Assessing terrorism

[mgc1961]

If you happened to be looking for a demonstration of the utter uselessness of "bipartisanship" as an approach to the world's problems, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better example than the Bipartisan Policy Center's latest terrorism-threat assessment, a report titled "Assessing the Terrorist Threat" .

It does offer a lot of useful information on what is indeed an important developing phenomenon -- namely, the growth of homegrown terrorism with an international orientation, that is, radical Muslims of American background. But -- even as it urges the government to prepare for and deal with "the radicalization and recruitment of Americans to terrorist ranks" -- it proceeds as though radical Islam is the only component of that problem.

This, of course, is exactly the kind of narrative that the Muslim-bashers at Fox love to run with, as you can see from the above video. Likewise, "mainstream" media like the Wall Street Journal did likewise, while NPR's execrable Dina Temple-Raston -- who not so long ago was writing warm and fuzzy profiles of the "new, kinder, gentler militias" -- chimed in with a piece headlined "Homegrown Terrorists Pose Biggest Threat, Report Says".

No doubt these homegrown Islamic radicals do pose a real threat. But whether they are in fact the "biggest" terrorism threat Americans face or not is very much open to question -- because the longest-running, most consistent and in fact currently fastest-growing domestic-terror threat comes from a component completely ignored in the BPC report: radical right-wing American extremists.


And what about the link? Here ya go: http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/assessing-threat-despite-rise-right-