Whatever Happened to Left-Wing Domestic Terrorism?

From AlterNet:

Never mind that the actual Weathermen didn’t go in much for bank robberies and avoided killing anyone during their bombing campaign. Several ex-Weathermen were involved in the horrifically bungled Brink’s armored car robbery at Rockland County, NY’s Nanuet Mall. Carried out by the remnants of the Black Liberation Army (a hyper-violent fragment of the Black Panther Party) and a few ex-members of the Weather Underground, the crime left two police officers and a security guard dead. The attempted robbery, which ended in the arrest or death of all involved, took place on Oct. 20, 1981.There have been no deaths linked to American left-wing extremism since.

But the specter of left-wing terrorism continues to hold a powerful sway over the American imagination.

And

But today there is no equivalent threat from left-wing extremists. Small bands of masked protestors periodically indulge in a bout of window smashing or throw rocks at the police, but bombings, bank robberies and gunfights with law enforcement are the province of fringe right-wing extremist groups. “Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, there are few, true left-wing extremist organizations operating in the United States,” Daryl Johnson notes in Right-Wing Resurgence: How A Domestic Terrorism Threat Is Being Ignored. Johnson is an expert on domestic non-Islamic extremism and a former senior analyst with the Department of Homeland Security, although his unit was dismantled in the wake of conservative outrage over its report on right-wing extremism in the United States.

More here.

I don't have too terribly much to say about this other than to bring attention to the article's assertion: there is really no such thing as left-wing terrorism in the United States.  If you want the reasons as to why this is the case, which have more to do with what motivated it in the first place no longer existing, then, by all means, click through.  But really, I just wanted to get a little something out there countering a popular conservative response when people bring up the very real threat of homegrown far right extremist terrorism.  You know, "well, they do it, too" or "the real threat comes from the eco-terrorists" or whatever.

No, the far left does not kill abortion doctors, or bomb abortion clinics, or burn down black churches, or murder government officials, or blow up government buildings, or create arsenals, or build bombs, or create stockpiles of poison.  This is a right-wing problem, and ONLY a right-wing problem.  There is simply no existing counterpart to violent far right extremists on the left.  Domestic non-jihadi terrorists are exclusively conservative--indeed, American right-wing extremists these days are actually a much bigger threat to the country than Islamic extremists are.

Conservatives really ought to do something about the traitors in their midst.

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