TERRORISM IN EUROPE AND IN THE UNITED STATES
Europe is increasingly becoming an important center of terrorism, something the continent has experienced in the past. However, to state that terrorism in Europe is mainly driven by Islamic terrorism would be overstating the problem. Europol noted that in 2014, 201 terrorist plots were attempted, with the vast majority of them being conducted by separatists, anarchists, and left-wing terrorists. In contrast, only two attacks were tied to religion, the shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels and a stabbing committed in Tours in December of that year. Nonetheless, starting with the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shootings, Europe has become associated with a particularly violent and virulent strain of Islamic terrorism. The November 2015 Paris attacks, the 2016 Brussels bombings, the 2016 Nice attack, the 2017 Manchester bombing, and the 2017 Barcelona attack are probably the most prominent examples because of the high casualty rate, but there have been a fair number of lower-profile stabbings, shootings, and attempted attacks by would-be terrorists.
The United States is not immune to continued Salafist jihadist threats either, but the challenge there is not as severe. If anything, it is likely overplayed relative to the United States’ domestic right-wing terrorism problem. This, of course, is an artifact of the country’s unique politics in relation to guns, its history of race relations, and how it regulates speech. Unlike in most European countries, expressing support for extremist or terrorist groups is not a crime. This allows for the distribution of material that would be prohibited in most other countries and gives political space for extremists of all types to share their views online.
Before beginning, it is worth discussing lone wolves. In 2008, an important academic debate broke out between Marc Sageman and Bruce Hoffman. Sageman argued that the most important terrorist threat came from the so-called lone wolves, or individuals who were self-radicalized and learned how to make explosives and execute terrorist attacks through instruction readily available in books or on the internet. This would increase, of course, with the proliferation of the internet, connecting disenchanted individuals with faraway communities virtually. The argument went that these self-radicalized individuals would make organizations like al-Qaeda redundant. Citing the evidence available at the time surrounding the July 2005 bombings in London and elsewhere in Europe, Sageman wrote about the coming “leaderless” jihad. Hoffman countered, citing the accumulating evidence surrounding the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the British investigation into the 2005 bombings, and investigations into a variety of successful and foiled plots across the world. In each of these cases, al-Qaeda’s imprimatur was evident. Even though its role was much more covert, it provided training, financing, or guidance. Compared to plots that seemed to be entirely homegrown or carried out by lone wolves, the scale of their violence was much greater and much more ferocious.
In the decade since that debate, the idea that lone wolves are the most important terrorist threat has lost credibility. Yet it still remains a phenomenon worth exploring. Chapter 14 discusses the industry of terrorism, why organizations are better at committing acts of violence than individuals, but for now, it is worth mentioning that sometimes individuals get lucky. In the United States, one of the worst acts of terror was committed by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, but they seem to be the exception rather than the norm. Either way, individuals with access to high-powered weaponry can kill many people. The 2016 Orlando nightclub shooter seems to have become radicalized on his own and still managed to kill forty-nine people. In other words, although homegrown terrorists might not be the biggest threat, they are still capable of inflicting significant pain on their societies.
Why is lone-wolf terrorism so prevalent nowadays? Largely because of the ease of access to terrorist propaganda on the internet and the presence of weapons. Indeed, an important al-Qaeda ideologue, Abu Musab al-Suri, had advocated the importance of self-radicalization as early as 2004 and 2005, as AQ lost its base in Afghanistan. The value of his ideas is likely overblown by academics, as it was only one part of his teachings and not many jihadists seem to quote him, but the late leader of Islamic State’s external operation, Abu Muhammad al-Adani advocated a similar strategy once it became evident that his organization was collapsing. Daniel Byman of Georgetown University explains that this tactic of necessity creates imitators, which other impressionable individuals can emulate, creating a problem that feeds upon itself.
Again, though, lone wolves are generally not as dangerous as terrorists with organizational backing or direction. Yet they are problematic in a subtler but perhaps more pernicious way. As Daniel Byman argues, lone-wolf attacks often generate more outward fear than the threat warrants. Nonetheless, opportune politicians often capitalize on these incidents to justify illiberal policies, such as Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, which further alienates individuals at risk of radicalizing and becoming terrorists. In essence, while lone wolves will cause deaths, the greater risk is a society overreacting and pursuing strategies that undermine the values that define them. This is happening both in Europe and the United States.
