DragonI

Opinion | I Spent 25 Years Fighting Jihadis. White Supremacists Aren’t So Different.

We can’t fight domestic terror groups efficiently until the law treats them the way we treat foreign ones.

www.nytimes.com

When a young Muslim man, self-radicalized online, kills in the name of Islamist ideology, we have no trouble calling him a terrorist and connecting him with groups like ISIS. When a young white man, similarly self-radicalized, kills in the name of racist ideology — even when he publishes a manifesto to that effect — we tend to call him disturbed. We speak about him as a troubled loner, rather than a member of a wider network.

The disparities are not limited to cultural perceptions. America’s law enforcement agencies, intelligence community and court system all treat these two scenarios differently. Those differences in treatment mask instructive similarities between these two forms of organized hate. Having spent almost 25 years fighting jihadi terrorism here and abroad, I see disturbing parallels between the rise of Al Qaeda in the 1990s and that of racist terrorism today.

White supremacists, like their Islamist counterparts, explicitly seek to use violence to create a climate of fear and chaos that can then be exploited to reshape society in their own image. Their recruitment videos share an emphasis on the lifestyle they purport to offer recruits — one of “purity,” militancy and physical fitness. 

One group for neo-Nazis, founded by a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has taken the analogy to its logical conclusion, calling itself “The Base” — a direct translation of the meaning of the word Al Qaeda. The organization also uses similar black flag imagery. The Base maintains an online library of terrorist manuals; the Al Qaeda publication Inspire taught the Boston bombers how to build pressure-cooker explosives.

Our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are not blind to the threat. In May, a senior F.B.I. official testified to Congress that the bureau is pursuing about 850 domestic terrorism investigations.

Since 2001, a long list of people have been indicted on a charge of providing material support to designated foreign terrorist entities like Al Qaeda. But for domestic terrorist organizations, material support charges are impossible because there is no mechanism for designating domestic terrorist groups as such.

Even the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, the worst domestic terrorist in the nation’s history, was not charged with any terrorism offense for precisely this reason.

Many of our allies have already changed their own laws to allow more robust investigations of domestic terrorists. Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, for example, can now use many of the same methods against domestic extremism that they have long deployed against Al Qaeda, thanks to laws passed following 9/11.

The F.B.I. should follow MI5’s lead, with appropriate safeguards for our constitutional freedoms. But this can happen only if Congress updates our post-9/11 legislation to allow domestic terror groups to be designated in the same way as foreign ones. This will allow our law-enforcement agencies access to the full suite of monitoring tools and our prosecutors the ability to bring meaningful charges for aiding domestic terrorism.

Facebook and Instagram Finally Ban White Nationalism and White Separatism

Facebook and Instagram will finally ban white nationalism and white separatism on their networks in a move that will be implemented next week. The decision, first reported by Motherboard but announced by Facebook on its website, comes after the social media giant spent years splitting hairs about the difference between white nationalism and white supremacy. And there’s still the question of how well Facebook can police white nationalist content among its 2 billion users.

gizmodo.com|Matt Novak

“We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism – things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity,” Facebook said.

Facebook has officially banned white supremacist content since at least last year, but the company deemed white nationalism and white separatism as perfectly acceptable. White nationalism is a belief that white people should be in charge of a given nation, while white separatism is a desire to establish a whites-only nation by banishing people of color and heavily restricting immigration.

Both ideologies rely heavily on the concept of white supremacy, the idea that people of color are inferior to white people, despite the fact that the basic question of who counts as “white” is something that racists can’t even agree upon. Facebook has seemingly decided that it’s not worth trying to distinguish between white supremacy and other forms of racism.

“We decided that the overlap between white nationalism, [white] separatism, and white supremacy is so extensive we really can’t make a meaningful distinction between them,” Brian Fishman, policy director of counterterrorism at Facebook, told Motherboard. “And that’s because the language and the rhetoric that is used and the ideology that it represents overlaps to a degree that it is not a meaningful distinction.”

Facebook will also launch a new program on the website to redirect people who are searching for white extremist content to get help. 

Facebook provided Gizmodo with the following examples of posts that would be taken down:

• “Yes, I am a white nationalist. No, I am not a racist.”
• “I am not anti-Muslim, I just think white people need their own separate nation.”
• “Asians are taking all of our jobs. This is why white separatism is the only way we can survive.”
• “What’s the answer to this immigration problem? White separatism.”

President Trump blamed for rise in hate groups to record high in new report

President Trump is making America hate again, a new report claims. The number of hate groups in the U.S. surged by 30% over the past four years, reaching an all-time high.

www.nydailynews.com|Gina Salamone

There were 1,020 hate groups in the U.S. in 2018, which marked the fourth straight year of growth, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report states that

“Once relegated to the fringes, the radical right now has a toehold in the White House,” the report adds.

“Rather than trying to tamp down hate, as presidents of both parties have done, President Trump elevates it — with both his rhetoric and his policies. In doing so, he’s given people across America the go-ahead to act on their worst instincts.”,  Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project

“Trump has made people in the white supremacist movement move back into politics and the public domain. He is a critical aspect of this dynamic, but he is not the only reason why the ranks of hate groups are growing. The ability to propagate hate in the online space is key.”,  Heidi Beirich

The center said in a statement that most hate groups in the United States espoused some form of white supremacist ideology, including neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederates and white nationalists. It said the number of white nationalist groups jumped by almost 50 percent, to 148 in 2018 from 100. 

According to statistics released by the FBI, hate crime has increased in the U.S. for the third year running. Last year, the number of incidents increased 17 percent compared to 2016. The total number of incidents grew from 6,121 in 2016 to 7,175 in 2017 with black and Jewish Americans seriously impacted. In 2017, 59.6 percent of the incidents reported were motivated by bias against race, 20.6 percent were against religion and 15.8 percent were against a person's sexual orientation.

• Why doesn’t the Southern Poverty Law Center list the alt-right Nazi #Incels?
• What do far-right extremists and anti-abortion activists have in common? White Evangelicals, Republicans and Trump supporters!

Christopher Wray told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday that, in addition to those domestic terrorism investigations, the FBI had an additional 1,000 investigations into suspected “lone wolves” in all 50 states.

Between 2007 and 2017, at least 33 officers were shot by individuals actively involved or affiliated with far-right extremism, including white supremacists, sovereign citizens and lone wolves — a number that far exceeds those killed by Black or leftist extremists.

This map shows documented instances where President-elect Donald Trump, his supporters, or his staff have harassed or attacked Latinos, immigrants, Muslim-American, African-Americans, and other minority and marginalized groups.

This list was compiled using hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports. Groups that appear in the center of states represent statewide groups.

How the USA PATRIOT Act redefines "Domestic Terrorism"

Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act

www.aclu.org

Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Pub. L. No. 107-52) expanded the definition of terrorism to cover ""domestic,"" as opposed to international, terrorism.  

A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do an act "dangerous to human life" that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to: 

• (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
• (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or 
• (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.
• Additionally, the acts have to occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States and if they do not, may be regarded as international terrorism.

Reddit bans r/altright over doxing

Reddit has banned the r/altright subreddit for “the proliferation of personal and confidential information.” That’s a rather clinical way of describing what’s often called doxing: posting details (docs) like the home phone number and address of someone a community wishes to harass.

techcrunch.com|Devin Coldewey

Once this information is public, the person in question is open to all manner of personal threats, swatting, COD pizza delivery and so on. The FBI recently released documents detailing its own investigations into death and bomb threats directed at women doxed and targeted by those gathering under the now rather ragged Gamergate banner.