CBS excluded the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 from a tally comparing the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamic extremists to the number of attacks carried out by far right extremists.
The Monday segment relied on a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that tallied acts of violent extremism in the U.S. from Sept. 12, 2001 through Dec. 31, 2016, and found that right wing extremism accounted for 72 percent of the total number of extremist incidents during that time. The inclusion of the World Trade Center attacks, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people, would have exposed the attempt to draw false equivalency between the threat of Islamic extremism and that of far right extremism.
While far right extremism accounted for the majority of incidents, Islamic extremism claimed more lives. This disparity is accounted for by a prevalence of right wing extremist incidents in which only one person was killed.
A total of 62 incidents of right wing violence made the tally, 48 of which involved one death. This is likely due to the inclusion of a number of gang related murders, some of which occurred among prison gang members. The list of incidents designated as right wing extremism include the murder of multiple pedophiles and the murder of man by his step son who was trying to gain “street cred.”
The list of Islamic extremist incidents also includes a number of acts that resulted in only one death, but those events are offset by a number of high fatality incidents like the Orlando night club shooting, which killed 49 people, and the shooting at Ft. Hood that killed 13.
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