Right Wing extremism is terrorism

A forensics official works at the al Noor mosque after the white supremacist massacre attack.
Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images

Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to the media during a news conference in Wellington New Zealand. Bush said two improvised explosive devices were attached to a vehicle as part of the attack. One device was disabled and authorities were working on the other.
Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Echo opinion published in the Central Maine newspaper Kennebec Journal by Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

The deadly attacks on two New Zealand mosques should draw attention to an obvious fact: Terrorists linked to the far right are no less murderous than the Islamist groups that get more headlines and attention from politicians.

Western governments shouldn’t be fooled by the skewed headline count; watching white supremacists should be a priority — alongside preventing the radicalization of Muslim minorities. This is not just a moment to grieve the 50 dead in Christchurch. It’s time to review the data and make a conscious policy shift.

Islamist terrorists killed hundreds of people in Western Europe and the U.S. between 2014 and 2016, the heyday of the Islamic State. That drew attention away from far-right terrorists, but they have kept on killing: 66 people in 113 attacks around the world between 2013 and 2017, according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace.

The Australian think-tank’s count is, however, too low. It includes only expressly politically motivated killings accompanied by white supremacist manifestos or preceded by racist social media posts – like those perpetrated by Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot 77 people in 2011, or Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. There are other murders that aren’t always confessed so clearly. They are often mixed in with everyday thuggery and violent psychosis in police statistics.

The U.S. Anti-Defamation League attempts a broader count, stressing murderers’ links with far-right organizations rather than their stated motives. According to the group, right-wing extremists were responsible for 70 percent of the 427 extremist-related killings that occurred in the U.S. in the past 10 years. In 2018, every one of the perpetrators of the 37 extremist-related murders in the U.S. had ties to at least one far-right movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism, the ADL says.

Importantly, the number of incidents of violence perpetrated by the far-right is on the rise. The Institute for Economics and Peace noted in its 2018 Global Terrorism Index report that the number of such killings increased from three in 2014 to 17 in 2017.

Meanwhile, Islamist-inspired terrorism appears to be on the wane, with the attempt to create a caliphate in the Middle East roundly defeated and the ideal of pure Islamic statehood losing its attractiveness to the assorted misfits among the West’s Muslim minorities. 

According to Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s Global Attack Index, fatalities linked to Islamic State declined by 51.5 percent in 2018.

The far right has never killed on the same scale as the Islamic State. But it has grown by feeding off white supremacists’ fears of Muslim immigration and the public perception that terrorism is Islamist by nature. That process has been helped by the fact that Islamist-linked attacks receive disproportionate media coverage. 

A recent paper by Erin Kearns of the University of Alabama and her colleagues showed only 12.5 percent of the 136 terrorist acts that occurred in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015 were linked to such groups — but they received more than half of the news coverage. If the perpetrator is a Muslim, the number of stories about the attack increases by 357 percent, the academics calculated.

In a separate paper, Kearns showed that giving people more data about terrorism doesn’t necessarily change their minds about its prevalence and nature. Policymakers, though, should be more willing to put their biases aside. While it would be foolish to ignore militant Islamist groups, governments must pay close attention to right-wing extremist organizations.

In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution already monitors all such groups (or 25,250 people at the last count in 2017, up from 9,600 in 2012). The authorities don’t just make a special effort to track right-wing crime by motivation, they also try to assess how many of their members are capable of violence through monitoring and infiltrating radical groups.

Though the German record of fighting right-wing violence is far from spotless (and the growing membership of radical groups is evidence of that), the approach itself is correct. Western governments must make an effort to keep a close eye on the far right just as they do on potentially dangerous Muslim groups.

And they should adopt the approach to recording crime used by the Anti-Defamation League. This means assuming the specific motives of a violent crime are less important than the perpetrator’s links to a white supremacist group. 

Such assumptions, after all, are already being made about Islamists.

The mechanisms of radicalization are similar regardless of religion and ethnicity. Anti-terror policies should be based on that fact and be equally tough on every kind of murderous radicalism. The Christchurch killings are a reminder that this is not yet the case.

Leonid Bershidsky 

Sports and international relations ~ World Cup and immigration

Echo opinion by Leonid Bershidsky*: What this World Soccer Cup says about immigration published in Tulsa World, an Oklahoma newspaper.

World Cup Trophy

Immigrant communities look for ways of adapting to their host countries and excelling in sports is a helpful raceway towards assimilation.

Immigrants and sons of immigrants were over-represented on the World Cup teams when these squads compared with the demographics of these countries as a whole.

France’s championship game-bound starting lineup contains five players born overseas or to immigrant parents: Cameroonian-born Samuel Umtiti; N’Golo Kante, whose parents came from Mali; son of Guinean parents Paul Pogba; Kylian Mbappe, whose father is Cameroonian and mother Algerian; and Blaise Matuidi, son of an Angolan father and a Congolese mother. 

