A few weeks after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the Director of the FBI said, “Our most immediate concern is that violent extremists—individuals or small groups—will draw inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks against Americans going about their daily lives. That includes not just homegrown violent extremists inspired by a foreign terrorist organization but also domestic violent extremists targeting Jewish or Muslim communities.”
And indeed, in the three months after October 7, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,291 anti-Jewish incidents, which was a 361-percent increase compared to the same period one year prior.
But the terrorist attacks the FBI Director warned about never arrived, and all but 56 of those 3,291 incidents were nonviolent, consisting of hate speech, vandalism, and rallies. And ADL has inflated its recorded number of nonviolent incidents by counting certain political speech as hate speech.
We should, of course, condemn those 56 violent incidents, all forms of hateful rhetoric, and all genuine expressions of support for terrorism. And we must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks like the kind committed on September 11 and in the 2019 terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
But fighting terrorism is different from hyping it. What led to the 9/11 terrorist attack was the failure of the US intelligence agencies to communicate with each other, not any downplaying of terrorism, according to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.
The fact of the matter is that terrorism is incredibly rare and on the decline. Most of it is in the Middle East and South Asia, with tiny amounts in North America and countries like New Zealand.
In truth, most forms of violence have been declining in Western nations for centuries, even millennia.
To the extent governments and NGOs are recording more so-called “hate speech,” it’s because people today are far more likely to label speech “hateful” than were people just a few decades ago. By almost every measure, our tolerance of racial, sexual, and religious minorities is at an all-time high.
And we should also be very wary of governments hyping terrorism since it leads to abuses of power. After 9/11, the hyping of terrorism fears allowed the US to invade a country we never should have invaded, occupy a country we shouldn’t have occupied, use kidnapping and torture as standard operating procedures, and violate fundamental civil liberties.
Now, it appears that the US and other governments around the world are hyping hate in order to weaponize the government against their political enemies.
