Were the killings in the church in Charleston terrorism, meant to intimidate the black population of America? Of course they were. Moreover, they were a reflection of the still widespread hatred amongst white people for America’s first black president, Barack Obama. Indeed, as The New York Times published week, “The main terrorist threat in the US is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. (Many of them anti-black.) Just ask the police.” The New York Times has studied 382 police forces and 74 percent reported extremism by whites. Severe Muslim extremism was only three percent of the total.
The number of violent plots carried out by international terrorists remains very low and most attempts have been thwarted. Last year, not one US citizen died from international terrorism at home. The number of Americans killed abroad was 24. In contrast, at home, rightwing white extremists carried out 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11 and caused 254 fatalities. So much for attacks by al Qaeda-like terrorists.
Nevertheless, if one looks at it from a global perspective, there was an increase in the number of terrorist attacks last year. The frequency of such attacks rose by 35 percent in a single year but they were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Middle East, principally in Iraq (the legacy of President George Bush’s and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s invasion), with Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria next on the list. Al Qaeda affiliates, including the most deadly of all, Islamic State, rampant in Syria and Iraq, have become among the world’s foremost purveyors of terrorist violence. Even so, the number of deaths, 32,727, is about the same as the number of people killed annually in car accidents in the US.
The misinformation that most Americans suffer from, thanks to a slanted media and the frenzy of mainly Republican politicians, is extremely worrying, mainly because it is pushing Obama back into the sinkhole of the Middle East’s self-destructiveness. Just two beheadings of American citizens in late August and September by IS seems to have caused a war-weary nation to increase the support for US airstrikes from 52 percent of those of voting age to 78 percent, and for deploying ground troops from 19 percent to 44 percent. As Micah Zencho writes in the US magazine, Foreign Policy, “This is unsurprising because people are exposed to threatening television news coverage which is far more likely to support hawkish foreign policies.” One might add that in America’s close ally, Saudi Arabia, beheadings for crimes like adultery are a regular occurrence and are rarely mentioned by the US media.
Obama has been pushed by this reporting, Republican pressure, the Pentagon and even some of his White House and State Department staff to expand the bombing of Syria and the IS. He has deployed hundreds of troops to train the Iraqi army — a goal that eight years of occupation could not achieve. That said, the worsening Middle Eastern trends are only a small fraction of the overall violent deaths. According to the Geneva Declaration, less than seven percent of the world’s violent deaths were the result of terrorism. 93 percent of these were due to interpersonal violence, gang violence and economically motivated crimes. Citizens of several Central American and Caribbean countries are still more likely to be the victims of homicides than Iraqis or Syrians.
Coming back to Charleston, America should be focusing on crimes against blacks, rather than putting so much of the nation’s energy into tackling Middle Eastern terrorism. As Obama said the other day, “We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” Black Americans are killed at 12 times the rate of people in other developed countries.
If one compares various countries’ rate of homicides against the Human Development Index, an overall measure of the standard of living and welfare, one gets a picture of who is at the top of the violence league. Among the developed countries, the US’s rate of homicide deaths is 5.2 per 100,000 persons, more than three times that of its neighbour, Canada. France and the UK are at 1.1. Italy and Sweden are at 0.9. Denmark is at 0.8 and Japan at 0.4. The Arab countries are also well-placed in the league. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (which includes Dubai) have a rate of 0.7 and Saudi Arabia 0.8.
America’s primary concern should be its gun laws, not international terrorism. Despite mass killings in schools and other places, Obama’s attempts to tighten gun laws have been shot down. It is not just the Republicans in Congress who vote against Obama on this but Democrats as well. Once the Iranian deal for its nuclear programme is signed, probably in a week’s time, Obama should use an executive order to ban the public wearing of arms, military-style weapons and the buying of guns with no questions asked. This should be America’s priority, not hysterical overstatements about the savagery of international terrorism.
The writer has been a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune for 20 years and author of the much acclaimed new book, Conundrums of Humanity — the Big Foreign Policy Questions of Our Age. He may be contacted at [email protected]