In fact, that’s 45 percent of the starting 11 teams. Non-European Union immigrants and their children make up only 13.5 percent of France’s population, according to Eurostat.

Belgium’s starting 11 also had five players of immigrant background: Nacer Chadli, who started out playing for the Moroccan national team before he switched to Belgium; Marouane Fellaini, whose parents are also Moroccan; Vincent Kompany and Romelu Lukaku, whose fathers are Congolese; and Mousa Dembele, whose father is from Mali. Belgium’s population of first- and second-generation non-EU immigrants is 12 percent.

England, too, has a greater proportion of players with non-European immigrant backgrounds — mostly Caribbean, as in the cases of Kyle Walker, Ashley Young, Raheem Sterling and Jesse Lingard; Dele Alli’s father is Nigerian — than the U.K. has such residents. Their share is 14 percent of the overall U.K. population.

England head coach Gareth Southgate is not quite right when he says his team “represents modern England.” Neither he nor the French and Belgian coaches, who have voiced similar sentiments, are wrong to be proud of the diversity, however. The national teams and the powerful player selection systems in the three countries pick the best players regardless or their origin, religion or skin color. Soccer has to be meritocratic because it’s competition in its purest form, not constrained by national borders to the same degree as American sports. In soccer, the son of a banker and a lawyer (that’s the background of French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris) is on an equal footing with someone like Lukaku, whose family couldn’t pay its electricity bills for weeks at a time and whose mother had to water down his milk to make it last longer. Or like Sterling, whose mother cleaned hotel rooms to put herself through school.

For immigrants without fast-twitch muscles and great footwork, however, there is no level playing field. Employment rates are noticeably lower among first-generation immigrants than for the population as a whole, and they don’t improve much for the second generation.

The odds are stacked against kids with the same background as the world-class soccer players in a number of important ways. Statistics show a higher percentage of second-generation immigrants than native-born people go to college in France and the U.K. (though not in Belgium) — but, according to a 2017 report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, an overwhelming majority of young people with low educational attainment in all three countries are second-generation, non-EU immigrants. The report says:

Educational aspirations are generally high among migrant families. However, while educational aspirations may support educational upward mobility, by itself they are not sufficient, particularly when support structures and knowledge on how to attain these goals is lacking.
As a result, in Belgium, people with non-EU-born parents are 13.2 percent less likely than the native-born to get a better job than their parents; in France, the likelihood is 8 percent lower, and in the U.K., 4 percent lower. People are stuck in low-paid occupations — and in low-income areas full of other people with migration backgrounds. This creates a vicious circle for millions of people, even if it gives the extremely talented few the impulse to fight harder.

“Let me tell you something — every game I ever played was a final,” Lukaku** told The Players’ Tribune.
“When I played in the park, it was a final. When I played during break in kindergarten, it was a final. I’m dead-ass serious. I used to try to tear the cover off the ball every time I shot it. Full power. ... No finesse shot. I didn’t have the new ‘FIFA.’ I didn’t have a Playstation. I wasn’t playing around. I was trying to kill you.”

In a column for The Times, Patrick Vieira, the former French international, echoes the violence of that self-description as he recalls his childhood in a poor Paris suburb — the kind of place from which most of the current French team’s second-generation immigrants hail from.

“When I trained and played,” he wrote, “it was with a knife in my teeth. By that I mean I had a hunger to succeed. I loved the game but I also had a drive from my mother. To so many people in those estates, there are no jobs, no help. You see that determination in a lot of footballers from those concrete pitches.”

Sports — in particular, soccer with its well-developed, lavishly funded selection systems and powerful clubs — can be a straight path out of poverty. Several of the French and Belgian players’ fathers are former small-time soccer pros, and they gave their sons good advice, providing some of the networking benefits that immigrants, whether first- or second-generation, lack in Europe.

The soccer meritocracy can’t give every ghetto kid an upward path, though. All it can do is make sure the ones who play every game like their last make it onto big club rosters and national teams.

There’s a lesson in this for the rest of society. Soccer’s support networks for talented kids can and should be replicated in other areas of endeavor. Some of the boys and girls growing up in no-hope areas today could be the Mbappé** and Lukakus*** of tech, finance or the arts. The national teams, multicolored as they are, exist to remind governments, businesses and educational institutions that they just need to look harder.

*Leonid Bershidsky- Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics and business. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

**Kylian Mbappé Lottin is a French professional footballer who plays as a forward for Paris Saint-Germain and the France national team

***Romelu Menama Lukaku Bolingoli is a Belgian professional footballer who plays as a striker for English club Manchester United and the Belgium national team.