The current foreign fighter flow is historically unprecedented. It dwarfs both the number of fighters who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s and later to Iraq in the early 2000s. Estimates range from as little as 30,000 fighters to higher estimates of around 45,000. According to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague, as of April 2016, there were anywhere from 3,900 to 4,200 EU nationals fighting in Iraq and Syria. The majority of those fighters, approximately 2,830 foreign fighters, come from Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The ICCT also believes that around 30 percent of those fighters have returned and another 14 percent have died. Additionally, it believes that about 90 percent of the fighters originated from urban areas and that 83 percent are male. The Soufan Group notes that the majority of those that traveled from Europe had past criminal records. The American foreign fighter problem was not as big as of early 2016. Estimates by the U.S. government were that only around 250 citizens had attempted the journey, with around 150 actually making it. Interestingly enough, a sizable number of American fighters traveled to the region to fight against IS, either linking up with the Kurds or working with other groups based in Iraq.
The large number of fighters is partially an artifact of Islamic State’s sophisticated information operations across social media. The Soufan Group has studied this problem at length and finds that social media creates the ground for persuading people to join, but generally is not the decisive factor. From their research, the same factors that lead to radicalization, meaning in-person social connection, matter much more in driving recruits. Those traveling are usually in their twenties and are individuals seeking a new life. Most travel with the intention of staying there and are unlikely to return either because they are killed or because they will want to continue fighting elsewhere. Of those that have returned, some have expressed disillusionment with Islamic State’s violence.
With the collapse of IS, there is a greater worry of plots emanating from its members in Europe and the United States. In the early years, there was less concern because the skills of an insurgent are not necessarily the same as those of a terrorist. However, the various suicide bombings and plots in Western Europe have demonstrated that Islamic State has a sophisticated apparatus for plotting attacks in the West.
THE ISLAMIC STATE THREAT TO EUROPE
Europe has been a target for Islamic terrorism for generations, but only recently has the threat become so evident. In the 2000s, al-Qaeda successfully attacked Madrid and London, and individuals linked to it nearly pulled off stellar attacks elsewhere on the continent. The threat was largely uneven, though, affecting countries with emotional symbolism. The United Kingdom has been at the forefront of plots because of its association with United States and its history of colonialism in the Middle East. France has been a target for similar reasons, but IS also blames it for the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Spain is a target because many extremists regard it as occupied Muslim territory that needs to be reclaimed. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany have been targets for plots as well, but with the exception of the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 in Amsterdam, there were few high-profile attacks before 2011 in those places.
The recent flow of foreign fighters has changed the calculus for the continent’s security forces. Out of all the countries, the best prepared for the current threat were France, Spain, and the United Kingdom because of their long history of domestic terrorism; they therefore had legislation in place that enabled them to proactively tackle the problem. Even then, the number of plots has overwhelmed them, and they have been caught by surprise. For example, France had been tracking the individuals that executed the Charlie Hebdo shootings but lacked the resources to properly investigate them given the severity of other threats they had to manage. Likewise, the man who committed the Westminster attack in March 2017 was known to British security forces, but due to the fact that he was fifty-two, MI5 did not believe him to be a threat. These countries have been lucky because of the resources they have placed into fighting terrorism. Not all countries have the budget or the know-how for combating terrorism. Every country in Europe has had individuals travel to Iraq and Syria, and if any of these individuals return, these places might become targets for terrorism as well. Because of open borders, the difficulty of monitoring individuals traveling abroad to fight, and the fact that IS needs to get lucky only once to create havoc, Europol now regards the group to be the most significant terrorist threat to the continent.
While Europe as a whole is a target, Islamic State is focusing more on the countries involved in the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition. Europol explains that since 2014, when IS first declared the caliphate, it has transitioned toward the internationalization of its violence as a deterrent, hoping that such aggression will change the political calculus of Europe’s domestic societies. Before 2015, most of its attacks were opportunistic and symbolic, designed to create the impression that IS was everywhere. This in turn helped draw more recruits and funding from abroad. With the pressure the organization feels in the Middle East, they hope that inspiring terrorism in the continent might reduce the operational tempo against them. There is some history to justify this stance. Following the 2004 Madrid train bombings, Spain withdrew from Iraq, but this is only an example with other contextual factors weakening the causal link.
What is interesting is that for many governments, the biggest concern is lone wolves. A Europol report from November 2016 notes that most plots in Europe seem to be linked to lone wolves inspired by Islamic State’s ideology, but authorities have assumed this since the beginning even when evidence suggested the contrary. Take the case of Mehdi Nemmouche, the man who shot up the Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014. The police in Brussels assumed he was acting on his own after arresting him, despite finding a video of him claiming responsibility with an IS flag behind him. Only later did they attribute the attack to IS after discovering he had traveled to Syria in 2013. Indeed, IS no longer needs would-be recruits to travel to the Middle East for indoctrination or training. An investigation published by The New York Times in March 2017 found that IS uses social media and encrypted communication platforms to radicalize individuals and help guide plots. Using programs like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal, IS can provide step-by-step instructions for target selection, weapon usage, and even operational command and control. In other words, modern technology is lowering the barriers to entry for would-be terrorists lacking knowledge or expertise. As such, what is likely happening is what Bruce Hoffman described in his debate with Marc Sageman a decade ago: there certainly are lone-wolf terrorists, but the most dangerous and most successful plots likely have some external influence in terms of guiding and plotting. Even then, many of the plots assumed to have been committed in a leaderless fashion might in the future be discovered to have had some external guidance, as was the case with Nemmouche.
