Whatever Happened to Left-Wing Domestic Terrorism?
alternet.org 
Since 1981, right-wing extremists are the only ones who have run up a body count.
“Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, there are few, true left-wing extremist organizations operating in the United States,” Daryl Johnson notes in Right-Wing Resurgence: How A Domestic Terrorism Threat Is Being Ignored. Johnson is an expert on domestic non-Islamic extremism and a former senior analyst with the Department of Homeland Security, although his unit was dismantled in the wake of conservative outrage over its report on right-wing extremism in the United States. In January 2009, Johnson’s team warned of increased cyber attacks, which “are attractive options to leftwing extremists who view attacks on economic targets as aligning with their nonviolent, ‘no-harm’ doctrine.” “I stand by the statement that the left-wing terrorist groups were active in the 1970s and early '80s and we’ve seen a shift to more right-wing extremism,” Johnson says. “We do have left-wing extremists who are active and they do property destruction and commit acts of arson; there have been occasional incidents where a police officer will get injured…but the vast majority of these things are property destruction. They just don’t have the body count.”
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This last point is something the lunatic fringe of the American right has been at pains to prove recently. While left-wing terrorism in the United States is relegated to property damage and Al Qaeda-inspired militants have been largely foiled in the last decade, right-wing terrorism continues to wreck havoc. From 1995 to 2011, according to the Center for American Progress, 56 percent of domestic terrorist attacks can be attributed to right-wing extremists, 30 percent to violent environmentalists and 12 percent to Islamic radicals. The most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil before 9/11 was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, who was steeped in hard-right-wing ideology.
As Daryl Johnson testified before the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, right-wing extremist have killed 16 police officers and 20 other Americans between 2006 and 2012. (That’s a higher toll than the collective murders of all the American leftist terrorists of the 1970s combined.) Many women’s health clinics, African-American churches and mosques have been attacked in the same period. Just last week a man believed to be a member of a white supremacist gang murdered the chief of the Colorado Department of Corrections in his home. |
