Throughout this course, we've been focusing on understanding the threat that emanated prior to and at 9/11, and how it's affected our world and our country. And today, this lecture, we're going to focus specifically on violent extremism in the United States. The first point I want to make is that, violent extremism in the United States is a multi-dimensional problem. First is extremism that is inspired by ISIS/Al-Qaeda ideology, much of what we've studied in this course. A second source of violent extremism in the United States is extremism inspired by other concerns, ideologies like White Supremacy. Anti-government extremism also is the source of violence here in the US. Even in recent years we have seen violent extremists incidents inspired by a African-American Black Nationalist ideology. So, there are multiple sources of violent extremism in the US. The FBI has a number of definitions which are worth pointing out and they, to my mind, confuse the issue a little bit. Let me explain why. First, the FBI defines Homegrown Violent Extremism, as a person who has lived or operated primarily in the United States, engage in ideologically-motivated terrorist activities in furtherance of objectives, here's the key phrase, promoted by a foreign terrorist organization that is acting independently. So, the FBI looks at called HVE, or Homegrown Violent Extremism, as usually connected to Al-Qaeda or ISIS, but these would be individuals who operate and take action in the US. There's a second definition of something called Domestic Terrorism which the FBI defines as, acts of violence that violate the criminal laws, committed by individuals or groups without foreign direction, and appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or influence the policy of a government, by intimidation or coercion and occur primarily within the United States. So these forms, Domestic Terrorism under these definitions, would be those types of more domestic ideologies like White Supremacism, Black Nationalism, anti-government, militias, land ownership issues in the west. So, the FBI calls these Domestic Terrorism. The point I want to make is that, you put all these phenomenon together, they actually are all homegrown. These are individuals who, almost exclusively born in the United States, or came here at a very young age, but grow into this ideology and engage in violence, and it is all domestic. These are acts that are planned, plotted and take place in the United States. So, even though the FBI's definitions make this dichotomy, for the purposes of this lecture, I'm looking at this entire phenomenon of violent extremism in the United States, which I sometimes call either Homegrown Terrorism or Domestic Terrorism. Another interesting point is that, even though our focus has been so strong on these incidents since 9/11, actually if you look at the data, violent extremism in the United States has actually decreased dramatically since the 1970s. If you look at the number of extremist incidents in the US as this data shows, you have a very rapid decline from the decade of the 70s and 80s when we had so much domestic protest and extremist movements. That has declined rapidly, although you're seeing a slight uptick in the most recent years. If we look by lethal attacks, both by ideology and by year, these are the years since 9/11. What we're seeing is really, until the Orlando shooting in 2016, pretty much the same level of deadly attacks, and the number of victims killed by the category of Far Right Extremism, which would include both White Supremacist and anti-government, sovereign citizen, those ideologies, and the people who are motivated by the ideology of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The Orlando attack, where 59 individuals were killed, has put that ahead, but again, you can see the trend lines here. What we're going to focus on for the rest of the lecture though, of course, is the topic of this course, which is this form of ideology inspired by Al-Qaeda and ISIS, which mainly affects Muslim-American terrorists. My colleague, Charles Kurzman at the University of North Carolina, and I have been studying this and putting out reports on this issue since 2008. And, this is a product of that research. It has shown fairly low levels of number of perpetrators, averaging between 20 and 30 over this 15 year period, with a big uptick in the last two years, 2014/2015, with the emergence of ISIS. Another interesting aspect of this trend is, you'll see that a large majority of the plots were disrupted before the violence could take place. That's the dark blue and the light blue lines on this graph. They're all disrupted plots. The gray areas which account for a lot of the perpetrators in both 2009, 2014 and 2015, are individuals who travel outside the United States to join foreign forces. So, these would be US citizens or people living in the United States, who left the United States, became foreign fighters and joined ISIS, or in the instance of 2009, a foreign fighting force like Al-Shabab. So, a lot of the cases involve that. The number of actual violent incidents in the US attributable to Muslim-American terrorists actually is attributed to the black line, which are a fairly small number of these perpetrators. So, if we look in total, the violent extremism by Muslims in the US represents really a small fraction of