Thursday, March 29, 2012

Research defines groups to watch--has anyone been left out?

To define the ideological motivations, LaFree and Bersani used START’s Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism—United States (Miller, Smarick and Simone, 2011), which briefly describes ideological motivations as:
Extreme Right-Wing: groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent (for some the threat is from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group), and believe in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism. Groups may also be fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation), anti-global, suspicious of centralized federal authority, reverent of individual liberty, and believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.

Extreme Left-Wing: groups that want to bring about change through violent revolution rather than through established political processes. This category also includes secular left-wing groups that rely heavily on terrorism to overthrow the capitalist system and either establish “a dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marxist-Leninists) or, much more rarely, a decentralized, non-hierarchical political system (anarchists).

Religious: groups that seek to smite the purported enemies of God and other evildoers, impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists), forcibly insert religion into the political sphere (e.g., those who seek to politicize religion, such as Christian Reconstructionists and Islamists), and/or bring about Armageddon (apocalyptic millenarian cults; 2010: 17). For example, Jewish Direct Action, Mormon extremist, Jamaat-al-Fuqra, and Covenant, Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) are included in this category.

Ethno-Nationalist/Separatist: regionally concentrated groups with a history of organized political autonomy with their own state, traditional ruler, or regional government, who are committed to gaining or regaining political independence through any means and who have supported political movements for autonomy at some time since 1945.

Single Issue: groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes (e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro). This category includes groups from all sides of the political spectrum.
It's interesting that people who advocate the killing of the low-income and black if they are still in the womb, are not on the government watch list. Anyone in the age range of 60s or 70s complains of loss of "a way of life," and is not thrilled with Agenda 21 or China holding our debt. Are they dangerous? Islamic members of the military who advocate for their religion and then shoot up a military base, missed the filter of terrorist cells. If ones' beliefs are universal and international in orientation, or if one advocates peaceful revolution through fundamental change, or if the group can stand in front of mainstream media cameras and call for vigilanteism, START funded research will probably not notice them.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ethno Nationalist? Are they looking at LaRaza as a threat?

uriah said...

save a child