A New Type of Terror Emerges in America

Plots outside the command and control of extremist groups are difficult to detect

- Paul M. Barrett

Since September 11, 2001, the death toll from extremist Islamic-inspired terrorism in the U.S. stands at 45, including the 14 people killed on Dec. 2 by the husband-and-wife shooters in San Bernardino, Calif. That’s according to New America, a Washington research organization, which found about the same sad tally—48—for victims of terrorism linked to white supremacists and other right-wing ideologies.

“Lines are blurring between the extremist Islamist threat and the kind of mass shootings we’re all too familiar with in America,” says Daniel Benjamin, a scholar at Dartmouth College who served as coordinator for counter terrorism at the U.S. Department of State from 2009 through 2012. Regardless of their demented ideas, all of these killers operate outside the command and control of large terrorist groups or even small cells. Like the massacres at a Charleston (S.C.) black church last June and at an Oak Creek (Wis.) Sikh temple in August 2012, the bloodshed in San Bernardino lacked what Benjamin terms “terrorist followthrough”: a claim of responsibility, issuance of demands, or effort to make any clear point.

“Talk about random. San Bernardino puts random into a new category,” says Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law in New York. As of this writing, it’s still not clear why Syed Rizwan Farook, the American-born son of Pakistani immigrants, or his Pakistani-born, Saudi-raised wife, Tashfeen Malik, attacked a holiday party and training session at the social-services center where Farook worked as a health inspector.