Counting terrorist attacks: what does the FBI say?
The FBI keeps statistics on terrorist attacks within the US, and yesterday commenter “japan” brought up the fact that, when they count number of attacks in the last couple of decades, the vast majority have not been committed by Muslims.
Which is, of course, an irrelevant statistic, although it sounds good if you want to make the point that Islamic terrorism in this country is no big deal, and what we really have to fear are the natives.
What’s wrong with trying to use the statistics, which begin in 1980 (and seem to end in 2005 on the only such FBI list I could find online) to prove much of anything about Islamic terrorism and its incidence? Let me count some of the ways.
Before 9/11, there were very few Islamic terrorist attacks on US soil, but they have increased since then. Starting in 1980 skews the numbers to begin with.
The Muslim population of the US until quite recently was infinitesimal, and it is still very small compared to, for example, the number of white people (the group from whom white supremacists—perpetrators of many other acts labeled “terrorist”—come). So statistics that make no attempt to account for that can be very misleading.
There have been many Islamic terrorist attacks against the US or US citizens abroad, and they do not appear in the statistics.
Counting the number of attacks and comparing that number is meaningless unless the attacks are broken down by type and severity, including number of people killed and injured. A planned attack to place a smoke bomb somewhere and destroy some property, and where no one was injured nor was anyone intended to be injured, is malicious and needs to be prosecuted, of course, and if it is perpetrated by a political group intending to intimidate I assume it’s correct to call it a terrorist act. But to count that as one attack and the 9/11 attacks as one (or even three, with the three venues being NY, DC, and PA) is a preposterously and outrageously false equivalence. Common sense dictates that, but whoever said that government agencies, or propagandists, demonstrate common sense?
The chart I linked to doesn’t give all that many details, although it is somewhat helpful. More helpful, though, if you want to understand the problem with equating all acts as equal, would be to look at the terrorist acts actually perpetrated by “Jewish extremist groups,” which essentially means the Jewish Defense League many decades ago. See this to get a sense of what most of these acts were, and when they were committed. The vast majority were quite minor, and were committed in the 70s and 80s. Virtually all of the more serious ones (there were only a couple of those) were suspected to have been committed by JDL members members but never proven to have been.
Consider, also, that Ft. Hood was not officially considered a Muslim terrorist act by the FBI–it was workplace violence (see this):
The U.S. government declined requests from survivors and family members of the slain to categorize the Fort Hood shooting as an act of terrorism, or motivated by militant Islamic religious convictions. In November 2011, a group of survivors and family members filed a lawsuit against the government for negligence in preventing the attack, and to force the government to classify the shootings as terrorism. The Pentagon argued that charging Hasan with terrorism was not possible within the military justice system and that such action could harm the military prosecutors’ ability to sustain a guilty verdict against Hasan.
By the way, if you’re curious to know how the FBI does define terrorism, this is it:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
At the FBI’s own site, there’s also a page that lists links to major terrorism cases of the last few decades. They are overwhelmingly by Muslims, especially since 9/11. And of course, 9/11 still is enormous in terms of damage done and death toll. Nothing even remotely compares, and it basically represents the start of the era of the most serious threats by Muslim terrorists in the US. Prior to 9/11, the big terrorist attacks were by the Unibomber and of course, the left’s favorite home-grown example, Tim McVeigh and accomplices in Oklahoma City—which was indeed a very large-scale and terribly lethal domestic non-Muslim terrorist attack.
All these FBI statistics might be meaningful to the FBI, and to the government in making the propaganda points it currently wishes to make. But they say very little about the relative seriousness of different terrorist groups in the US in terms of scope and danger to human life.
Another point of interest is how non-Muslim terrorist acts are classified. For example, what is a right-wing terrorist group? White supremacists are a category responsible for many domestic terrorist acts, and they are counted as being on the right (follow that link for a very helpful chart), although very often they don’t espouse the principles of the right. Perpetrators such as Dylan Roof, a crazy drug-addled white supremacist who hated blacks and liked the Confederate flag are automatically considered to be on the right even though what I’ve just described was about the sum total of his politics. Many of these are simply anti-government, or are often neo-Nazis or Nazi admirers. Here’s one who was fairly typical, a crazy white supremacist racist reacting with anger to something. Hardly what we think of as a terrorist act or a member of the right:
In 2009, Robert Poplawski killed three police officers who responded to a domestic dispute call at his mother’s house where he was living. Poplawski frequented white supremacist websites and expressed anti-government and racist views. Poplawski was reportedly lying in wait and ambushed the responding officers.
When you get rid of all the white supremacist neo-Nazis, all that seems to remain of this “right-wing terrorist” group are people like the killer of George Tiller, a terrorist (or rather, assassin, which is somewhat different) who was anti-abortion, a bona fide cause of the right as opposed to white supremacy. He was also fiercely anti government, and mentally ill. How is a guy who’s basically an anarchist considered to be on the right? Anarchists defy classification, and the attempt to shoehorn some of them into the left and some into the right is a doomed one, because anarchists are not part of either group.
In sum: everyone intuitively understands that a manic-depressive white supremacist who tries to hurt his mother and then kills police officers who comes to answer the domestic violence call is a dangerous murderer. But everyone also understands that classifying the act of such a person as of the same type and magnitude as the destruction of the World Trade Center by jihadists is a travesty.
The pro-choice cult deserves a category of its own. It is competitive with “secular” left-wing regimes and their universal Islamic counterparts.
