Foreign Policy, the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, has reposted an article by Daniel Byman, a government insider and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Byman’s article, Should we treat domestic terrorists the way we treat ISIS?: What works—and what doesn’t, calls for a police and surveillance state focus on domestic “rightwing terrorist” individuals and organizations.
Byman’s point of departure is Stephen Paddock, the millionaire accused of killing 58 people attending and country and western festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. The government has yet to establish a political or religious motive for the attack, and yet Byman writes Paddock fits “a stereotype of a right-wing terrorist more than a jihadist one.”
From there Byman conflates Paddock’s alleged violence with that of James Alex Fields Jr., the “white supremacist” who drove a car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville. “Fields’ use of a car to drive through a crowd resembles nothing more than the vehicle attacks that we’ve seen in Barcelona, Berlin, London, Nice, and other cities in the past two years,” Byman argues.
From there Byman wanders far afield. He pairs the 2015 attack on a Planned Parenthood Clinic and a black church in Charleston to the sniper attack in Las Vegas. He argues the government should treat domestic terrorism incidents the same way it treats attacks by the Islamic State. [READ MORE]
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