NO, YOU’RE NOT MORE LIKELY TO BE KILLED BY A RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST THAN AN ISLAMIC TERRORIST

https://areomagazine.com/2017/05/28/no-youre-not-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-right-wing-extremist-than-an-islamic-terrorist/

Every time one of these articles crops up, a cursory glance at the source data it relies on reveals a myriad of flaws in its methods and therefore in its conclusions. It is highly likely that the next time you are confronted by someone claiming that “far-right terrorism” (or some variation of) is a greater threat than Islamic terrorism, they will be citing a report or article that contains most, if not all, of the below errors:

• A tally which starts after the biggest terror attack committed on U.S. soil.
• A tally which ends before the deadliest mass shooting on U.S. soil. (Both of these attacks were committed by jihadists.)
• A tally which fails to include certain other jihadist and right-wing attacks.
• A tally which misreports certain attacks as “right-wing” or “far-right”.
• A report which fails to include figures for Americans killed abroad.
• A report which ignores foiled plots.
• A report which ignores the number of non-fatal casualties.
• A report which is not calibrated to consider the disproportionate focus of counter-terror analysis on Islamic terrorism.
• A report which is not calibrated to consider the disproportionate number of attacks by Muslim extremists in relation to their lack of prevalence as a minority group.
• A report which conflates several disparate ideological motivations for non-Islamic terrorism by lumping them all into the “far-right” bracket.
• A report which ignores all terror attacks outside of the United States.

This narrow focus on terrorism committed within U.S. borders is particularly galling. According to the 2015 Global Terrorism Index published by Institute for Economics and Peace, only 2.6 percent of terror related deaths occur in the West (for accuracy, this figure includes the September 11th attacks.) Furthermore, just 4 groups (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al Qaeda) were responsible for 74% of the world’s terror related deaths in 2015 — and Islamic State and Boko Haram were responsible for over half of the world’s terrorism fatalities between them. It’s likely that there has been some fluctuation in these figures since the publishing of this data, but the point remains that the overwhelming majority of terror attacks occur in countries outside of the West and that they are committed by Islamic extremists. And so the insistence that our gaze should never stray from terrorism within U.S. borders further skews that data and buries the victims of these attacks figuratively, often before they’ve even been buried literally.

It’s often said, that the biggest victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims. This is undoubtedly true. It’s odd then that those who claim to concern themselves with the welfare of Muslims should spend so much of their time smugly undermining threats to their safety.