Today we’re going to talk about a terrifying
group of terrorist super soldiers. They call
them. Anteefa… Ant-eye-fay… Ant...ifa.
Anyway, they’re bad. (clips of reactionaries
fearmongering about antifa, bookmarked Ben
Shapiro one)
This has been going on for YEARS at this point,
unrestrained mass violence by The Left and
the government is doing NOTHING. Organised
Aunt-Ehfa cells have been… doing… something.
Hang on, I didn’t really do a lot of research
for this video maybe I should just…
Oh, antifa isn’t an acronym for some shady
organisation it’s just shorthand for antifascist.
And… anyone who materially opposes fascism
is one. It’s not a centralised group, there’s
no membership, it defines an activity, a strategy.
Huh… maybe I’d better take a look at some
reports on terrorism and double check some
of my numbers here.
Oh… oooooooh.
According to “A database of nine years of
domestic terrorism incidents compiled by The
Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute
and Reveal from The Center for Investigative
Reporting” which includes all terrorist
incidents in the US that could be reasonably
linked to a political ideology between 2008
and 2016, left wing terrorism is actually
pretty minor.
There were 19 left wing terrorist incidents,
compared to 63 islamist incidents and 115
right wing incidents. Now this report includes
both successful and foiled terror attacks,
do you notice anything interesting about that?
Let’s put a pin in that for a moment.
Before we get into right wing and islamist
terrorism I want to take a look at the Crimes
Of Antifa, there may only have been 19 incidents
but based on what Ben Sharpedo has told me
they’re sure to be horrific. Curiously only
7 deaths are accounted for as a result of
left wing terrorism in this 9 year period,
however since there were so few left wing
terrorist incidents it is much more fair to
look at what percent of these incidents resulted
in fatalities. According to the report, left
wing terrorist incidents had the lowest rate
of fatalities at around 10-11% of incidents
resulting in deaths, just behind islamic terror
and miles behind right wing terror. And keep
in mind that the percentage of foiled islamic
terror plots is massive on account of the
war on terror primarily focusing on them.
The relatively low police interest in right
wing terror plots despite there being twice
as many right wing incidents as islamist incidents
likely contributed to them being nearly 3
times more likely to result in fatalities.
So let’s take a look at these 19 left wing
terrorist incidents to get to the bottom of
why so few of them resulted in fatalities.
Only a 10% fatality rate means that in this
9 year period, only 2 of these incidents resulted
in deaths.
12 of the 19 incidents were carried out by
environmentalist/animal liberation groups,
nearly all of them are tied to the Animal
Liberation Front. These 12 include property
damage, vandalism, and unleashing thousands
of minks on an unsuspecting countryside. These
are undeniably ideologically driven criminal
acts but it’s noteworthy that most of these
incidents at no point had human targets, and
nobody was injured or killed in any of them,
though some of them included threats.
There were also several incidents targeting
the republican party, a republican office
was firebombed with nobody in it and several
people were caught planning to use molotovs
to cause power outages at a republican convention.
Again, no human targets, just institutional
ones.
That brings us to the 2 incidents out of the
19 that we can establish had clear intention
to wound or kill human beings.
The first incident took place in Dallas in
2016. Micah Xavier Johnson, an Afghan War
Veteran who was reportedly acting on his anger
over the unjust murder of black men by the
police, set out with the explicit goal of
shooting white police officers. And he did,
killing 5 of them before being killed himself.
He had reportedly liked several black nationalist
pages on Facebook but there are no known ties
between Micah and antifascist groups.
The second incident was the shooting of two
police officers in 2014 carried out by Ismaaiyl
Abdullah Brinsley, who reportedly made an
instagram post announcing his intention to
kill police officers as retribution for the
murders of Eric Garner and Mike Brown. Which
he then acted upon. Ismaaiyl had ties to a
prison gang called the Black Guerilla Family,
who certainly had left wing origins but are
not considered to represent those ideas very
much today. Ismaaiyl also had no known ties
to antifascism.