Once we had a state that was more soviet than representative, we have people gaming the reports by lots of various means, many of them subtle and cumulative over time. take nidal hassan, thats not terrorism, thats work place violence. Same would be true of Alton Nolen, who they dressed up the whole thing as to being upset for being fired, and ignore he cut the womans head off, was muslim, the tradition of head cutting, and that the mosque he belonged to was not one of the nicer ones.
neither of these would be on the list of terrorist attacks, and if you DO go before 1980, you would have to include the middle east plane hijackings and the names of the organizations and such that went with that. so like the lynching numbers stopping at the point where they would have to record hayes tilden democrat driven mass murder, they conveniently pick the date (As neo points out)
so its a wash… even more so when these erroneous numbers are then presented in averages that leave out the numbers used to derive them… which then people apply those averages to numbers they look up that may or may not have been used or may or may not have been corrected in some way also not defined.
for the most part useless…
and purposefully so… like money supply and unemployment figures…like the factory reports to each soviet as to its production…
n.n, if you can translate economic marxism into cultural marxism, why cant you transfer war concept to things like demographic war, in which you manipulate democidal policies by taking advantage of a group and then protecting that manipulation by telling the group they are really smart for doing it and so, they would rather go over a cliff like thelma and louise and lose it all than admit they been had and its not what they were promised when they gave permission for others to control their lives even if it was voluntary (which just makes it peaceful and cheap)
Good post Neo. My mother used to say, “statistics don’e lie but liars use statistics”.
Americans are not pro-choice. There is no common principle that supports elective abortion or “planning” of a pro-choice cult or its members under the constitution, despite The Supreme Court’s discovery of a faith-based clause to summarily excise one of the named parties, “Posterity”, from the social contract. Any violence directed to abortionists and clinical cannibals (e.g. Planned Parenthood corporation), is carried out as an independent cause of the actor. It is not “right-wing”. At least not in America.
That said, anarchists serve the interests of left-wing ideologues who seek to establish monopolies under the color of authority.
ArtfldgrsGhost:
Well, you have to give some credit to the “best and brightest” for establishing a cult that exploits people’s juvenile and base desires. Even though this is the default disposition of an undeveloped humanity, it still required some effort to convert a mature population.
right wing is anything bad… then the left, after whipping up a bunch of fear about it, says it lives on feeding fear. My facebook feed has charts of about everything bad the US has done (including FDRs internment camps) and labels it all right wing.
The left imported the whole concept of the right to the US. Truman mainstreamed it… while using it as a pejorative. Conservative, as a term, was started by the progressives… also as a pejorative.
Well said.
Thanks for putting reality on the wall for the trolls to know.
Rand (the think tank) has an on line database of terror attacks. Filtering for American domestic attacks since 9/11 shows most are done by environmentalists or animal rights activists.
Dons:
Yes, and number of attacks by each group is irrelevant, as I wrote in the post.
The DC Snipers were obviously an example of Islamic terrorism, as proved by the drawings made by the younger one in prison. Of course, this is denied by the government, just as Ft. Hood was.
A lot of people think that Bush’s wars failed, but since they can’t prove that by pointing to Islamic jihad attacks in those years, what they are left to do is to attack it from another direction. That Islam isn’t to blame because Bush depopulated the terrorist cells so much that they had issues regenerating their cell based network in the US after intel captured from Iraq, eliminated them.
So if you’re successful against Islam, that means you “lost a war” and that “Islam isn’t a threat”. But if you aren’t successful against Islam, that means you should obey Islam and that the West is guilty.
Either way, doesn’t matter to the enemy how they have to justify it. They plan on winning, not having a debate.
Are you feel more secure Ymarsakar?
Bush’s wars results are irrelevant, what you see today on the street and town were security and spacial force starched of limits tells more of the reality of today life of fear rather been more saver.
No one mentions the evil of Political Correctness and those in thrall to PC for poisoning the swamp so that terrorism cannot be correctly named, identified, and confronted.
This subject is very much the swamp, as neo unpacks it. But the State Department lists groups responsible for terrorism, and about two-thirds on the list are Muslim.
Is this really a lie? As the PC insist. Or is it closer to the Truth, which we still won’t identify? Nurturing domestic evils.
I sure hope that president Trump or Cruz puts the Southern Poverty Law Center on the terrorist group list.
I have seen it terrorize friends and acquaintances
by merely listing and getting the media to report them.
No one mentions the evil of Political Correctness and those in thrall to PC for poisoning the swamp so that terrorism cannot be correctly named, identified, and confronted.
I call that Leftist mind control or WMD, Weapons of Mass Deception. It’s been on my research queue since 2008.
Are you feel more secure Ymarsakar?
When you start thinking your feelings have something to do with your security, you need a gut check on your surroundings.
1. Gut instincts are real.
2. They don’t work when your security is run by DC boys.
Bush’s wars results are irrelevant, what you see today on the street and town were security and spacial force starched of limits tells more of the reality of today life of fear rather been more saver.
Of course they are relevant. Without Bush’s intel, what you see today in 2015 would be what you would have experienced in 2009 and 2010.
But because it didn’t happen, you think you know what’s going on. Because of your Feelings. But the train is fine, so you just feel your way through that intersection.
Regarding your comments re: anarchists, it seems that they always show up at leftist marches/protests. No anarchists seen at Tea Party rallies.
They don’t seem so difficult to categorize when you consider who they flock with.
West:
Well, maybe the anarchists at the Tea Party rallies are incognito.
Seriously, though, there are anarchists who think/hope that the anarchic world would gravitate towards some sort of natural, organic, voluntary collectivism. Anarchists of the left, supposedly. Those of the right are more into individualism.
But it seems to me that, once you’re into anarchism, you’re neither of left or right, you’re in another category. The labeling of anarchists as left or right is just a way for other people to make political points off them.