> but I almost never hear Islamic radicals cited as an example. That's probably ...

smsm42 · on June 5, 2019

Over this period, white extremism — an umbrella term encompassing white nationalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, xenophobic, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic ideologies — accounted for about 8 percent of all attacks in these regions and about a third of those in the United States.

What about other 92% of overall attacks and 2/3 of US attacks? Would it be insane to suggest that 92% of attacks deserve a bit more attention than 8% of attacks?

Also:

We examined attacks perpetrated by anti-immigrant extremists, anti-Muslim extremists, neo-Nazi extremists, right-wing extremists, anti-Semitic extremists, neo-fascists, white extremists, anti-Arab extremists, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Sikh extremists and incel extremists.

This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!). To add on top of that, it also for some reason puts incels into the pile, which have nothing to do with racial angle at all. Moreover:

For episodes in which the identity of the perpetrator was unknown, we made a determination about ideology based on the target or through further research. We excluded episodes with insufficient evidence of ideological motivation.

That looks like it means each time a target who has been frequent target of racist extremists in the past was attacked, and the reason for attack is not known, it was assumed it's "white supremacists", if the researches themselves deemed the motivation "sufficient", by some unknown criteria. That is a good recipe for seriously biased results. For example, a string of Jewish centre bombing threats has been proven recently to be a work of one distubred Israeli teen. Has it not been known by now, it would be listed as "white supremacist" attacks, as it's clearly would be obvious that somebody who bombs a Jewish center must be a Nazi.

And with all that, it's still 8%. Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?

foldr · on June 5, 2019

>And with all that, it's still 8%.

You'd have to see how big the other categories were to draw any conclusions.

In recent years, it's been widely reported that white supremicists have been responsible for more violence in the USA than Islamist extremists. See e.g.

https://www.jta.org/2019/01/24/opinion/right-wing-extremist-...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...

My point, though, was not that white supremacy is necessarily more of a danger than Islamist extremism, but that you were massively understating the danger it poses in your original comment ("they could never pull off even one hundredth of what ISIS has been pulling off for years").

> This lists all anti-Semites as "white supremacists" even though there is a lot of anti-Semitic extremists who have nothing to do with white supremacy movements (Hamas and Hezbollah would be "white supremacists" by that definition!)

I think you're pulling a bit of a "no true white supremacist" move here. If you want to get into that kind of thing, we could also pick over the question of just how much "Islamic" terrorism is really Islamic in its motivation.

> Is this getting only 8% of the press attention and other coverage and assigned 8% importance compared to other violent threats?

I think so (?)

I don't have figures, and I'm not sure where one would obtain them. But I'd say that Islamist terror attacks certainly get more press coverage than white supremacist terrorism.