Education

Professor: Muslim Terrorism Gets More Coverage Than ‘Right-Wing’ Attacks

REUTERS/Patrick T. Fallon

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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American University professor Erin Kearns has been telling her students that the U.S. has more to fear form right-wing terrorists than Islamic terrorists. She bases that conclusion on the number of attacks, not the number of people killed, The College Fix reports.

These lectures could originally be found on the e-learning site Blackboard and were captured by The College Fix.

However, both a College Fix analysis of the Global Terrorism Database and a fact check by The Daily Caller, question the methodology used in assessing who is most responsible for terrorist attacks in the United States.

Since 2011, the majority of terrorist fatalities have been caused by Islamic extremist terror. But Kearns is adamant that the Islamic extremists are being unduly blamed. “I would guess that a handful of you are probably like, ‘Oh, it’s some radical of Islam, people who are using that to justify their violence,'” Kearns says in a May lecture from this year.

“That is a common, common assumption,” she stated. “In reality, if we look at the past 10 years, only about 12 percent of terrorist attacks in the U.S. have been committed by Muslims.”

But Kearns says because those Muslim attacks “get more coverage” than right-wing terrorism,” Americans are receiving an “inaccurate view of what the threat is.”

However, Muslim terrorist attacks are far more deadly and kill more people.

As The College Fix notes, from 2011 to 2016 in the United States, 161 people died as a result of terrorist incidents. Of that number, Muslim extremists accounted for 90 of the dead, or 56 percent.

A fact check conducted by The Daily Caller News Foundation took aim at a contention by the Anti-Defamation League that “claimed right-wing extremists have committed 74 percent of murders carried out by domestic extremists in the last 10 years.”

The fact check said the claim was “unsubstantiated” because the ADL was “ignoring other data points that may undermine” their claim.

Another problem with Kearns’ analysis is that the source that she sees as the greater threat — “right-wing” terrorism — remains undefined.

After reaching out to Kearns for further comment, the professor told The College Fix that she believes the extent of Islamic extremist terrorism is exaggerated because “the perpetrator’s identity — not fatalities — is the most significant predictor of media coverage.”

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