Focusing on imaginary terrorist threats leaves us vulnerable to real ones

On July 16, representatives of 65 nations attended a ministerial summit convened by the State Department to address the alleged threat from far-left extremist groups. The meeting was the latest gambit in President Trump’s campaign against the “radical left,” launched after the murder of Charlie Kirk.  

Focusing on imaginary threats inhibits the ability to counter real ones. Unfortunately, this year’s National Counterterrorism Strategy does exactly that. The document prioritizes Islamists, drug cartels and other “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist” but ignores far-right extremists. 

In my extensive research and writing on terrorism I have never encountered a “violent” and “radically pro-transgender” extremist group. During the more than 20 years I participated in the Department of Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, I taught that groups across the political spectrum use terror as a weapon. Strategy must be based on an objective assessment of actual threats, not an ideological predilection to dislike certain groups.

Until now, law enforcement and intelligence agencies conducted objective threat assessments, concentrating their efforts on groups most likely to attack Americans at home or abroad, regardless of ideology. Those threats have changed over time. 

During the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan launched terrorist campaigns against the Civil Rights Movement, including the infamous Birmingham Baptist Church bombing that killed four young African American girls in 1963. 

The next threat came from the left. The Marxist Weathermen-Weather Underground carried out more than 20 bombing attacks from 1969 to........

© The Hill