Is The U.S. Engaged In a Muslim Religious War … On the Side of Islamic Jihadis?
Non-Muslims Carried Out More than 90% of All Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil
Posted on May 1, 2013, by WashingtonsBlog
Terrorism Is a Real Threat But the Threat to the U.S. from Muslim Terrorists is Exaggerated
An FBI report shows that Muslims perpetrated only a small percentage of terrorist attacks carried out on U.S. soil between 1980 and 2005.
Princeton University’s Loon Watch compiled the following chart from the FBI’s data (as explained below, this chart is over-simplified and somewhat inaccurate):
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database
According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs. 6%). These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion. These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.
(The chart is misleading in several ways. For example, it labels “Extreme Left Wing Groups” and “Communists”, but not “Extreme Right Wing Groups” or “Fascists”. It should have either discard all partisan labels, or included labels for both ends of the spectrum. Also, “Latinos” is misleading, as Loonwatch is referring to Puerto Rican separatist groups, Cuban exile groups and the like. However, as shown below, many of the basic concepts are correct.)
U.S. News and World Report noted in February of this year:
Of the more than 300 American deaths from political violence and mass shootings since 9/11, only 33 have come at the hands of Muslim-Americans, according to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. The Muslim-American suspects or perpetrators in these or other attempted attacks fit no demographic profile—only 51 of more than 200 are of Arabic ethnicity. In 2012, all but one of the nine Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered halted in early stages. That one, an attempted bombing of a Social Security office in Arizona, caused no casualties.
Wired reported the same month:
Since 9/11, [Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writing for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and National Security] and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbours. During that period, 180,000 Americans murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurtzman's team.
Law enforcement, including “informants and undercover agents,” were involved in “almost all of the Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered in 2012,” the Triangle team finds. That’s in keeping with the FBI’s recent practice of using undercover or double agents to encourage would-be terrorists to act on their strong desires and arresting them when they do — a practice critics say perilously close to entrapment. A difference in 2012 observed by Triangle: except the Arizona attack, all the alleged plots involving U.S. Muslims were “discovered and disrupted at an early stage,” while in the past three years, law enforcement often observed the incubating terror initiatives “after weapons or explosives gathered.”
The sample of Muslim Americans turning to terror is “vanishingly small,” Kurzman tells Danger Room. Measuring the U.S. Muslim population is a famously inexact science since census data don’t track religion, but rather “country of origin,” which researchers attempt to use as a proxy. There are somewhere between 1.7 million and seven million American Muslims, by most estimates, and Kurzman says he operates off a model that presumes the lower end, a bit over 2 million. That’s less a rate of involvement in terrorism of less than 10 per million, down from a 2003 high of 40 per million, as detailed in the chart above.
The scrutiny by law enforcement and homeland security on American Muslims has not similarly abated. The FBI tracks “geo maps” of areas where Muslims live and work, regardless of their involvement in any crime. The Patriot Act and other post-9/11 restrictions on government surveillance remain in place. The Department of Homeland Security just celebrated its 10th anniversary. In 2011, President Obama ordered the entire federal national-security apparatus to get rid of counterterrorism training material that instructed agents to focus on Islam itself, rather than specific terrorist groups.
Kurzman doesn’t deny that law enforcement plays a role in disrupting and deterring homegrown U.S. Muslim terrorism. His research holds it out as a possible explanation for the decline. But he remains surprised by the disconnect between the scale of the terrorism problem and the size — and expense — of the government’s response.
“Until public opinion starts to recognise the extent of the problem has been lower than we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance — not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we address the rights & liberties of everyone.”
We agree. And so do most Americans. Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors, risky sexual behaviour or just about anything other than terrorism.
Kurzman told the Young Turks in February that Islamic terrorism “doesn’t even count for 1 percent” of the 180,000 murders in the US since 9/11.
While the Boston Marathon bombings were horrific, a top terrorism expert says that the Boston attack was more like Columbine than 9/11 and that the bombers are “murderers not terrorists”. The overwhelming majority of mass shootings were by non-Muslims. (This is true in Europe, as well as in the U.S.)
