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Sunday, January 24, 2016

Right Wing Extremism vs. Islamic Extremism in the United States: A Look at the Numbers



There's a lie being perpetrated that Right Wing Extremism is more deadly than Islamic exremism.  Here's the reason it's a statistical lie.

Again, as I noted in the introduction, this is not to dismiss the threat of right wing terrorism and its very deadly consequences for some, but only to add perspective to the claims being made. Right wing terrorism is more deadly for Americans only if you add a number of very limiting parameters (e.g. excluding the victims of 9/11, ignoring “lone wolf” attacks without solid connections to groups like al-Qaeda and their affiliates, etc…). But if you lift those limitations, and apply equal standards, then the raw and unfiltered numbers of deaths of Americans due to Islamic extremism in the United States over the last fifteen years dwarf the numbers attributable to right wing extremism by a ratio of over 62 to 1. Even if you leave out 9/11 victims and just focus on the ideological statements and goals of the attackers, then the deaths of Americans due to Islamic extremism still outnumber the deaths attributable to right wingers (which reveals an even greater disparity when compared with population groups). If we move beyond America’s borders, then the disparity becomes far greater, with somewhere around 90% of the world’s terrorism related deaths attributable to Islamic extremism, and only a fraction of 1% attributable to right wing extremism.

Read the whole thing.

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