the violence in our country that we've seen over this period. If you look at murders in the United States by Muslim American extremists over this 15 year period, the total is 123 homicides, and I'm not trying to minimize that at all. Those are tragic incidents and that's too much violence, but we have to place it in some sort of context if we're trying to figure out how big a problem is homegrown violent extremism from this particular ideology. The number of total murders, homicides that we've had in the United States over this same period is 240,000. So if you want to look at the percentage of the amount of violence or lethal violence in the United States that has been caused by Muslim Americans inspired by Al-Qaeda or by ISIS, it's 0.5%. One out of every 2000 homicides that has taken place since 9/11 in the U.S. has been caused by this form of homegrown extremism. Another important point is these are mug shots, photos of a variety of the violent extremist motivated by Al-Qaeda or ISIS that we've had since 9/11. And you can see just from looking at them, they come in every shape, size, color, gender, ethnicity that you can imagine. So there is no specific profile. A majority do have their origins from the Middle East but you can't make any sort of predictive judgments. We've had African-Americans, converts, small number of women and white Anglo Saxons who have adopted this ideology and engaged in violence in the U.S. Indeed, our director of the FBI testified before Congress made this comment. He said, "Homegrown violent extremists do not share a typical profile; their experiences and motives are often distinct." So as we know from earlier lectures, there is no one single pathway to radicalization and that applies whether you're abroad and joining one of these foreign terrorist organizations or you are a homegrown violent extremist living here and inspired to engage in violent action here in the U.S. Donald Trump suggested that because of violent extremism in the U.S., we should cut off immigration from certain countries, suggesting that the problem of homegrown violent extremism was really caused by immigrants, but the data does not support that argument. As you can see from this graph, almost 60% of Muslim Americans living in the United States are immigrants, but only 24 percent of the perpetrators of violent extremism come from an immigrant background. So a disproportionately low amount of the violent extremism we see in the United States inspired by Al-Qaeda comes from immigrants, it's more from people who are born and raised in the United States. Finally, I want to talk about what do we know about the characteristics of U.S. violent extremists? Again, there is no psychological or racial or age or even gender profile that we can say this is what a violent extremist looks like. But research over the years into these perpetrators has identified some common characteristics that we might be able to use to help us prevent these incidents in the future. First is we often find that these perpetrators are isolated individuals, often loners, although early in their life they might have seemed integrated and normalized. When you come closer to their actual engagement in violence, they disassociate, they are not in the mainstream, they are not working and they lose their friends, they've become much more isolated and disaffected individuals. Second, we find that a big percentage of the people who engage in violent extremism had some interaction with the criminal justice system prior to their acts of violence. Another characteristic that we find with many violent extremists is that even though they are loners and they remove themselves from places like their family and friends, they are also looking for some sort of common community. Often, they find a community, people who think like them or have the same grievances as them. Often, they find that community online, not necessarily in person. Interestingly, we find that many of these violent extremists had some form of trauma in their childhood. It could be family trauma, it could be something that happened personally to them, some sort of abusive behavior, but it is interesting that a very big percentage had some sort of trauma in their early stages of their life. And finally, we find that these individuals identify with some sort of cause or group grievance. Here, perhaps the plight of the Syrian refugees. It might be something in politics, it might be something personal, but they attach to this idea that they are part of a community that has been wronged in some way, and in their minds, they use this grievance to justify their violent actions. So in summary, what do we know about homegrown violent extremism in the United States? First, as I mentioned, it comes from multiple ideologies,. Second, the amount of violence that we've experienced since 9/11 from homegrown extremism is small compared to other forms of violence. Of course, the 3000 deaths on 9/11 themselves were not homegrown violent extremists but extremists from outside, so I'm not including that. And a final key point is there's no specific profile we can use for homegrown terrorism and no single pathway that they follow to radicalization. However, many of them have experienced personal trauma, feel insignificant within their own communities, and they relate to group forms of grievance or crisis.
