Smoking Homegrown --- terrorists that is

John Brennan, the deputy national security adviser for counter-terrorism and homeland security, has announced a new national security strategy that will focus on the threat posed by homegrown extremists. Except, the target of this strategy doesn’t seem to be all domestic terrorism, but rather domestic terrorism with foreign roots.

There has been a surge in right-wing extremism in the U.S., copiously documented by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, but which was also predicted by Homeland Security. In fact, the report warned that right-wing extremists, who are “angry at the economy and the election of a black president” might recruit GWOT veterans.

I have been writing about how white domestic terrorism has slipped from the media’s radar, but sadly, it seems like the government is also uninterested by the surge in right wing extremism — possibly because such violence doesn’t fit the helpful war narrative of the “dangerous other” being brown, and from a desert landscape.

There have been a couple recent domestic terrorist attack that have been largely ignored by the media and government:

Robert Joos Jr.

A firearms and explosives expert suspected of involvement with two white supremacist brothers in the sending of a bomb to the office of a municipal diversity officer was sentenced to 6½ years in prison in Missouri on Tuesday.

And then there is the unknown man who bombed a mosque in Florida.

Unlike in the case of Faisal Shahzad, these bombs actually detonated. In a rational world, these stories would probably receive considerably more coverage than the Shahzad incident, but again, Shahzad, a Muslim Pakistani-American, fits the narrative of a “dangerous domestic threat with foreign roots.” Joos and the unknown man don’t fit that character description.