Making the situation much murkier is that IS does have an external operations unit, the Emni. The group, which was run by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the former spokesperson for the group until recently, initially began as an internal police unit monitoring the behavior of its members. After 2013, the entity became charged with plotting attacks abroad. The Emni serves as both an intelligence and a commando unit. According to police reports, defectors, and members captured, it has been training foreign fighters and sending them back to their countries of origin. It also seems to be the key decision-making body within IS for when it comes to plots abroad. The New York Times notes that apparently there are branches for various continents and regions. The only place where the Emni does not recruit from is the United States because of the difficulties of smuggling people back into the country. Instead, as is explained later, IS finds it easier to radicalize individuals online and to convince them to buy guns, taking advantage of the country’s lax regulatory framework for weapons.
The foreign fighters the Emni sends abroad might participate directly in attacks or they might serve as the command and control for plots. These individuals usually return and form sleeper cells, which can recruit more individuals who have never traveled to IS-held territory and task them with attacks. In this sense, IS has exported al-Qaeda’s training camp model from Afghanistan and simply adapted it to the European security context. The training these individuals receive gives them insight for manufacturing bombs, as was the case with the airport attack in Brussels 2016, or selecting symbolic targets like the November 2015 Paris attacks. The Emni also serves as a logistics body, helping smuggle fighters back into Europe after they have received training.
This model has given IS tremendous results. The main figure coordinating the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had spent time in Syria in 2013 before returning to Europe sometime in 2014 or 2015. Belgian by birth, Abaaoud was implicated in ordering several successful and failed plots across Europe in 2014 and 2015. He apparently had been guiding Nemmouche when he targeted Brussels. Abaaoud later participated directly in the attacks in Paris, which involved a sophisticated level of expertise in terms of operational tempo and the use of explosives. The attacks involved the use of TATP, an explosive that is difficult to manufacture but is coveted by Islamists because it can be made from over-the-counter products. After setting these off near the Stade de France, which distracted local security forces, IS attacked the Bataclan theater and proceeded to kill more people.
The key thing about the Emni is that it recognizes the need for executing many low-intensity attacks to maintain its image. Recognizing the difficulty of pulling off attacks like the one in Paris, IS moved on to low-tech attacks, which are just as deadly and require less technical sophistication. Examples of this include the Bastille Day Nice attack, where a radicalized individual drove a truck and ran over people watching the parade, and the December 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack, which followed a similar approach. Other dangerous plots include the Westminster terror attack in March 2017 that saw Khalid Masood run over fifty people, killing five. Afterwards, he crashed his car and fatally stabbed a police officer before security forces finally shot him dead. At the time of this writing, no links have appeared connecting Masood to a bigger terrorist organization, but there are records that he sent encrypted messages over WhatsApp right before committing the attack, opening the possibility of some international connection. On April 20, 2017, three days before the first round of the French elections, a man named Karim Cheurfi opened fire against police officers and civilians at the Champs-Elysées, killing one and injuring three. Most likely timed to try to influence the French elections, the attack was later claimed by IS. Nonetheless, IS still continues to plot attacks using explosives, as evinced by the Ansbach suicide bombing in 2016, which thankfully only killed the bomber and no one else. More worrisome was the May 2017 bombing at the Manchester Arena, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-three people and over five hundred injured, mainly young girls, after the suicide attacker set off a nail bomb. British security forces remained silent while the investigation continued, but there were indications suggesting the attack was the work of a major terrorist group because the perpetrator, Salman Ramadan Abedi, had links to Libya, despite being born in the United Kingdom. Later, it turned out that he had acted alone but that his father had been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda, which had formed to fight Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Furthermore, it appears that he had been in contact with IS members in Libya.
Even in plots not directly ordered by IS, its influence is pervasive. This was the case with the August 2017 Barcelona attack. Following the low-tech model used with great effect in Nice, a man named Younes Abouyaaqoub drove a van through La Rambla, a street popular for pedestrians, in the Catalan city, killing 13 and injuring over 130 people. This was part of a larger plot by a cell with a connection to IS through a Salafist imam named Abdelbaki Es Satty. The cell originally sought to blow up a van full of TAPT, the explosive of choice for jihadist terrorists in Europe, somewhere in Barcelona. The attack fell apart when the men trying to manufacture the bombs, which likely included Es Satty, accidentally set off an explosion in their safehouse in the small town of Alcanar, killing Es Satty and another. Fearing their plot would unravel soon thereafter, the remaining members of the cell opted to use vehicular terrorism, first in Barcelona, and again in the town of Cambrils. In Cambrils, they ran into pedestrians, injuring several, before seeing their automobile flip over and proceeding to stab a woman to death after exiting the car. The attackers, wearing fake suicide vests, were shot dead by the police. Abouyaaqoub for his part was killed four days after the initial attack by police.