However you classify them – murder or terrorism – the Boston bombings occurred after all of the statistical analysis set forth above. Moreover, different groups have different agendas about how to classify the perpetrators (For example, liberal Mother Jones and conservative Breitbart disagree on how many of those responsible for terror attacks classified as right wing extremists.)
So we decided to look at the most current statistics for ourselves, to do an actual numerical count not driven by any agenda.
Specifically, we reviewed all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as documented by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2012). Global Terrorism Database, as retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.
The START Global Terrorism Database spans from 1970 through 2012 (and will be updated from year-to-year), and – as of this writing – includes 104,000 terrorist incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive open-source database open to the public.
E agree., And so do most Americans. Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors, risky sexual behaviour or just about anything other than terrorism.
Kurzman told the Young Turks in February that Islamic terrorism “doesn’t even count for 1 percent” of the 180,000 murders in the US since 9/11.
While the Boston Marathon bombings were horrific, a top terrorism expert says that the Boston attack was more like Columbine than 9/11 and that the bombers are “murderers not terrorists”. The overwhelming majority of mass shootings were by non-Muslims. (This is true in Europe, as well as in the U.S.)
However you classify them – murder or terrorism – the Boston bombings occurred after all of the statistical analysis set forth above. Moreover, different groups have different agendas about how to classify the perpetrators (For example, liberal Mother Jones and conservative Breitbart disagree on how many of those responsible for terror attacks can correctly classify as right wing extremists.)
So we decided to look at the most current statistics for ourselves, to do an actual numerical count not driven by any agenda.
Specifically, we reviewed all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as documented by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2012). Global Terrorism Database, as retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.
The START Global Terrorism Database spans from 1970 through 2012 (and will be updated from year-to-year), and – as of this writing – includes 104,000 terrorist incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive open-source database open to the public.
We counted up the number of terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims. We, excluded attacks by groups which are obviously not Muslims. Such as,
the Ku Klux Klan,
Medellin Drug Cartel,
Irish Republican Army,
Anti-Castro Group,
Mormon extremists,
Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation,
Jewish Defense League,
May 19 Communist Order,
Chicano Liberation Front,
Jewish Armed Resistance,
American Indian Movement,
Gay Liberation Front,
Aryan Nation,
Jewish Action Movement,
National Front for the Liberation of Cuba,
Fourth Reich Skinheads.
We counted attacks by
Al Qaeda,
the Taliban,
Black American Moslems,
Palestine,
Lebanon or any other Arab or Muslim country, or any name including anything looking remotely Arabic or Indonesian (like “Al” anything or “Jamaat” anything).
If not sure what the person’s affiliation was, we looked up the name of the group to determine whether connected to Muslims.
Based on our review of the approximately 2,400 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil contained within the START database, we determined that about 60 were carried out by Muslims.
In other words, about 2.5% of all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1970 and 2012 have been conducted by Muslims.* This is a tiny proportion of all attacks.
(We determined that approximately 118 of the terror attacks – or 4.9% – were carried out by Jewish groups such as Jewish Armed Resistance, the Jewish Defense League, Jewish Action Movement, United Jewish Underground and Thunder of Zion. This is almost twice the percentage of Islamic attacks within the United States. Also, there were approximately 168 attacks – or 7% – by anti-abortion activists, who tend to be Christian. Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional – a Puerto Rican paramilitary organisation – carried out more than 120bomb attacks on U.S. targets between 1974 and 1983, and there were some 41 attacks by Cuban exiles and some attacks by other Latin American groups. If we look at worldwide assault – instead of just attacks on U.S. soil – Sunni Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism. However: 1. Muslims are also the primary victims of terror attacks worldwide, and 2. the U.S. backs the most basic types of Sunnis over more moderate Muslims and Arab secularists.)
