Confirming what all of our self-proclaimed moral superiors already knew, Euractiv.com reported Wednesday that according to a new study that has just been issued by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP), “the number of far-right terrorist acts has risen by 250% since 2014. When it comes to fatalities, the increase was even more than 700% within five years, with 89 people killed in 2019.” In fact, “there are now more right-wing attacks than at any other time in the past 50 years, with 13 far-right terrorist attacks that had each killed more than 10 people, compared to 24 Islamist attacks, and three linked to other ideologies, the report found.” As Benjamin Disraeli put it, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
The IEP’s Executive Director Steve Killelea solemnly intoned: “As a new decade begins, we see new terrorist threats. The rise in right-wing extremism in the West and the deterioration in the Sahel are prime examples.”
The Institute of Economics and Peace says that its “research is used extensively by governments, academic institutions, think tanks, non‑governmental organisations and by intergovernmental institutions such as the OECD, The Commonwealth Secretariat, the World Bank and the United Nations.” So now you know where it’s coming from, and what its agenda is.
In any case, note the sleight of hand here. “Far-right terrorism” is compared with the Islamic State. The Islamic State is one of a great many jihad organizations worldwide, yet it alone is being compared with what is presumably several different organizations lumped together as “far-right terrorism.” The threat of al-Qaeda and other jihad groups would make the jihad threat substantially greater, but that is not the objective of this study.
Another important aspect of this issue was reported last week in American Military News. According to former CIA agent Brad Johnson, “Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the United States (TEVUS) is a US government-funded database that tabulates violent attacks in the United States. Used by the US government and media alike, it is one of the fundamental sources of information about who is conducting violent attacks in the United States. TEVUS reporting appears to set out to cover up Islamic, Arab, Black Nationalist, and Left-Wing terrorism and extremist violence and attempts to document white and right-wing violence where little to no violence actually exists.”
TEVUS does this simply by misrepresenting the available data. “In a blatant display of data manipulation, the exclusively Arab 9/11 hijackers who murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people were categorized by TEVUS as ‘White/Caucasian non-Hispanic’ and as a result, TEVUS is able to attribute all of those killed in 9/11 to whites. This is by far the largest source of deaths attributed to acts of violence by whites and wildly throws off the actual statistics to make white right-wing violence appear common. TEVUS reports there are 39 court cases which they characterize as right-wing, yet there is only one reference of any kind to terrorism in any of these court cases and that was a single instance where the attacker referred to his target as a ‘terrorist’ and a ‘suicide bomber.’”
Despite this flagrant dishonesty, the TEVUS database is influential, as Homeland Security director Chad Wolf indicated last October when he said: “I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.”
In light of all this, it would be important to know how the IEP evaluated the data. Note also that Antifa and Black Lives Matter have rioted violently in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, Wisconsin, New York City, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, and “far-Left terrorism” somehow never gets noticed, while the handful of actual “far-right terrorists” that do exist haven’t been burning down cities and vowing revolution.
That also reveals the agenda of this “study.” It is part of an ongoing effort to downplay the Islamic jihad threat and play up a “far-right” threat that is clearly more media hype than reality. This has been going on for quite some time. In a 2018 interview, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) fed the fires of the “white supremacist terror” hysteria when she asserted that “our country [no, not Somalia] should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.”
She also offered a ready solution: “Profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.” Amid a general clamor on the Left over “white supremacist terrorism,” this is even crazier than most claims, but in light of the growing clamor on the Left for the reeducation of Trump supporters, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could see such profiling in the next four years. If we do, studies such as this latest pile of nonsense from the IEP will have paved the way.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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