New Zealand is a small, faraway country, and the victims of the shooting rampage in Christchurch were no doubt Muslims, rather than Jews. But I felt the same sickening feeling as I read news of the massacre in the mosques as I did in October reading the news about the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.
All acts of terrorism — all killings of the innocent — are an abomination, and one that is made all the worse when the victims are chosen for their skin color, ethnicity, sexuality or religious beliefs. In other words, when these are hate crimes rooted in pathologies shared by many others, rather than random emanations of a diseased mind. Such attacks are designed to perpetuate the most dangerous forms of hatred known to mankind: the same kind of religious hatred that produced the Thirty Years' War, the same kind of racial hatred that produced the Holocaust, the same kind of ethnic hatred that produced the Srebrenica massacre.
Yet we do not treat all hate crimes equally. For decades, we have been understandably focused on attacks by Muslim extremists. I say understandably because 9/11 was the worst terrorist attack ever, and it was only a prelude of the horrors to come. Think of all those car bombs driven by Sunni terrorists in Iraq into crowds of Shiites. Or by Pashtun terrorists in Afghanistan into crowds of Hazaras. Or think of the Islamic State's attempted genocide against the Yazidis. Many terrible atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of Islam in recent decades — and they have occurred not only in Kabul or Baghdad but also in Paris and Orlando.
But a focus on Islamist violence should not distract us from the growing threat of right-wing violence. While 9/11 is the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, the second-worst was Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 people. The Anti-Defamation League reports that in the United States, "right-wing extremists collectively have been responsible for more than 70 percent of the 427 extremist-related killings over the past 10 years, far outnumbering those committed by left-wing extremists or domestic Islamist extremists." The toll of right-wing terrorism could have been even greater if the FBI had not apprehended last month the heavily armed Coast Guard lieutenant Christopher Hasson before he was allegedly ready to strike against liberal politicians and media personalities. Yet the administration has slashed programs designed to combat this menace.