Moreover, another study was undertaken by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism – called “Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism in the United States” – found:
Between 1970 and 2011, 32 percent of the offender groups motivated by ethnonationalism/separatist agendas, 28 percent driven by single issues, such as animal rights or opposition to war, and religious beliefs hit 7 percent. Also, 11 percent of the perpetrator groups classified as extreme right-wing, and 22 percent categorised as extreme left-wing.
Preliminary findings from PPT-US data between 1970 and 2011 also illustrate a distinct shift in the dominant ideologies of these terrorist groups over time, with the proportion of emerging ethnonationalism/separatist terrorist groups declining and the percentage of religious terrorist groups increasing. However, while terrorist groups with religious ideologies represent 40 percent of all new groups from 2000-2011 (two out of five), they only account for 7 percent of groups over time.
Similarly, a third study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism Religion found that religion alone is not a key factor in determining which terrorists want to use weapons of mass destruction:
The available empirical data show that there is not a significant relationship between terrorist organisations’ pursuit of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) weapons and the mere possession of a religious ideology, according to a new quantitative study by START researchers Victor Asal, Gary Ackerman and Karl Rethemeyer.
Therefore, Muslims are not more likely than other groups to want to use WMDs.
* The Boston Marathon bombing was not included in this analysis, as START has not yet updated its database to include 2013 terrorist attacks. Three people died in the Boston bombing. While tragic, we are confident that none-Muslims killed more than three during this same period.
We are not experts in terrorism analysis. We would, therefore, defer to people like Kurtzman on the exact number. However, every quantitative analysis of terrorism in the U.S. we have read shows that the percent of terror attacks carried out by Muslims is far less than 10%.
Postscript: State-sponsored terrorism is beyond the scope of this discussion, and not included in our statistical analysis. Specifically, the following arguments are beyond the framework of this discussion, as we are focusing solely on non-state terrorism:
Cases by University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole that deaths from 20th-century wars could be labelled Christian terrorism
Arguments that our recent use of torture and double tap drone strikes are terrorism
Non-Muslims Carried Out More than 90% of All Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil
Posted on May 1, 2013, by WashingtonsBlog
Terrorism Is a Real Threat But the Threat to the U.S. from Muslim Terrorists is Exaggerated
An FBI report shows that Muslims perpetrated only a small percentage of terrorist attacks carried out on U.S. soil between 1980 and 2005.
Princeton University’s Loon Watch compiled the following chart from the FBI’s data (as explained below, this chart is over-simplified and somewhat inaccurate):
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database
According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs. 6%). These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion. These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.
(The chart is misleading in several ways. For example, it labels “Extreme Left Wing Groups” and “Communists”, but not “Extreme Right Wing Groups” or “Fascists”. It should have either discard all partisan labels, or included labels for both ends of the spectrum. Also, “Latinos” is misleading, as Loonwatch is referring to Puerto Rican separatist groups, Cuban exile groups and the like. However, as shown below, many of the basic concepts are correct.)
U.S. News and World Report noted in February of this year:
Of the more than 300 American deaths from political violence and mass shootings since 9/11, only 33 have come at the hands of Muslim-Americans, according to the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. The Muslim-American suspects or perpetrators in these or other attempted attacks fit no demographic profile—only 51 of more than 200 are of Arabic ethnicity. In 2012, all but one of the nine Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered halted in early stages. That one, an attempted bombing of a Social Security office in Arizona, caused no casualties.
Wired reported the same month:
Since 9/11, [Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writing for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and National Security] and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbours. During that period, 180,000 Americans murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurtzman's team.
Law enforcement, including “informants and undercover agents,” were involved in “almost all of the Muslim-American terrorism plots uncovered in 2012,” the Triangle team finds. That’s in keeping with the FBI’s recent practice of using undercover or double agents to encourage would-be terrorists to act on their strong desires and arresting them when they do — a practice critics say perilously close to entrapment. A difference in 2012 observed by Triangle: except the Arizona attack, all the alleged plots involving U.S. Muslims were “discovered and disrupted at an early stage,” while in the past three years, law enforcement often observed the incubating terror initiatives “after weapons or explosives gathered.”
