Ilhan Omar “White Men" are Greater Threat Than Jihadis

The ever-controversial Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) recently claimed that “our country [in this case she meant the United States, not Somalia] should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.” She called for “profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.” As crazy as this sounds, it is a commonplace claim on the Left these days. But that doesn’t make it even remotely true.

No, they don’t. It is a false claim that “white men” or “right-wing extremists” are a bigger threat to Americans than Islamic jihad terrorists. As I noted in November 2018 when CNN’s Don Lemon made the same claim, this claim originated with an April 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study that counted 106 people killed in 62 attacks by “far-right violent extremists,” as compared to 119 people killed in 23 attacks by “radical Islamist violent extremists.”

That’s it then, right? 39 more attacks by “far-right violent extremists” than by “radical Islamist violent extremists.” Although 13 more people were killed in the jihad attacks, this establishes definitively that America has a much bigger problem with the “far-right” than with jihadis, right?

No. One major problem with the Government Accountability Office study is clear on page 6 of its report, where you will see that the count of fatalities committed by “far right wing extremists” and “radical Islamist extremists” begins on September 12, 2001. Why was that day chosen for the beginning of the study? If the GAO had gone back one more day, the number of Americans killed by Islamic jihadists would have been several thousand more than those killed by “far-right violent extremists.”