11 Oct, 2015
White supremacists a bigger problem in U.S. than “Islamic extremists”
Tehran, Oct 5, IRNA – While there is a high tendency in the United States to portray Muslims as a threat for international peace, figures suggest that white supremacy is a bigger problem.
“There’s an acceptance (in the US) now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts said, according to the New York Times. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated,” he added.
Based on a survey, since Sept. 11, 2001, ‘non-Muslim’ extremists have killed 48 Americans—including the mass killings in Charleston, S.C., a report by the New York Times back in June suggests.
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The public perception in the US is that they are the Muslim extremists who are actually claiming American lives. But statistics show that domestic terrorists, mainly the White Supremacy is the problem, i.e. extremists who are not of the Muslim faith.
Extremism and committing violence against the US public, especially the African-Americans goes down in the US history.
According to Westen sources, America’s first federal anti-terrorism law, known as the Third Force Act or the Ku Klux Klan Act, was passed by Congress in 1871.
The law caused nine counties in South Carolina to be placed under martial law and led to thousands of arrests.
To David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, the actions of foreign extremist groups are no better or worse than the historic violence against African-Americans by domestic extremists.
‘There’s nothing you’re going to see today that’s not going to have already occurred in the US,’ he said as quoted by the Huffington Post.
‘If you think of these groups that behead now — first of all, beheading is barbaric but it’s no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the US.’
Some maintain that anti-black terrorism cases in the US rooted in the past; the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws.
The Jim Crow laws were a number of laws requiring racial segregation in the United States. These laws were enforced in different states between 1876 and 1965. ‘Jim Crow’ laws provided a systematic legal basis for segregating and discriminating against African Americans. The laws first appeared after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era and were enforced through the mid-twentieth century.
Despite the long history of violence and terrorism in the US, recent reports tend to show the opposite. However, it is crystal clear that terrorism is still an ongoing concern in the US.
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