A Northeastern University professor has put forward a provocative notion: Perhaps the U.S. government should include the Ku Klux Klan as an enemy in its war against terrorism.
Why not, indeed.
Max Abrahms, a political science professor and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, took on the KKK-terrorist issue in a column on Politico.com. He writes:
“There is still no consensus over the definition, but terrorism usually denotes a nonstate actor attacking civilian targets to spread fear for some putative political goal. And here we had a 73-year-old lone wolf opening fire on a Jewish community center and retirement home on Passover eve yelling ‘Heil Hitler.’”
The “here” involved the killing of three people on Passover eve in Overland Park, Kan. Police arrested a known Klan leader and virulent anti-Semite. Granted, the suspect hasn’t been convicted of anything — at least not yet — but he seems to many observers to be acting like someone who is guilty of killing those three innocent victims.
Let’s suppose, though, the Klan leader-suspect had nothing to do with it, does the Klan’s violent history make it any less of a candidate as a terrorist organization? Hardly.
Back to Abrahms’s point …
“But what does it take for a hateful act to become a full-fledged terrorist attack? You might think the distinction hinges on lethality. A year ago this week, though, the Boston Marathon bombings killed the same number of bystanders, and Americans had little trouble fingering the incident as terrorism. And over the years, the Klan has killed many more Americans than has Al Qaeda, and the group has certainly fanned its share of fear,” he writes.
Do we launch drone strikes in the back woods of some remote region in the country where KKK members are known to plot their dirty deeds? Of course not. The Klan and other domestic hate groups, though, do “terrorize” citizens with their threats and their actions.
Why not call them what they are and then act as if we’re at war with them?
Abrahms’s full essay is here. Take a look.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/the-kkk-is-a-terrorist-organization-105717.html?hp=r2#.U05gB1JOWt8