Es Satty, had a long history in jihadist circles. He was a recruiter for IS through his role as the imam of the town of Ripoll. Previously, he had been arrested for his ties to individuals belonging to an AQ affiliate that carried out several attacks in Morocco, including the 2003 Casablanca terrorist incident. In a previous stint in prison for drug trafficking, he also befriended one of the plotters of the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the worst terrorist incident in Spain’s history. Es Satty’s death makes it difficult to answer the exact nature of the IS connection. Nonetheless, as Spain’s most prominent terrorism scholars, Fernando Reinares and Carola Garcia-Calvo, explain, at the time of the Barcelona attack, individuals like Es Satty were involved deeply in a continent-wide jihadist network that recruited and mobilized terrorists for Islamic State. In this sense, even if Es Satty was not a direct member of IS, his presence shows how deeply integrated its organizational structure is all over Europe.
More recently, IS has started turning back foreign fighters from Europe, as it recognizes its inevitable collapse. Instead, it is preparing them for future plots on the continent. IS is also taking advantage of the refugee crisis, hoping that the European public remains antagonistic toward them to validate IS propaganda and to deepen the social rift between Muslims and non-Muslims on the continent. Future attacks are likely to become more prominent, as many fighters from Europe begin returning to their home cities following the further losses the caliphate is currently experiencing. When the caliphate ceases to be a real entity and transitions into a virtual caliphate, the sleeper cells that the Emni sent abroad are bound to erupt once more.
THE TERRORISM THREAT IN THE UNITED STATES
Terrorism in the United States is more complex and has other dynamics at play than Islamism. According to the New America Foundation, the number of deaths caused by Salafist jihadist terrorism between 2005 and 2015 was 94.1 During the same period, the number of deaths from guns was a staggering 301,797.2 Ever since the Columbine massacre in 1999, the country has developed a worse reputation abroad for mass shootings than it has for terrorism, which, with the exception of 9/11, is exceedingly rare. This is not to say that Salafist jihadist terrorism is not a problem, but rather, it is often overblown into something bigger for political reasons. It is important to note, however, that part of the reason that only 94 people have died during this period is simultaneously a factor of the relative scope of the threat, the country’s ability to integrate and assimilate its Muslim population, and because of the reforms undertaken by the United States since 2001 to prevent another 9/11. If American domestic security agencies ever become lax in regard to this problem, that number will be much higher.
So how does terrorism in America look? Since 9/11, the list of plots is quite extensive. These include the failed midair shoe bomb attempt by Richard Reid, a British national traveling to Miami in 2001, the 2008 Times Square bombing, which caused no fatalities, the Little Rock shooting in 2009 that killed one person, and Faisal Shahzad’s failed Times Square bombing in 2010. Before 2014, when IS grew in stature, the deadliest and best-known attacks were the Fort Hood shooting in 2009 and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. In the former, Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, killed thirteen people and injured another thirty-two. In the latter, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev placed pressure cooker bombs at the finish line of the marathon, killing three and injuring nearly three hundred people.
The nature of the threat has evolved quite a bit since 2014, but it has its antecedents in the jihadist threat from 2001 to 2013. After 9/11, AQ struggled in staging further mass-casualty attacks in the United States but found an avenue through the proliferation of online propaganda leading to an increased number of radicalized individuals in the United States. A few of the plots emerging from this era were carried out by so-called lone-wolf terrorists, discussed earlier, but many of them had an external element guiding, directing, or influencing the attacks. This is the lasting pernicious legacy of Anwar al-Awlaki, who inspired Nidal Hasan. IS has adopted this model. A study done by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Seamus Hughes of George Washington University found that of thirty-eight IS-inspired plots between March 1, 2014, and March 1, 2017, eight of these had some direct connection to English-speaking IS operatives in Syria. This largely follows the model used by IS in Europe, except many of these individuals have not traveled to Iraq or Syria. Many did try, but when they found it difficult to go abroad, they decided to plot domestically. This was the case of Elton Simpson, one of the 2015 Garland, Texas, shooters. Prior to the attack, Simpson had attempted traveling to Somalia but was stopped by the FBI. Still committed to attacking, he reached out to IS operatives via Twitter, who guided and advised him to attack in May 2015.
