deeply illiberal.

No doubt we all love the spectacle of a mythical monster against which to signal our moral virtue and to wax indignant about with our fellows. But we should resist the urge to do this, since it plays directly into the hands of the few who want nothing more than to be talked about and make the world mad with rage. White supremacy is not a monolith endangering our children and societies, but we might just make it into one by overinflating it into precisely this.