The sample of Muslim Americans turning to terror is “vanishingly small,” Kurzman tells Danger Room. Measuring the U.S. Muslim population is a famously inexact science since census data don’t track religion, but rather “country of origin,” which researchers attempt to use as a proxy. There are somewhere between 1.7 million and seven million American Muslims, by most estimates, and Kurzman says he operates off a model that presumes the lower end, a bit over 2 million. That’s less a rate of involvement in terrorism of less than 10 per million, down from a 2003 high of 40 per million, as detailed in the chart above.
The scrutiny by law enforcement and homeland security on American Muslims has not similarly abated. The FBI tracks “geo maps” of areas where Muslims live and work, regardless of their involvement in any crime. The Patriot Act and other post-9/11 restrictions on government surveillance remain in place. The Department of Homeland Security just celebrated its 10th anniversary. In 2011, President Obama ordered the entire federal national-security apparatus to get rid of counterterrorism training material that instructed agents to focus on Islam itself, rather than specific terrorist groups.
Kurzman doesn’t deny that law enforcement plays a role in disrupting and deterring homegrown U.S. Muslim terrorism. His research holds it out as a possible explanation for the decline. But he remains surprised by the disconnect between the scale of the terrorism problem and the size — and expense — of the government’s response.
“Until public opinion starts to recognise the extent of the problem has been lower than we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance — not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we address the rights & liberties of everyone.”
We agree. And so do most Americans. Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors, risky sexual behaviour or just about anything other than terrorism.
Kurzman told the Young Turks in February that Islamic terrorism “doesn’t even count for 1 percent” of the 180,000 murders in the US since 9/11.
While the Boston Marathon bombings were horrific, a top terrorism expert says that the Boston attack was more like Columbine than 9/11 and that the bombers are “murderers not terrorists”. The overwhelming majority of mass shootings were by non-Muslims. (This is true in Europe, as well as in the U.S.)
However you classify them – murder or terrorism – the Boston bombings occurred after all of the statistical analysis set forth above. Moreover, different groups have different agendas about how to classify the perpetrators (For example, liberal Mother Jones and conservative Breitbart disagree on how many of those responsible for terror attacks classified as right wing extremists.)
So we decided to look at the most current statistics for ourselves, to do an actual numerical count not driven by any agenda.
Specifically, we reviewed all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as documented by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2012). Global Terrorism Database, as retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.
The START Global Terrorism Database spans from 1970 through 2012 (and will be updated from year-to-year), and – as of this writing – includes 104,000 terrorist incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive open-source database open to the public.
E agree., And so do most Americans. Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors, risky sexual behaviour or just about anything other than terrorism.
Kurzman told the Young Turks in February that Islamic terrorism “doesn’t even count for 1 percent” of the 180,000 murders in the US since 9/11.
While the Boston Marathon bombings were horrific, a top terrorism expert says that the Boston attack was more like Columbine than 9/11 and that the bombers are “murderers not terrorists”. The overwhelming majority of mass shootings were by non-Muslims. (This is true in Europe, as well as in the U.S.)
However you classify them – murder or terrorism – the Boston bombings occurred after all of the statistical analysis set forth above. Moreover, different groups have different agendas about how to classify the perpetrators (For example, liberal Mother Jones and conservative Breitbart disagree on how many of those responsible for terror attacks can correctly classify as right wing extremists.)
So we decided to look at the most current statistics for ourselves, to do an actual numerical count not driven by any agenda.
Specifically, we reviewed all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as documented by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2012). Global Terrorism Database, as retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.
The START Global Terrorism Database spans from 1970 through 2012 (and will be updated from year-to-year), and – as of this writing – includes 104,000 terrorist incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive open-source database open to the public.
