The Trump administration\u2019s focus on fighting \u201cradical Islamic terrorism\u201d could not only hamper counterterrorism efforts, but it could even embolden right-wing and anti-government extremists, experts and former government officials say.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s transition team made clear to officials at the Department of Homeland Security after the election that it wants to reorient programs meant to counter violent extremism<\/a> so that they focus almost exclusively on the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism rather than other forms of extremism.<\/p>\n The inference was unmistakable, says a former U.S. counterterrorism official who worked on programs to counter extremism and who is familiar with those transition meetings. \u201cWe\u2019re seen as too politically correct and that we are not taking the threat head on by \u2018calling it what is,\u2019\u201d the official said. A focus on the threat of Islamic terrorism also underpinned the administration\u2019s now frozen travel ban for individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries.<\/p>\n So far, in the administration\u2019s chaotic early days, no big changes have been made to the DHS program. A DHS official told Foreign Policy<\/span> that no decision had been reached as to whether this change in focus would actually be put in place. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has not commented on the matter.<\/p>\n But the proposal is meeting plenty of pushback, both because it could undermine government efforts to counter radicalization within the Muslim community and because it ignores a big and growing threat from far-right and anti-government groups. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) warned in a Feb. 13 letter<\/a> to Kelly that such a shift could \u201ccontinue to give rise to the false narrative that Western Civilization is at war with Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n Focusing solely on Islamic extremism \u201cwould be a huge mistake,\u201d said David Schanzer, the director of Duke University\u2019s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. He said programs meant to counter extremism \u201cwere a hard sell for the Muslim community even before\u201d the election and that Muslim communities see them \u201cas a form of surveillance.\u201d\u00a0Four schools have turned down<\/a> federal CVE funding citing such concerns. In all, 20 percent of a total of $10 million in DHS funds for countering extremism have been rejected.<\/p>\n Such a shift would also downplay the threat from other forms of terrorism. Far-right and anti-government groups plan and carry out domestic attacks at a greater frequency than foreign terrorist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and civil rights. On Wednesday, SPLC released its latest “Hate Map<\/a>,” which shows that there\u00a0are nearly 1,000 such groups in the United States, such as the Crusaders<\/a>, which counts among its membership three men in Kansas who plotted in October 2016 to bomb an apartment complex where Somalis live. The SPLC noted an increase<\/a> in hate crimes in the month following Trump\u2019s election.<\/p>\n And since the 9\/11\u00a0terrorist attacks, anti-government groups have racked up a death toll on par with that of Islamist extremists, according to New America, a think tank, which keeps a database<\/a> on terrorist incidents. Until the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, in which a New York man pledging allegiance to the Islamic State killed 49 people<\/a>, far-right extremism caused more deaths in the United States than did jihad.<\/p>\n \u201cThe trend lines look very similar,\u201d David Sterman, a terrorism analyst with New America, told FP<\/span>.<\/p>\n According to a 2015 survey<\/a> of nearly 400 law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, authorities considered anti-government violent extremists, rather than radicalized Muslims, to be \u201cthe most severe threat of political violence that they face.\u201d<\/p>\n And that threat may be growing. The former U.S. counterterrorism official said recent intelligence briefings showed an uptick in domestic threats associated with white nationalists and anti-government groups. Police officers are being threatened by these groups as well, the official said \u2014\u00a0and are even being infiltrated by them, according to a classified FBI counterterrorism policy guide<\/a> from April 2015.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a more regular occurrence of this kind of reporting obviously than with ISIS-inspired threats,\u201d the official said, using an alternate acronym for the Islamic State.<\/p>\n