In Europe, academic and official statistics-including the University of Bergen’s Terrorism in Western Europe: Events Data (TWEED) and Europol’s annual European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT)-show a number of right-wing attacks since World War II. 5 As a means of comparison, Islamist and right-wing extremists have caused 45 and 48 casualties in the United States, respectively, since the Septemattacks. 4 In both the United States and Canada, a widespread lack of coherent analysis about the threat posed by extreme right-wing militants stands in stark contrast to the level of concern about such individuals expressed by police officials and other law enforcement agencies.
3 Professor Christopher Hewitt’s valuable studies about terrorism in the United States also show that “white racist/rightist” terrorism accounts for 31.2 percent of the incidents and 51.6 percent of terrorism-related fatalities between 19, making it the number one threat ahead of “revolutionary left-wing” or “black militant” terrorism. 2 After three peaks in 2001, 2004, and 2008, with each wave surpassing the previous one, the general trend is again upwards. In the United States, for example, the Combating Terrorism Center’s Arie Perliger counted 4,420 violent incidents perpetrated by right-wing extremists between 19, causing 670 fatalities and 3,053 injured persons. Nevertheless, statistics clearly show the significant risk posed by violent right-wing extremists in Western countries. However, the public debate has not ascribed the same level of importance to the threat from the extreme right as it has regularly with Islamist extremism.
1 Similar events have been recorded in many Western European countries, as well as in Russia and Eastern Europe. Only one day after Charles Kurzman had argued in the New York Times that right-wing terrorism might be the most severe security threat in the United States, Dylann Roof killed nine people in his shooting rampage at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. In the United States, white supremacist Michael Page shot and killed six people and wounded four others in an attack against a Wisconsin Sikh temple in August 2012. That same year, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in a bomb attack in Oslo and a mass shooting in Utøya, Norway.
Despite having assassinated at least 10 people and committed 2 bombings over the course of almost 14 years, it had gone undetected. In Germany, a right-wing terrorist group calling itself the National Socialist Underground was discovered in 2011. For the international audience, only a few of these incidents gained broad media attention right-wing extremist attacks are seen mostly as isolated events when compared with other attacks, such as those by Islamist extremist terrorists. Although not as significant as in Europe, the United States has also seen an upsurge in political violence considered to be “right-wing extremist” in nature (for example, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, racist, or anti-government sovereign citizen). Daniel Koehler is the Director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies (GIRDS) and a Fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security.Įurope has experienced a revival of militant right-wing extremist groups, networks, and incidents in recent years, with a surge of anti-immigration and Islamophobic violence, as well as anti-government attacks and assaults on political opponents, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals.
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