OLYMPICS-U.S.: Experts Wonder if Homegrown Terrorism is Rising

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jul 31 1996 (IPS) - From church burnings in the South to a pipe bomb at the Olympics Games last Saturday, the face of terrorism in the United States is increasingly becoming domestic.

Over the past year, federal authorities have blamed the Oklahoma City bombing and what they have nicknamed the ‘Unabomber’ parcel bombs on white men with isolated lifestyles and strong anti- government views. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking at a similar portrait as a clue to finding whoever planted a pipe bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park.

Combined with federal searches into several unexplained cases of arson and desecration of black churches in the South, the recent spotlight on domestic terrorism has especially drawn attention to the rise of the rightist U.S. militia movement. Militia groups and the racist far right, experts say, are expanding their membership rapidly, which may be helping to fuel the surge of racist or anti-government attacks.

U.S. militias take their cue from the second and tenth amendments to the Constitution, which confer, respectively, the right to bear arms for “a well-regulated militia” and the pre- eminence of individual states over the federal government.

David Tubbs, an FBI spokesman, said the agency was examining the rightist militia movement anew following the Atlanta bombing, but characterised it only as “a routine part of the investigation.”

Whether militias are found to be at the bottom of the Olympics attack or not, some analysts of the U.S. far right fear those groups are growing much more powerful.

“We expect to see more violence from far-right movements,” warns Noah Chandler, a research associate for the Atlanta-based Centre for Democratic Renewal, which studies hate groups. “They have created an environment where it’s seemingly okay to settle differences with weapons.”

“The impact of these groups has been growing rapidly since the Oklahoma bombing,” adds Tawanda Shaw of KlanWatch, an Atlanta- based group that monitors the racist right. In the past 18 months, she says, dozens of new militias have been created, with some 440 armed militia groups believed to be operating nationwide.

“For the hard core, Oklahoma City was just the beginning,” she says.

Chandler says there are only an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 members of U.S. militias throughout the country, and perhaps another 25,000 people belonging to the white supremacist fringe. But their influence, and their grasp of paramilitary tactics, outweighs their numbers, he argues.

“They’ve been very successful at influencing more mainstream types of politics,” he says. The militias, Chandler contends, have effectively separated “above-ground” activities, including community outreach, from underground work like paramilitary training and acts of sabotage.

Some politicians, like Republican Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, openly received above-ground support from militias during the 1994 elections. But Chandler contends the groups that help bolster populist campaigns on the right are “one and the same” with those which call for racial war and anti-government terror.

He argues that the recent violence linked to the militias has in fact helped steer supporters to the cause, by proving that the groups could back up their anti-government talk with action.

The militia movement has gained membership since last Apr 19, when the Alfred E. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a car bomb, killing 170 people. Two former Army soldiers connected to the Michigan Militia, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, have been arrested for the bombing.

That October, an obscure group calling itself ‘Sons of Gestapo’ claimed credit for derailing a Los Angeles-bound Amtrak train in Arizona, killing one person and injuring 78 others. There has been no sign of the group since that attack, and some experts suspect that militia groups, using the ‘Sons of Gestapo’ moniker as a ruse, were behind the derailment.

Despite such incidents, the militia movement’s growth has been largely ignored by the media, argues Jim Naureckas, a media analyst for the group ‘Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’ (FAIR). “You get people more excited about dark-skinned foreigners” than about white, domestic terrorism, he says of media coverage.

Naureckas says there was little media follow-up to the Amtrak derailment story, and almost no investigation into the ‘Sons of Gestapo.’ “Imagine what the story would have been like if it had been caused by ‘the Sons of Jihad’,” he says, referring to the Arab word for ‘struggle.’

Some press outlets, notably those outside the United States, have actually expressed relief that the Olympics bomb seems more likely to be the result of domestic terrorism than the foreign kind.

The Financial Times (of London), in its Tuesday editorial, argues, “It is preferable that Americans should come to terms with the painful truth that terrorism is a plague which can germinate within almost any modern urban society, and that vigilance against it must be directed inward as well as outward.”

But analysts of the U.S. extreme right worry that the government could respond with a harsh crackdown on the militia movement, which some say would only help the militias.

“They’re very paranoid of any type of government crackdown,” Chandler says of militia supporters. “Legislation such as the anti-terrorism bill (passed this April by Congress) or signs of a government crackdown — that will attract people (to the militias).”

Instead of new legislation, Shaw adds, states need to enforce existing laws that forbid the formation of militias or paramilitary organisations. Currently, 24 states, including Georgia, have anti-paramilitary laws, and an additional 17 have laws banning militias.