The enemy within

Some people describe the massive shootout in San Bernardino as the worst terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. By doing that, they rekindle the speculations and analyses of politicians, experts and agencies of public and national security about the enemy inside the country.

There is talk of a new type of terrorist — raised in this country and therefore hard to detect but “radicalized” (a word now defined as something negative) who acts in the name of foreign foes.

On Saturday [Dec. 5], Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson commented that, with the events in San Bernardino, “We have moved to an entirely new phase in the global terrorist threat and in our homeland security efforts.”

President Barack Obama broached the new nature of that threat and the measures that the government will adopt to protect the nation.

The incidents in San Bernardino and Paris have detonated a deafening noise of interminable commentary in the media, angry rhetoric among politicians and the spread of fear among the population. Everything leads to the belief that this country is or will be under attack by insane foreigners whose purpose is to kill U.S. Americans.

But it turns out that, empirically, the greatest threat to the public and national security of the United States is not the threat from the outside but one that’s very American and expresses itself through an extreme right that uses almost the same vocabulary of religious war as the Muslim far right.

It also expresses itself through a society armed to the teeth that exterminates itself at the average rate of one person killed by gunfire every 16 minutes.

The consensus among the folks in charge of public and national security is that the greatest threat of armed violence comes from the proliferation of American individuals and groups on the extreme right.

As reported by The New Yorker, since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has suffered 65 attacks linked to far-right groups or ideologies (anti-federal, white supremacy, anti-abortion extremists) and only 24 linked to Muslim extremists.

Academic experts who surveyed more than 400 police agencies in the U.S. concluded that, to public safety officials, “the main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists but from right-wing extremists.”

In 2014, there were at least 784 hate groups in the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which specializes in hate crimes and right-wing extremist groups.

The word “terrorism” is seldom used to describe acts of mass violence by Christian fundamentalists against, for example, abortion clinics. Or by white supremacists against Afro-American churches.

At the same time, in this society, one of the world’s most armed, the purchase of armament is excessive. The result of every massive shootout or attack, along with a growing sensation of insecurity because of the circulation of firearms, is the acquisition of more firearms “to defend ourselves from the bad guys.”

There was a surge in the sale of firearms in the United States after the San Bernardino incident and the mass shooting by a white American in Colorado a few days earlier. The same happened after the worst mass shooting in recent times, in which 26 people were killed in an elementary school in Connecticut in 2012.

In fact, on the Friday [Nov. 27] after Thanksgiving Day, the largest number of applications for background checks was submitted to the FBI in one day (185,345 people), the step prior to buying firearms. That’s not including the fact that 40 percent of those weapons were bought in gun shows and through other transactions that don’t require registration.

“It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war,” stated The New York Times in an editorial about firearms and mass shootings published on its front page, the first such instance since 1920.

The editorial assailed the politicians who “offer prayers for gun victims and then […] reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing.”

It accused them of “distract[ing] us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.”

This perfect combination for the ultra-conservatives of an outside enemy and more weapons for defense is cultivated every day by the right-wing Republican candidates for U.S. President. They issue calls for citizens to arm themselves so they can defend the country from outside threats, whether they be Muslims, migrants (all of them) or refugees.

Donald Trump never ceases to warn about the threat posed by “them” against “us,” repeating that these are “very dangerous times” and that “we have to attack” those who “threaten us.”

Ted Cruz promises to “carpet bomb into oblivion” the Islamic State. A few hours after the San Bernardino shootout, he summoned his followers to a shooting range and told them that “[we can] stop the bad guys by using our guns.”

The president of the politically influential fundamentalist-Christian Liberty University, Jerry Fallwell Jr., told his students that “if more good people had concealed-carry permits we could end those Muslims before they walk in and kill,” The Washington Post reported.

All that demagogic rhetoric with fascist tinges encourages desperate sectors to commit acts of violence with firearms as self-defense acts. These messages of intolerance justify what is, in fact, a type of social madness leading to mutual extermination that reflects the United States’ warlike policies in recent years.

We need to shoot to defend “us” from the threat from “them.”

The enemy is indeed inside, but it’s not “them” — it’s “us.”

(From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.)

[Photo at top of victim of the San Bernardino massacre being taken to an ambulance.]