These 2 incidents stand out from the other
17 because they were carried out with the
explicit intent to kill, which we’ve established
is not typically the case with left wing terrorism.
And the 19 left wing terrorist incidents detailed
in this report stand out from right wing and
islamic terror in that even when they DO have
human targets, they do not target random civilians,
they are different in character in that their
targets are part of either the state or capitalist
apparatus. They attack fur stores, they attack
republican headquarters, they attack police
officers. In 2017, so just outside the range
of this report, a left wing activist attacked
republican congressmen mike scalise at a baseball
game, also injuring an aid, a police officer,
and a Tyson Foods lobbyist. Again, clearly
targeting state or corporate actors.
I highlight the distinct character of left
wing terrorism because of how starkly it contrasts
with right wing and islamic terrorism, which
consistently pursues either random violence
towards civilians, or violence targeted specifically
at marginalised groups. And I don’t bring
this up just to highlight the difference between
left wing terrorism and right wing and islamic
terrorism, but also to draw attention to how
similar right wing and islamic terrorism are
to one another
and how they’re made distinct from left
wing terrorism by their targets and their
methods.
Islamic terrorists throughout the US consistently
attack civilians in public spaces, much like
right wing terrorists. Both islamic and right
wing terrorists most frequently have human
targets and regularly attack marginalised
groups. They attack synagogues, they attack
gay bars. In the west, right wing terrorists
attack mosques, in the middle east, isis attacks
mosques. While left wing terrorists target
companies, police, and politicians. Right
wing and islamic terrorists are much more
likely to target you.
There’s a very simple reason that right
wing and islamic terror have such a similar
character, and similar targets. Islamic extremism
is a far right ideology. Western media has
gotten better at acknowledging the presence
of right wing, white supremacist violence
in recent years but they still fall into the
misstep of drawing a hard line between the
white supremacist fascism of the white American
right wing, and the wahhabist fascism that
has been militarising the right wing of The
Gulf, through groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Both of these genocidal, far right ideologies,
are built around an identitarian supremacy,
with the intention of violently imposing a
brutally hierarchical social and cultural
order at the expense of women and all marginalised
groups deemed outside of the In Group they
have placed at the top of said heirarchy.
Take any Jihadist and any Neo Nazi and they’re
likely not to get along, but they effectively
believe the same things. Their versions of
these ideals are coloured somewhat by their
cultural background, but whether it’s christian,
secular, pagan, or islamic, whether it’s
west or east, fascism is fascism. Islam is
no more accountable for ISIS than Christianity
is for the KKK, and the efforts to highlight
the different cultural backgrounds of these
fascists with the intent to obfuscate their
similarities must be opposed.
Fortunately it is notoriously difficult for
people who want to put their ethnic or cultural
group at the top of the pyramid to cooperate
with other groups with the same goal. However,
when we understand radical islamic terror
as driven by far right politics, we get a
much more accurate picture of what percentage
of terrorism comes from the left, as opposed
to the right.
Not one act of terrorism accounted for in
this report was perpetrated by antifa. Nearly
all of them were perpetrated by people who
antifascists are actively opposing.
As a result of the destructive character of
right wing terrorism, it has a much higher
fatality rate than terrorism from the left.
Which, again, is the result of a much higher
rate of actually aiming to kill people. Though
you’ll notice right wing terrorism has a
higher fatality rate than islamic right wing
terrorism, despite their similar character.
Why is that?
Well, as we touched on earlier, a lot of it
comes down to policing. 48%, nearly half of
the islamic terrorist incidents in this report
involved sting operations of some sort, as
opposed to 12% for other right wing incidents,
and 11% for left wing. Greater investment
in the prevention of islamic terrorism resulted
in twice as many islamic terror plots being
foiled compared to the number of right wing
plots that were foiled. And there was an equal
percentage of stings for left wing and right
wing conspirators despite one being significantly
deadlier than the other.