Of course, those IS-directed plots are only about 20 percent of the Salafist-inspired attacks. The others were carried out by self-radicalized individuals, whose identification with IS may have been opportunistic and intended for shock value. This seems to be the case with the San Bernardino shooters in December 2015 and the Pulse nightclub attacker in June 2016. It is important to note, though, that this is the publicly available evidence. As often happens, as more evidence accumulates over the years, links to foreign groups might appear. For example, the Boston Marathon bombers initially appeared to be homegrown radicals who lucked out with instructions from the internet, most likely from Anwar al-Awlaki’s Inspire magazine, but evidence indicates that the older brother was probably in contact with extremist organizations in Russia. The same happened with Faisal Shahzad, where evidence later revealed he had connections to the Taliban.
It is also worth mentioning that the majority of the perpetrators of these plots were either born in the United States or grew up there. The Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hassan, one of the San Bernardino attackers, and the Pulse nightclub shooter were born in the United States, Faisal Shahzad had American citizenship, and the Boston bombers came to the United States as children. The New York Times attributes this to the disconnect between two competing identities for these individuals: the culture of their parents and their American culture. This is similar to the phenomenon in Europe as well, where the second generation seems to have a hard time reconciling its separate identity.
The curious thing about the United States is that Islamic terrorism gets most of the attention even though the U.S. faces an extremely potent right-wing terrorism threat. Most of these incidents are not labeled terrorism, however, because of how American law enforcement defines hate crimes and domestic terrorism. Taking a definition that approximates a more European reading of terrorism, the New America Foundation in June 2015, estimated the number of deaths caused by right-wing terrorism since 9/11 at fifty, a number that at the time was higher than jihadist terrorism. The numbers changed after the San Bernardino and Orlando attacks, but still underscore the potency of this phenomenon. The incidents that fall in this category include the Charleston church shooting, multiple police ambushes, and an attack against the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009. This tally excludes mass shootings like the Newtown massacre, the Virginia Tech killings, or Isla Vista killings, as these seemed to lack a political motive or any broader political aim to influence American politics or inspire fear among certain ethnic groups.
The plotters behind these attacks run the litany of hate groups from Christian militia members to anti-government entities. Christian extremists with parochial interests have not committed many acts of violence since 2001, except for the murder of George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. The other groups are growing in prominence, however. In 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed 892 different hate groups in the United States. This number has grown with the nomination and subsequent election of Donald Trump. Traditionally, most of these groups’ violence has been directed toward ethnic minorities like Jews, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, but more recently, hate crimes have been directed primarily at American Muslims.
According to FBI data, hate crimes in the United States showed a decline overall, but when examining the figures by religion, there was an upswing of violence toward Muslims. Examples abound. In September 2016, a man on a motorcycle started a fire at an Islamic cultural center near Orlando, while in August 2016, an imam was killed execution-style in New York City. At the time of this writing, the final statistics for 2017 are not available, but if press reports are accurate, they will likely document a general rise in hate crimes regardless of ethnicity or religious status. By late February, there had been more than one hundred reported bomb threats against Jewish institutions or acts of defacement of Jewish symbols, including cemeteries. February 2017 also saw the death of two Indian men by a man yelling, “Get out of my country!” in Kansas, most likely believing them to be Muslims. In May 2017, an alleged white supremacist named Sean C. Urbanski was charged with killing Richard W. Collins III, a young black man who had just finished university and had earned a commission in the U.S. Army. As of this writing, Urbanski has pled not guilty and has not been convicted of any crime, although authorities have charged him with a hate crime after discovering evidence on social media and on his phone that linked him to various hate groups, including a Facebook group called “Alt-Reich: Nation.”
Indeed, many of these hate crimes have occurred in the context of the emergence of the so-called alt-right, which is not reassuring for the United States in the coming years. The alt-right was introduced earlier in this book but warrants more nuanced analysis because it has the potential to generate a potent strain of right-wing terrorism. The term dates back to the late 2000s when Richard Spencer, the president of the Washington-based white supremacist National Policy Institute think tank and the unofficial spokesperson for the movement, used it to describe a wing of American conservatism focused primarily on white identity politics and the preservation of what he called “Western civilization.” The phrase gained mainstream usage during the 2016 presidential elections because many individuals associated with the alt-right started to openly support then candidate Trump. Prominent supporters included Richard Spencer, the chairman of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, and the founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, Matthew Heimbach.
