By Gen. (Ret) John Allen
2/24/20
I combated the threat of foreign terrorism for much of my career, fighting organizations that are grounded in virulent, hateful ideologies, and in many cases operate in a network of independent, loosely connected cells. Violent white-supremacist organizations operate in a similar fashion. Our failure to address these domestic groups and their networks, or to take them as seriously as their foreign counterparts, is costing us lives, diminishing our shared and cherished values, and compromising our credibility and unity as a people. Last month, I testified before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism about one element of the threat that white-supremacists pose: the risks of anti-Semitic violence and the ongoing threats facing our faith-based communities. Yet as we celebrate Black History Month and reflect on all that it represents, we should recognize the deep roots of racism and prejudice in America. Slavery is America’s original sin, and this “genetic birth defect,” as Representative Hakeem Jeffries recently called it, did not resolve itself with the end of the Civil War, nor with the heroic efforts of the civil-rights movement. The resurgence of white-nationalist ideologies and organizations is rooted in this legacy. Too many of today’s white-supremacist groups have taken unchecked strides to rebrand themselves as part of the contemporary political mainstream, emphasizing “heritage” or pseudoscience to mask their true, violent intentions.
Identifying and prosecuting such organizations for the terrorist groups that they are—just as the international community rightly fought against the Islamic State’s attempts to brand itself as the true voice of Islam—denies these groups the credibility and narrative that they so desperately seek. The horrendous lynchings, terror campaigns that destroyed entire communities, and many unresolved murders that dominated the period of Reconstruction and the years that followed should be recognized as acts of domestic terrorism. Americans are again losing their lives to this threat, and that reality should define how we respond to it. Contemporary white-supremacist groups pose a dire security threat, one that rivals, and perhaps even eclipses, that of foreign terrorist organizations. In my testimony, I called upon the U.S. Congress to be seized with this issue. The American people must do the same. Just as I fought America’s enemies abroad, so too must we fight violent, hateful ideologies at home.
