TerrorismMost 2014 Muslim-American terrorism cases involved Americans going to Syria: Report

A new report issued last week by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security shows that terrorist plots involving Muslim-Americans accounted for only a small fraction of the threats to public safety in the United States.

The center’s annual report offers systematic evidence on the issues of terrorism and homeland security. The Triangle Center says that the 2014 report shows that growth in terrorism cases involving Muslim-Americans can be attributed to individuals seeking to join terrorist groups in Syria. Of the twenty-five Muslim-Americans associated with terrorism in 2014, six plotted or engaged in violence in the United States. This number equals the lowest total since 2008.

“That’s far less than one would guess from media coverage and government resources devoted to this concern,’’ said Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology in UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences and author of the report. “Despite concern about the radicalizing effect of the civil wars in Syria and elsewhere, violent extremism continued to attract a miniscule number of adherents among Muslim-Americans in 2014.”

“We have not seen mass radicalization of Muslims in the United States,” Kurzman told VOANews. “That’s worth taking note of.”

Kurzman said that the numbers of Muslim-American terrorism suspects have, in fact, been declining, and over the last couple of years there have been almost no plots aimed at the United States. Most of those arrested recently on suspicion of terrorism were attempting to travel to Syria or Yemen to join terrorist groups there.

David Schanzer, director of the center and an associate professor of the practice at Duke University, said it comes as no surprise that the brutal Syrian civil war is stimulating a small number of American youth to attempt to join the fighting.

“This report is striking, however, for the data showing that hardly any Muslim-Americans — about eight per year — have been involved in terrorism offenses against targets inside the United States since 9/11,” Schanzer said. “This terrorism has caused 50 deaths in over 13 years, whereas 136 people were killed in mass shooting incidents in the United States in 2014 alone.”

Schanzer added that while federal authorities spend “a disproportionate amount of energy” thinking about domestic terrorism, local police departments across the country have other things on their minds.

“They very much realize that the things that are threats to public safety in their communities are much more things like drugs, gangs, domestic violence,” he said.

VOANews notes that although comparisons are not easy, other studies suggest that right-wing violence claimed more lives in the U.S. than terrorism committed in the name of Islam (see, for example, Peter Bergen and David Sterman, “U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists,” CNN, 15 April 2014).

The study examined a total of 250 American Muslims who have been arrested for — or who have engaged in — acts that can be called terrorism since 2001. This is out of an estimated population of three million Muslims in the United States.

The study found that while terrorism has caused 50 deaths in the United States during 2001-2014, during the same 13-year period more than 200,000 were murdered in the United States.

U.S. security authorities say that large-scale terrorist attacks have been prevented because of the broad security structure which was set up in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

Kurzman says that his findings suggest a “mismatch” between other public safety issues, such as car accidents or the easy availability of firearms, on the one hand, and the attention given to the possibility of homegrown terrorism on the other.

“We are stuck into this security mindset, where we have a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of violence and a much higher level of tolerance for other threats,” he told VOANews.

The Triangle Center is a collaborative effort among Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and RTI International.

— Read more in Charles Kurzman, Terrorism Cases Involving Muslim-Americans, 2014 (Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, 9 February 2015); and Michael Jensen et al., Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States: Preliminary Findings (START, University of Maryland, January 2015)