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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.

Some of the other categories contain even more islamic perps, like antisemitic, and palestininan terrorism. Not to mention islamic terrorism did by far the most victims, outweighing all other forms of terrorism combined.

Even the 2017 study, ignoring the twin elephants in the room, comes to that conclusion:

A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US between 2008 and 2016.[24] It found:[25]

115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.

63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.

19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as "plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused 7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[26]

The article wiki uses as source here is confused. Its central, vehement point is that far more resources should be devoted to far-right terrorism, yet its own (and in my opinion, already cherry-picked) statistics show that despite the government's focus on islamic terrorism, it remains the greater threat. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly equalized all forms of terrorism to foil 55% (the mean of the two threats) : far-right deaths would be reduced by 24, islamic deaths would jump by 79.


Suspiciously absent from that wikipedia article are black supremacist attacks, like waukesha. And the dallas and NY police killings (quote from a perp: "I want to kill white people, especially white officers"), although mentioned in the introduction, are not in the categorized list. But I guess it's just "isolated incidents", they needed the space for a couple of anti-abortion attempted murders.

What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.

I mean that Wiki is listing 15 attacks in 20 years, with the clear outlier being 9/11. I didn't say anything about how rare or common white nationalist attacks were.

You said "Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so." That 'exceptionnally rare' is 100% false.

But okay. You mean then, that terrorism is rare in general. That may be true, but so are wars. And one can cause the other, as 9/11 or sarajevo '14 have shown.

I was engaging with anti_dan's point about why Jews are in practice supporting Islam post-9/11, but yes, I would say that terrorism is absolutely rare in modern America. So you're right, it's not exceptional. My mistake.