How to Fight the New Domestic Terrorism
The U.S. should use its hard-won experience against al Qaeda and Islamic State to combat today’s surge of lethal white supremacist attacks
The Wall Street Journal
Aug. 9, 2019
Pittsburgh, Tallahassee, Poway, Jeffersontown and now El Paso—these American communities have been the scene since 2018 of the most lethal mass shootings connected to white supremacist ideology, but there have been many other lesser attacks and foiled plots. In the U.S., such terrorism has now eclipsed international jihadist terrorism in both frequency and severity. Events of the past week seem to have finally awoken the country to the reality of this threat, but our politicians are already bickering about what to do about it.
In fact, the formula for responding to America’s white supremacist terrorism emergency is quite clear—in part because of our hard-won experience fighting jihadists from al Qaeda and its spawn, Islamic State. We must swiftly and carefully apply the best practices of the two decades since Sept. 11, 2001, to counter this decade’s domestic terrorist threat—by passing new laws, increasing resources and enhancing investigative capabilities.
The post-9/11 lessons are particularly applicable, in part, because of the similarities between the jihadists and violent white supremacists. Both extremist movements depend on the anger of
alienated young men, vulnerable to moral suasion and often lacking strong community or social bonds as moderating influences in their lives. Both depend on reaching and indoctrinating recruits via the internet.
Today’s white supremacist terrorists band together online, further radicalize themselves and fire one another up in much the same manner as their jihadist counterparts. White supremacists avidly network in the virtual world, whether or not they know each other in real life. They pick their targets and methods and then share their manifestos, pronouncements and even attacks, using social media platforms such as Gab and 8chan; the anti-Muslim extremist who
murdered 51 worshipers in March at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, used
Facebook to broadcast live video of the massacre.
Much like Islamic State and other transnational terrorists, the atrocities of the new terrorists serve to inspire their fellow extremists to more bloodshed. The white supremacists “crowdsource” their ideology from the views of the amorphous movement’s most prolific attackers. As the terrorism expert J.M. Berger has noted, many of them were particularly galvanized by a far-right extremist’s shocking
2011 attack in Norway, which left 77 dead. The killer wrote a manifesto, which his admirers have treated as a sort of grim proof of concept—showing, as Mr. Berger puts it, that “one person can carry out a spectacular terrorist attack—a terrorist attack that is highly lethal and very impactful, without resources.”
The Norway murderer’s vision helped to inspire the Australian gunman who perpetrated the Christchurch massacre and surfaced in the attack allegedly planned by a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant stationed in Washington, D.C. The gunman who
murdered nine black worshipers at a June 2015 Bible study meeting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., made a point of writing a racist manifesto beforehand.
But there are also key operational differences between the two movements, with implications for how to fight them. Violent white supremacism in the U.S. has grown from the bottom up, not the top down. Al Qaeda and Islamic State often directed their most vicious attacks from a central headquarters, whether al Qaeda’s safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan or Islamic State’s self-declared “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq. Sometimes coordinating with foreign fighters and local recruits, these groups were able to stage such atrocities as 9/11 and the March 2016 suicide bombings in Brussels. These top-down-style assaults then inspired jihadist supporters with no direct connection to the terrorist groups’ leadership to perpetrate local attacks against soft targets as opportunities arose.
Lacking any such centralized leadership, white supremacist terrorism overwhelmingly involves the online self-radicalization of isolated young men. As a result, there is no terrorist headquarters to discover and target. The new terrorists don’t control territory or take shelter with sympathetic governments.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-fight-the-new-domestic-terrorism-11565363219