We counted up the number of terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims. We, excluded attacks by groups which are obviously not Muslims. Such as,
the Ku Klux Klan,
Medellin Drug Cartel,
Irish Republican Army,
Anti-Castro Group,
Mormon extremists,
Vietnamese Organization to Exterminate Communists and Restore the Nation,
Jewish Defense League,
May 19 Communist Order,
Chicano Liberation Front,
Jewish Armed Resistance,
American Indian Movement,
Gay Liberation Front,
Aryan Nation,
Jewish Action Movement,
National Front for the Liberation of Cuba,
Fourth Reich Skinheads.
We counted attacks by
Al Qaeda,
the Taliban,
Black American Moslems,
Palestine,
Lebanon or any other Arab or Muslim country, or any name including anything looking remotely Arabic or Indonesian (like “Al” anything or “Jamaat” anything).
If not sure what the person’s affiliation was, we looked up the name of the group to determine whether connected to Muslims.
Based on our review of the approximately 2,400 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil contained within the START database, we determined that about 60 were carried out by Muslims.
In other words, about 2.5% of all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1970 and 2012 have been conducted by Muslims.* This is a tiny proportion of all attacks.
(We determined that approximately 118 of the terror attacks – or 4.9% – were carried out by Jewish groups such as Jewish Armed Resistance, the Jewish Defense League, Jewish Action Movement, United Jewish Underground and Thunder of Zion. This is almost twice the percentage of Islamic attacks within the United States. Also, there were approximately 168 attacks – or 7% – by anti-abortion activists, who tend to be Christian. Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional – a Puerto Rican paramilitary organisation – carried out more than 120bomb attacks on U.S. targets between 1974 and 1983, and there were some 41 attacks by Cuban exiles and some attacks by other Latin American groups. If we look at worldwide assault – instead of just attacks on U.S. soil – Sunni Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism. However: 1. Muslims are also the primary victims of terror attacks worldwide, and 2. the U.S. backs the most basic types of Sunnis over more moderate Muslims and Arab secularists.)
Moreover, another study was undertaken by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism – called “Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism in the United States” – found:
Between 1970 and 2011, 32 percent of the offender groups motivated by ethnonationalism/separatist agendas, 28 percent driven by single issues, such as animal rights or opposition to war, and religious beliefs hit 7 percent. Also, 11 percent of the perpetrator groups classified as extreme right-wing, and 22 percent categorised as extreme left-wing.
Preliminary findings from PPT-US data between 1970 and 2011 also illustrate a distinct shift in the dominant ideologies of these terrorist groups over time, with the proportion of emerging ethnonationalism/separatist terrorist groups declining and the percentage of religious terrorist groups increasing. However, while terrorist groups with religious ideologies represent 40 percent of all new groups from 2000-2011 (two out of five), they only account for 7 percent of groups over time.
Similarly, a third study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism Religion found that religion alone is not a key factor in determining which terrorists want to use weapons of mass destruction:
The available empirical data show that there is not a significant relationship between terrorist organisations’ pursuit of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) weapons and the mere possession of a religious ideology, according to a new quantitative study by START researchers Victor Asal, Gary Ackerman and Karl Rethemeyer.
Therefore, Muslims are not more likely than other groups to want to use WMDs.
* The Boston Marathon bombing was not included in this analysis, as START has not yet updated its database to include 2013 terrorist attacks. Three people died in the Boston bombing. While tragic, we are confident that none-Muslims killed more than three during this same period.
We are not experts in terrorism analysis. We would, therefore, defer to people like Kurtzman on the exact number. However, every quantitative analysis of terrorism in the U.S. we have read shows that the percent of terror attacks carried out by Muslims is far less than 10%.
Postscript: State-sponsored terrorism is beyond the scope of this discussion, and not included in our statistical analysis. Specifically, the following arguments are beyond the framework of this discussion, as we are focusing solely on non-state terrorism:
Cases by University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole that deaths from 20th-century wars could be labelled Christian terrorism
Arguments that our recent use of torture and double tap drone strikes are terrorism
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