To quote Reveal’s writeup on the report:
three-quarters of the Islamist incidents in
the database were pre-empted plots, including
elaborate sting operations, while 35 percent
of far-right incidents were pre-empted, a
much smaller ratio. That disparity, counterterror
experts say, is an indication that far fewer
investigative resources – such as analysts,
paid informants and undercover operatives
– have been deployed to halt far-right attacks.
There’s no short supply of cases in which
the FBI does more harm than good, such as
a sting that targeted 19 year old Mohamed
Osman Mohamud about which an FBI agent assigned
to the case wrote that Mohamud “would not
make any attempts to conduct a terrorist attack
without specific direction from the (undercover
employees).” The report also notes that
“Evidence was even introduced at trial that
FBI operatives had blocked him from traveling
to a cannery job in Alaska to keep him involved
in the plot they had designed.” The FBI
even paid his rent while they manufactured
this terror plot for him.
So I’m not here to endorse US anti-terror
operations, but I think it’s a safe assumption
to make that if they invested as much into
preventing white nationalist right wing terrorism
as they did islamic right wing terrorism,
fewer people would have died overall. I wonder
what possible motivations could be behind
their reluctance to do so.
Speaking of systemic racism, let’s also
take a look at the differences in how terrorists
of different political ideologies and ethnicities
are charged and sentenced.
First, of all the terrorist incidents that
resulted in arrests, 91% of islamic terror
suspects faced federal prosecution, and every
single left wing suspect did as well, compared
to only 60% of right wing terror suspects,
leaving many of those cases in the hands of
local and state authorities. Which was likely
a factor in the staggeringly low rate of terror
charges actually being filed against right
wing terror suspects, at only 9%. Compared
that to 60% for left wing terror suspects,
and 84% for islamic terror suspects. Meaning
nearly every islamic terror suspect that was
prosecuted faced terrorism charges, while
hardly any did among the other right wing
suspects.
This hesitation to charge right wing terrorists
with, well, terrorism charges, also contributed
to a disparity in the harshness of sentences
they faced.
“Even though most Islamists were charged
only in connection with plots, they often
were sentenced as harshly as or more harshly
than right-wing extremists, who mostly succeeded
in committing acts of terror. Among the Islamist
cases, 8 percent got life sentences, 2 percent
got death sentences, and the average sentence
for the other cases was 21 years in prison.
Among far-right cases, 12 percent got life
sentences, 5 percent got death sentences,
and the average sentence for the rest was
eight years.”
Whie there are some gross inconsistencies
in the way we police different kinds of far
right terrorism, largely as a result of heavily
racialised ideas about who is and is not a
terrorist, the fact remains that the vast,
VAST majority of terrorism is the result of
far right, fascist ideology. And so we find
ourselves returning to the claims from Fox
news anchors, and people like Ben Shapino,
as well as sadly, the president himself, that
antifascists are just as bad as the fascists
they oppose, or, to hear some of them tell
it, even worse. There are bad people on both
sides after all.
The assertion that the people OPPOSING the
ideologies responsible for 90% of terrorist
attacks in the United States are somehow the
problem, or the REAL TERRORISTS doesn’t
have any bearing in reality that we can find
in this report. Especially coming from people
who have been mentioned as inspirations by
white supremacist terrorists.
All over the globe, fascism threatens the
safety of all human beings, especially those
in marginalised groups with the least ability
to defend themselves. That’s why we need
to defend ourselves, and each other. If you
oppose terrorism, if you get that same sick
feeling every time there’s a bombing or
a mass shooting that I do. If you keep checking
back for updated body counts even though it
only upsets you more. If you tremble with
indignation at every injustice. Join up with
your local antifascists. From America to the
Middle East, They’re the ones trying to
stop the people responsible for 90% of terrorist
acts from recruiting and orchestrating more
killings, they’re the ones trying to protect
our communities, not these right wing mouthpieces
who try to deflect the blame every time they’re
quoted in a mass shooters manifesto.
Only the people can protect
the people.
