Leaders from roughly 60 countries gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss what top Trump administration officials are calling an urgent threat: far left terrorism.
Transcript
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The Trump administration is asking about 60 countries for help with what it calls an urgent threat – far-left terrorism. Leaders from those countries met in Washington yesterday with Trump officials. NPR’s domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef is here. Odette, we all know about the threat that radical jihadists have posed to this country, and in recent years, there’s been a greater attention to violence coming from the far right. What about the far left?
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Well, A, if we look at the last 50 years, there was once a time when the far left was responsible for a huge portion of political violence in the U.S., and that was in the 1970s. You know, you had groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, for example, that were implicated in bombing plots and the murders of police, among other things. But in the decades after that, things changed. The data have consistently shown that Islamist extremism and right-wing extremism have accounted for a far larger share of violence than the left wing. But at the convening yesterday led by the State Department, its head, Marco Rubio, said that, in fact, left-wing terrorism is and has been the top threat.
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MARCO RUBIO: Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia in our universities and by many of our legacy institutions.
YOUSEF: You know, A, many people that I speak with in the field of counterterrorism do not dismiss far-left terrorism as a right-wing fever dream. Many say that it could become resurgent and that law enforcement should take it seriously. But none of them say that they are aware of data that show any kind of parity with the deadliness that we’ve seen from far-right or Islamist terrorist attacks.
MARTÍNEZ: Then the summit, what was the State Department trying to accomplish with that?
YOUSEF: Well, Rubio framed this as a sort of reboot of the international coalition that came together after the 9/11 attacks to fight Islamist extremism. But this time, the focus is the far left. You know, I think one of the things that many are wondering is, to what extent can the administration show that there is, in fact, a well-funded transnational network of organized far-left groups and that any such network is connected to violent terrorism? I spoke with Jacob Ware about this. He’s a counterterrorism expert based at Georgetown University.
JACOB WARE: I have not seen much evidence that there is a transnational far-left movement in large part because, unlike the far right, individuals on the far left tend to be more concerned with their own communities, with economic issues or government overreach in their own communities. So you tend to have more hyperlocal organizing.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So, Odette, then what’s your sense about where things go from here?
YOUSEF: Well, yesterday, the State Department announced new visa restrictions against foreigners who may be connected to far-left terrorism. But there is also concern, A, that this focus on the far left could ultimately create risk for U.S. citizens too. You know, the administration has said it will be designating more overseas groups as far-left terrorists. And the reason some are wary about that is it widens the pool of foreign terrorist organizations that prosecutors can tie to people or organizations that may be involved in movements here in the U.S. that are on the left, and the legal consequences for material support to terrorists are very high.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. That’s NPR’s Odette Yousef. Thank you very much.
YOUSEF: Thank you.
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