2019: Looking back: Terrorism 2. A New Era of Terrorism

Five years ago, when U.S. federal and state law enforcement agencies were asked to identify the most serious violent extremist threats they faced in their respective jurisdictions, they all cited far-right, anti-government extremists. Following far-right, white nationalist extremists on the list of threats the United States was facing, these law enforcement practitioners placed Salafi-Jihadi-inspired extremist violence; radical environmentalists; and racist, violent extremism. Law enforcement agencies in Western Europe reached similar conclusions.

“The last few years have seen growing concern over the threat posed by far-right extremism and terrorism, particularly in the West,” the Global Terrorism Index notes.

The Index says that incidents of far-right terrorism have been increasing in the West, particularly in Western Europe, North America and Oceania. The total number of incidents have increased by 320 percent over the past five years.

The relative impact of far-right terrorism remains small, and the rise of far-right terrorism does not offset the overall decline in terrorist activity – and the number of the casualties of terrorism – around the world. Moreover, especially outside the West, nationalist/separatist and religious terrorism remain much more common.

One reason why far-right terrorism is more noticeable is that organized far-left terrorism has almost disappeared in the West. In the 1970s and 1980s, groups such as the Baader-Meinhof and Red Army Faction (Germany); Brigata Rosso (Italy); Action Directe (AD) (France); the Communist Combatant Cells (CCC) (Belgium); and the Popular Forces 25 April (FP-25) (Portugal) killed scores of politicians, policemen, and business people; staged bank robberies; and detonated bombs which damaged infrastructure. Most of these groups ceased operations in the mid- to late-1980s, after their leaders and members were captured or killed. Two far-left terrorist groups — the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO) (Spain) and the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) (Greece) – continued their campaigns until the middle of the first decade of this century.

But today, the most noticeable trend in terrorism is the rapid rise, and spread, of far-right terrorism. One terrorism expert writes that “given the rise of violent white nationalism and far-right extremism, and the power of twenty-first-century communications platforms, the threat is evolving rapidly.”

The new era of far-right terrorism is particularly challenging for the United States. The newly released U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence specifically highlighted the problem of increasing terrorist attacks perpetrated by individual who are not affiliated with any organization [see #3 below] and who are motivated by white nationalist propaganda readily available online.

Two terrorism experts write:

[T]here are several challenges inherent in tackling domestic, far-right extremism. Hate speech, for instance, is constitutionally protected in the United States, so, unlike in Europe, radicalism and radicalization cannot be effectively monitored. Law enforcement and social media companies, therefore, cannot easily track signs of increasing mobilization online. Moreover, Salafi-jihadi extremism and terrorism continues to dominate the discourse. It is, after all, much more politically expedient to tackle an allegedly foreign threat than deal with those at home. And finally, because these domestic far-right attacks have been perpetrated by individuals, not groups, there is no leader to target or funding to cut, just individuals spread across the country, who decide to act on their own, often with no traceable footprint.