Taking cues from Donald Trump’s more racially inflammatory remarks, such as calling Mexican immigrants rapists and arguing for a Muslim ban, the alt-right saw Trump’s candidacy creating an environment to operate openly, and thereby became key influencers both in Trump’s campaign and online discussions surrounding his candidacy. In the former case, Jeff Sessions, a perennial favorite of the alt-right because of his hardline views on immigration, became Trump’s first attorney general. Similarly, Steve Bannon became a chief advisor to Trump, helped him frame his presidential campaign, and later his administration, in stark, nationalist tones. In addition, Stephen Miller, a close associate of Richard Spencer and one of Jeff Sessions’s former legislative assistants, would go on to craft Trump’s Muslim ban in early 2017 and push for the end of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).3 Most Americans, however, became familiar with the alt-right because of its online activities. Platforms associated with the alt-right like Breitbart and Infowars played a large role in promoting content sympathetic to candidate Trump, becoming his most ardent supporters and the source of positive spin for his most controversial statements. Trump returned the favor, appearing in several interviews by contributors to these platforms, thus legitimizing both websites as viable news sources.
The alt-right falls on the extreme end of the left/right spectrum, but includes a few ideological quirks. Spencer has noted that it is a big-tent ideology that includes paleoconservative and libertarian followers of Ron Paul, anarcho-capitalists, theocrats, and fascists. In this grouping, there are also techno-libertarians, who argue that democracy and egalitarianism restrict technological progress because of the inherent biological differences among races and fantasize about the creation of a fascist state where technologists are free to invent and create without any state intervention. These variations distract from its inherent racism. All groups associated with the alt-right are bound together by the desire to resurrect European “blood and soil” notions of nationalism as well as by their pseudoscientific arguments about genetics and race to advocate white supremacy. Less extreme alt-righters, if there is such a thing, tend to couch their beliefs as being against “PC-culture,” or political correctness, which they argue means speaking truth to power; in practice, this means being openly racist toward immigrants and minorities.
Key policy issues for the alt-right include restrictive immigration policies and regressive refugee settlement policies. Perhaps the only point of debate among the alt-right concerns the issue of “whiteness” and people of Jewish heritage. A small grouping of the alt-right tend to be less anti-Semitic than others, or claim that their anti-Semitism is nothing more than a joke. Stephen Miller, for example, is Jewish. Milo Yiannopoulos, another of the alt-right’s more media-friendly avatars, is Jewish as well but has not hesitated to make jokes online about the Holocaust. Many, if not most, adhere to the German Nazi party line about Jews, with a substantial number being Holocaust deniers. Spencer, for his part, has said he is receptive to evidence that the Holocaust did not happen.
Another key feature of the alt-right is peddling of conspiracy theories. In much the same way that Richard Hofstadter described the far right in the 1960s in his essay “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” many in the alt-right view world events as driven by some dark actor intent on destroying Western civilization, with the white race as the ultimate victim. Not all conspiracies are alike. Some are somewhat benign, for instance those who believe that President Obama and the Democratic Party sought increased immigration to dilute the voting power of white Americans, thereby enabling the Democrats to consolidate power.
Others in the alt-right pushed the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy, which charged Democrats with running an underground pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant in D.C. More nefarious theories include the resurrection of anti-Semitic tropes involving “Jewish bankers” and financiers such as George Soros, who want to destroy democracy in the West, a further evolution of one of the worst hoaxes in history, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The theory with the most receptive audience, and which undoubtedly motivates many of the alt-right, is the belief in a global effort to commit “white genocide”—that is, the elimination of the white race. Some, like Richard Spencer, do not necessarily advance this argument from a conspiratorial perspective but offer pseudoscientific racist reasoning that amounts to the same thing. According to this reading, whites in Europe and North America are inherently superior to other races but are losing their political dominance and their culture to immigrants and will someday become subservient, if not extinct, because of higher birthrates in the immigrant population.
While some conservative publications downplay these theories as the nonsense held by a fringe minority, they have the potential for real harm. In December 2016, shortly after Trump won the election, a man named Edgar Madison Welch attacked Comet Pizza in northern Washington, DC. after encountering the Pizzagate conspiracy theory online. He entered the restaurant during lunchtime and fired three times before realizing he was in error. Welch’s visit was preceded by online harassment of the restaurant by those believing the conspiracy, which apparently included Trump’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, who shared it on social media. No one was hurt in the incident, but it underscored the potency of conspiratorial thinking. There is sufficient historical precedence of conspiracy theories that incite people to act violently against minorities, as was the case in Nazi Germany, or today, with the Buddhist majority attacking the Rohingya in Mynamar.
The alt-right represents the rebirth of the country’s most toxic, illiberal, and racist ideologies, but crafted to appeal to a younger generation. How the alt-right communicates is even different from its predecessors: it relies on online platforms such as Twitter or forums like Reddit, where the alt-right shares memes (or jokes, often laid over images) that convey their ideology in a supposed humorous fashion that allows alt-rights to claim they are only engaging in innocuous banter. And when people criticize alt-rights for their jokes, the common retort is that their critics are being politically correct and are too unsophisticated to understand their humor, and therefore warrant attacks in retaliation. This trolling often generates an online mob mentality where thousands harass prominent critics of the alt-right, and often occurs when leading alt-rightists identify prominent minorities in the media and attack them. Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter after encouraging his followers online to harass Leslie Jones, an African-American comedian.
