Seth Barron from City Journal corrects the New York Times regarding who commits most of the world’s extremist violence:
Evil as they are, white supremacists aren’t even close to the top of the list.
Last week, the New York Times featured an illustrated timeline of “white extremist” killings over the last nine years, with lines demonstrating citation and affiliation among the killers. According to the Times, the record shows “an informal global network of white extremists whose violent attacks are occurring with greater frequency in the West.”
The idea that white supremacist violence is a growing global threat has gained more currency recently, notably in the wake of the ghastly Christchurch mosque massacre, when an avowed white nationalist murdered 50 Muslims. New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, asserted that “White supremacists committed the largest # of extremist killings in 2017.” No one will deny that racial hatred is an evil ideology, and that people who kill in the name of white supremacy commit evil—but is it true that white extremists are sowing a growing amount of worldwide mayhem?
The evidence suggests otherwise. Even a superficial glance at the record indicates that of the nearly 20,000 people killed in thousands of extremist killings in 2017, white supremacists were responsible for very few. The worst terrorist event of 2017, according to the State Department, was the explosion of a truck bomb outside the Safari Hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia, which killed more than 580 people. This violent act is believed to have been the work of Al-Shabaab, which was responsible for 97 percent of the 370 instances of extremist killings in Somalia in 2017, accounting for about 1,400 deaths—mostly civilian. The remaining violent acts were carried out by Jabha East Africa (ISIS-Somalia), a dissident Al-Shabaab splinter group.
The deadliest extremist attack in Egypt’s history took place in 2017, when ISIS-Sinai terrorists converged on a mosque in Sinai during Friday prayers and slaughtered 312 people, including 27 children, when they came outside. Also in Egypt that year, on Palm Sunday, an extremist suicide bomber connected to IS-Egypt killed 30 Coptic Christians at a church in Tanta. He coordinated his actions with another suicide bomber, who killed 16 people at a church in Alexandria.
Read more: City Journal
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