Obama asked to renew focus on domestic extremists
The horrific mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., is raising questions about whether President Obama is prepared to launch the kind of effort against extremist groups that the government launched against the Ku Klux Klan in an earlier era.
Tracking homegrown extremist groups was an emphasis after the 1993 Waco siege and the Oklahoma City bombing two years later. But after Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has shifted its focus to international terrorism.
“The allocation of resources across different forms of terrorism has been skewed towards jihadi terrorism,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing extremist groups. “The government has allowed the threat of other forms of terrorism to take a back seat.”
Like Ku Klux Klan lynchings of the past, the Charleston shooting appears designed to not just to kill individuals but to create terror among African-Americans.
Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a longtime civil rights activist, said the federal government is going to have to do more to infiltrate extremist groups. Clyburn brought up the example of efforts against the Klan in the 1960s and 1970s.
“These groups cannot be allowed to continue to float around, they’re ratcheting things up. People have been ignoring this stuff and now all of a sudden nine people are dead,” Clyburn said.
Dylann Roof, who is charged with killing nine African-Americans at a prayer meeting, cited the white supremacist group Council for Conservative Citizens in his purported online “manifesto.”
The Department of Homeland Security issued a report in 2009 warning of a growing threat from right-wing extremism. But the report drew criticism from conservatives and veterans groups who said it unfairly singled out returning military veterans as possible recruits.
The analyst who wrote the report, Daryl Johnson, said his domestic terrorism team was disbanded and he left the agency.
Johnson, who now does consulting work, said in an interview that he rates the DHS efforts on homegrown extremist groups as “poor, not serious.”
The Justice Department did not respond to questions about whether it intended to beef up its efforts against homegrown extremist groups in the wake of the Charleston shootings.
S.Y. Lee, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said: “Recent events call for increased vigilance in homeland security. DHS routinely shares information with our state, local, federal and international law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security partners, and continually evaluates the level of protection we provide at federal facilities.”
Lee also encouraged the public to report “any suspicious activity in their communities to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.”
Radical Islamist groups are often what captures the public’s attention. But far more of the law enforcement agencies surveyed last year reported that anti-government extremism is a bigger threat in their jurisdictions (74 percent to 39 percent) than Islamist radicalism.
They cited extremists like neo-Nazis, “sovereign citizen” groups and militias, said Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina who co-authored the study.
This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 6:27 PM with the headline "Obama asked to renew focus on domestic extremists."