The alt-right relies on pseudoscientific arguments to gain legitimacy with their supporters and potential supporters. Derek Black, the son of Don Black (the founder of the infamous white supremacist online forum Stormfront and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan), explained in a profile appearing in The Washington Post how this has been a deliberate effort by alt-rights to give them plausible deniability of being labeled as racists. Some of the more public figures of the movement, like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos, are known for dressing fashionably and speaking cogently before cameras; they are no longer the scary men marching with swastika tattoos screaming “Death to Jews.” Rather, they appear as young millennials, educated at elite universities, drawing inspiration from debunked science and false philosophy to clothe their argument that the white race is on the verge of extinction.
With this extreme worldview, the alt-right can radicalize individuals into violence. Much like Salafists, the alt-right advocates a homogeneous society that absolutely rejects outsiders. The alt-right is much more extreme, however, because whereas Salafism castigates nonbelievers, the alt-right rejects billions on the basis of their physical attributes. The online platforms where these ideas find traction, such as Breitbart or Stormfront, ignore or censor any opposing view. The alt-right mind-set offers several solutions to what they see as the diminishing of the white race. Some are relatively benign, such as arguing for the end of nonwhite immigration into the United States. Others are more extreme, taking their cues from novels popular in these circles, like The Turner Diaries, which describes an America torn apart by race war. Adherents of this view tend to argue for more violent means.
At the time of this writing, there is no alt-right terrorist group, but there have been terrorist incidents by alt-rightists. In December 2017, William Edward Atchison shot up a high school in Aztec, New Mexico, killing himself and two students. Police searching his home for motives discovered he was active on numerous alt-right websites. In August 2017 in a Charlottesville, Virginia, James Alex Fields, an alt-right marcher protesting the removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee, drove his car into a group of counterprotestors, killing one and injuring nineteen others. These two attacks evoke the profile of lone-wolf terrorists, which many Americans associated with Islamic jihadist activities.
Worrisome too is the sense that Trump’s presidency has legitimized and normalized many alt-right positions, inducting them into mainstream conservativism. He has resurrected the phrase “America First,” a slogan popular with anti-Semites in the 1930s, and he has made many of the alt-right’s policy preferences his own, starting with efforts to restrict immigration. After the Charlottesville incident, he famously argued that “both sides” bore responsibility for Heather Heyer’s death, and at various points of his candidacy and presidency, he has hesitated to condemn white nationalists and supremacists. He has made many of the alt-right’s ideas part of modern-day Republican orthodoxy. Though many Republicans will not buy into many of the alt-right’s ideas, nevertheless, it would only take a small grouping of individuals to stumble upon its thinking, to radicalize, and then to take up arms.
Another source of right-wing terrorism comes from anti-government groups. Of the anti-government groups, the most prominent is the sovereign citizen movement, which portrays itself as a constitutionally originalist movement and rejects the current federal government, considering it illegitimate. Emerging in the 1970s, sovereign citizens have been implicated in a multitude of cop killings. In 2010, Joseph Kane killed two police officers in Memphis after a routine traffic stop. The ambush of Las Vegas police officers in April 2014 was committed by individuals linked to this organization. Another incident was the ambushing and killing of Christopher Smith, a deputy sheriff in Tallahassee in November 2014. Aside from attacking cops, the group is notorious for committing fraud to defame rivals or overwhelming local authorities with thousands of pages of paperwork to obstruct their ability to levy fines for mundane things like parking tickets. Structurally, sovereigns are decentralized, without any coordinated command or control, and only linked by a nominally shared ideology. In this regard, they are most representative of the lone-wolf phenomenon discussed earlier.
Sovereign citizens are only one strain of these groups. During the Obama administration, the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked close to 1,200 organizations of this type, with around 276 being armed militias. Anti-government organizations usually share a conspiratorial worldview that believes the federal government is working alongside the United Nations to deprive American citizens of their guns and property and to impose a world government. This mind-set created the panic in the summer of 2015 surrounding the American government’s Jade Helm 15 exercise in various southwestern states, which many anti-government groups thought was a prelude to martial law and the confiscation of their weapons. In addition, these groups captured national attention with the Bundy standoff in 2014 that drew militia members from across the country to fight against perceived overreach by the federal government.
A 2012 study done by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point found some interesting trends related to right-wing terrorism. First, there tended to be an upswing of right-wing violence during election years and that an increasing number of attacks occurred in states with large minority populations. They also noted that this movement caused more casualties in the first decade of the 2000s than in the 1990s when excluding the Oklahoma City bombing. However, because most of these efforts are decentralized, the level of violence is not high enough to generate the same panic. Indeed, as Bruce Hoffman has noted, the concept of leaderless terrorist violence was first postulated by the American white supremacist movement in the 1980s. The reason for this was that it drew less scrutiny from federal authorities and made it harder for one arrest to break apart their perceived resistance.
