Over the weekend, I finally watched a movie I had added to my Netflix queue months ago but hadn't been able to work up the courage to watch: 22 July.
The attacks by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on July 22, 2011, were horrifying for many reasons, not just the 77 people who died in the Oslo bombing and in the protracted assault on a Workers' Youth League summer camp on the island of Utoya. Breivik caught attention not only for the slaughter of so many, but for his radical far-right motivations. Who can forget his Nazi salute in court?
We've had few foreign attacks on U.S. soil (Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are the most notable). What we should worry more about, like Norway in this instance, is homegrown attacks from people (groups and individuals) with extremist views, be they white supremacy, jihad, or any number of other violent and radical ideologies.
Peter Bergen and David Sterman wrote in October in Foreign Affairs, just after a racially motivated killing of two people at a Kentucky grocery store, the sending of package bombs to prominent Trump critics, and an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11: "Since 9/11, no foreign terrorist group has successfully conducted a deadly attack in the United States. The main terrorist problem in the United States today is one of individuals--usually with ready access to guns--radicalized by a diverse array of ideologies absorbed from the Internet."
We should still be aware of the possibility of jihadist attacks like that at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, but we have to remember that the majority of those perpetrators were citizens or legal residents, and every lethal jihadist terrorist in the U.S. since 9/11 was born here, was naturalized, or was a legal resident. Meanwhile, deadly attacks on U.S. soil such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Las Vegas Route 91 shooting and the Charleston, S.C., church shooting continue, all undertaken by Americans.
The U.S. is not a stranger to violent domestic attacks, having dealt with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Unabomber attacks, Weather Underground bombings, and others before the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing at least 168 people, several of them children. That attack is still the most deadly domestic terror act in U.S. history.
Violent extremism of any type is a danger we should not ignore. In an April 2017 report, the Government Accountability Office reported that of 85 fatal acts by domestic violent extremists from Sept. 12, 2001, to Dec. 31, 2016, 62 of them were by far-right extremists. However, the 23 attacks by radical Islamist extremists were more deadly, with 119 deaths to 106 from attacks by far-right extremists; 41 percent of the Islamist-attack deaths were from the Pulse shooting.
The GAO report found no fatalities caused by far-left extremist attacks in that time period (property damage and simple assault, primarily from the relatively small militant Antifa movement, seem to be the biggest issues), but did not include the 2016 killings of eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge; the gunmen in that case were reportedly sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. In February 2018, nearly a year after that report, an ex-Marine sympathetic to the far-left Black Nationalist movement shot and killed a Georgia police officer who was trying to arrest him at his home. Also last year, a Bernie Sanders supporter attacked GOP congressional members at baseball practice, critically wounding Rep. Steve Scalise; thankfully, no one died.
In a November Washington Post report on domestic terror attacks, Wesley Lowery, Kimberly Kindy and Andrew Ba Tran wrote: "Stacey Hervey, a criminologist at the Metropolitan State University of Denver who has studied radicalization, said [U.S. domestic] attackers generally fit one of three archetypes: thrill-seekers, such as teenagers who paint swastikas on the sides of buildings; reactive attackers, who lash out suddenly at perceived enemies; and mission-oriented attackers, who aim to send a specific message or achieve a certain political goal."
We see the first two quite often, but it's those mission-oriented attackers, like Breivik, that should really concern us. Extremists on both sides are becoming very open with their intentions, posting them on Internet forums and in videos.
What can we do? How about not giving them an audience, or not trying to excuse violence on either side with, "Well, they do it too"?
While we should not forget or gloss over the actions of radicals, we should remember that they are still a very small segment of the population; far more of us are moderate in our beliefs.
Not everybody on the right is a white supremacist/neo-Nazi, just as not everybody on the left is Antifa. Most of us are no more interested in starting a race war than we are in fulfilling Marx's vision ... but everybody would know that if they'd just start actually listening to one another. It's not that hard, really, unless we make it that way.
I think I'll go for some comedies this weekend. At least they won't depress me.
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Assistant Editor Brenda Looper is editor of the Voices page. Read her blog at blooper0223.wordpress.com. Email her at blooper@arkansasonline.com.
Editorial on 03/06/2019