Church shootings are reminder of extremists

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Confronting extremists, law enforcement in the U.S. has been focusing on aspiring jihadists who align with the Islamic State, overshadowing long-standing concerns about avowed racists, neo-Nazis and anti-government militias.

The South Carolina shootings, experts say, are a reminder of the persistent dangers posed by disaffected people who are bent on violence but whose statements before they act may skate below the radar of police and federal authorities.

The killings at a black church in Charleston appear to fit a grim pattern of violence fueled by hate-filled ideology, joining other attacks by extremists in the past five years that have targeted Jewish and Sikh centers, federal government buildings and police officers.

While the number of Americans professing extremist ideologies fluctuates, the election of President Barack Obama, coupled with a national economic downturn, has in recent years intensified anger among white supremacists and anti-government groups to levels not seen since the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League.

“We’re actually about six years into a major resurgence of right-wing extremism, the largest we’ve had since the mid- to late 1990s,” Pitcavage said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., says it has counted more than 30 acts or plots of domestic terrorism or hate-driven rampages since 2010, an increase from the five years before that.

Those include the killings in Kansas last year of three people outside a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement home; a 2011 bomb plot that targeted the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Wash.; an assault-rifle attack on a Mexican consulate and federal courthouse in Austin, Texas; the murders of six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the slaying of two Las Vegas police officers by a couple with anti-government views who left behind a swastika and a yellow flag bearing the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”

The culprits are often individuals with little or no association with organized hate groups, acting on their own.

Tracking violent extremists before they act is difficult, in part because spouting hateful viewpoints isn’t by itself a crime, and many of those who do commit violence aren’t leaders of a movement but are disaffected individuals on the periphery of it, said Pitcavage. To some extent, law enforcement faces the same challenges in keeping tabs on Islamic State sympathizers seeking to travel to Syria or commit acts of terror at home – investigations in which the FBI dissects social media communications for evidence of intent to commit a crime.

“They tend not to be actively engaged with the movement,” Pitcavage said of lone extremists. “They’re not joining organized groups. They’re not extensively interacting online. They’re not going to events and meetings.”