ISIS is marching across huge swaths of land in the Middle East, crucifying, beheading and burning alive untold numbers of human beings, and making direct threats against the United States.
But the Department of Homeland Security is making sure the government doesn’t take its eye off the real enemy – right-wingers.
CNN reports:
A new intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security this month and reviewed by CNN, focuses on the domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists.
The report cites “24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks across the U.S. since 2010,” or as ISIS calls it, “a slow Tuesday morning.”
Without naming names, or citing any sources, CNN declares:
Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the domestic terror threat from sovereign citizen groups as equal to — and in some cases greater than — the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, that garner more public attention.
While anyone committing crimes is an issue law enforcement should be concerned with, the threat from lunatic fringe “sovereign citizens” — people who reject government — pales in comparison to an organized and well-financed group of jihadi terrorists excited at the prospect of their own death in the course of killing “infidels.”
A White House official said President Obama is concerned with all “violent ideologies.” How this is squared with the president personally meeting with leaders of anti-police groups in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, was not addressed. Nor were violent attacks on police in the name of “social justice,” like the execution of two New York City police officers by a member of the anti-police groups.
For clarity and comment on the report, CNN turned to the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.
The federal government’s focus on the domestic groups waxes and wanes, Potok said, in part because the threat from foreign groups like al Qaeda and its affiliates.
The SPLC has made news in recent years when a supporter of theirs shot a security guard at the Family Research Council while attempting to execute staffers at the group because the SPLC labeled them “anti-gay.” And recently, a fan of the SPLC shot and killed three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and labeled (then retracted) Dr. Ben Carson an “extremist.”
The report emerged after the three day White House summit on “combatting violent extremism,” which took great pains to avoid mentioning the words “Islamic terrorism” with regards to the threat the country and the world faces.