Terrorism will continue being a problem for both Europe and the United States, but in different ways. Europe has strong laws against hate speech and seems to have regulated its right-wing terror problem for now. Left-wing extremism seems to have died with the Cold War, but these groups always have the possibility of emerging, depending on the context of local politics. Furthermore, until 2015, the biggest problem affecting the continent were separatist groups, which tend to be underreported relative to violence committed by Islamic terrorists. This latter data must be qualified by noting that this is for the whole of Europe and that individual countries experience terrorism differently. Going forward, Europe’s proximity to the Middle East makes it an easy target for continued attacks by al-Qaeda and Islamic State. How this evolves will depend on the continent’s policies toward refugees and if it deploys a framework for integration and assimilation. Further cooperation and intelligence sharing among security forces will undoubtedly help the continent move forward, but given the size of Europe and the strained budgets of its member states, it might not be able to pool enough resources to stop all attacks. On top of this, while it is easy for outside commentators from countries with unified security apparatuses to prescribe solutions for Europe, it is important to keep in mind that European security is a tapestry of various policies developed at varying societal levels, making harmonious negotiations and diplomacy a luxury. That it seems dedicated toward working to this goal is commendable.
The United States, in contrast, is blessed with two large oceans and two friendly neighbors to its north and south. This will slow the growth of its Muslim population, especially because the Obama and Trump administrations have proven to be quite stingy in accepting refugees from Iraq and Syria. As such, most terrorism threats to the U.S. will likely come from its domestic population. Regarding Islamic terrorism, the threat to the United States has certainly been exaggerated. In the period between 9/11 and 2016, more Americans were killed by right-wing American terrorists than by Muslim terrorists. In 2017, the United States experienced thirteen terrorist incidents. Only two of these can be attributed to jihadist violence—the October 2017 truck attack in lower Manhattan and the failed suicide terrorist attack in New York’s Port Authority bus depot in December. The other eleven were committed by, or linked to, individuals from the far right.
A challenge confronting both Europe and the United States is allocating the necessary resources and properly analyzing the problem of terrorism. The nature of terrorism makes preventing every attack impossible unless governments start pulling resources away from other non-security-related programs. There will have to be cost-benefit analyses for these societies, as they must operate under conditions of constraint and scarcity. In an ideal world, where other challenges do not exist, all terrorism could be stopped. At the same time, while billions of dollars or euros could be spent to strengthen security at the cost of other important societal goods, such as education and health, these debates are often hard to have when grieving family members mourn the loss of their children, spouses, and friends. Of the two, it is likely that some European countries are better prepared for these discussions without devolving into demagoguery or inflating the problem more than necessary.
Countries such as the United Kingdom and Spain have a longer history of confronting terrorism and have developed a degree of resiliency that allows their societies to frame the problem in the right context. The United States, however, even with its long history of domestic terrorism—from left-wing radicals in the 1960s and 1970s (the Weather Underground), hate groups (the Ku Klux Klan and its many lynchings in the American South), and various right-wing terrorists starting in the 1980s—seems to lack such resiliency. One need only consider the effects of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, when two individuals caused the city to shut down and local officials to declare martial law, suspending the Constitution temporarily. The risk of terrorism, as discussed before, is not so much that terrorists will destroy a country but that it will cause societies to overreact and see them give up on their values in the name of security. Therefore, for Western societies, the seminal challenge is creating an effective and efficient counterterrorism policy that secures their domestic populations while at the same time not eroding the very values that define them as such: the rule of law, civil liberties, social pluralism, inclusionary democratic institutions, public spaces with unfettered access for assembly purposes, due process.
The obstacle, of course, when it comes to this last point is developing a proper metric for counterterrorism. When security forces are doing their job well, their victories will never appear on the front pages of newspapers. In contrast, whenever an intelligence failure occurs or some completely unexpected terrorist incident happens, this captures the public’s attention, and failures are broadcast globally. This is how it should be, because failure usually implies death, especially given the numerous instances where terrorism incidents occurred either due to the lack of imagination by counterterrorism entities, as was the case with Nemmouche in 2014, or because of strategic intelligence failures as with the May 2017 Manchester attacks. At the same time, terrorism will continue being a problem for society until time collapses upon itself just because of the inherent entropy and randomness of the universe. This is not meant to justify security lapses but rather to suggest the importance of a more robust societal understanding of the threat posed by terrorism and, similarly, the value of defining success in counterterrorism in more concrete terms than the abstract and nigh impossible goal of preventing terrorism forevermore.