CNN’s Don Lemon Doubles Down on False Claim That White Men are “Biggest Terror Threat in This Country”

Written by Robert Spencer

“The evidence is overwhelming,” insists Lemon. But is it, really? There are several reasons why it is a false claim that “right-wing extremists” are a bigger threat to Americans than Islamic jihad terrorists. “Lemon pointed to a recent Government Accountability Office report that shows that since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, far-right violent extremists have killed 106 people in 62 attacks in the United States, while radical Islamist violent extremists have killed 119 people in 23 attacks.”

But there are several problems with this study:

1.) It only counts fatalities, not people injured.

2.) It doesn’t take failed plots into account.

3.) If you follow the Post’s link to the Government Accountability Office, and go to page 6 of the report there, you’ll see that the count of fatalities committed by “far right wing extremists” and “radical Islamist extremists” begins on September 12, 2001. Go back one more day, and the number of Americans killed by Islamic jihadists is far, far more than the number of Americans killed by any other type of “extremist.”

4.) The comparison doesn’t take into account the fact that there is a global network of Islamic jihadis. They’re found on every inhabited continent. Major jihad organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have repeatedly called upon Muslims to murder Americans. By contrast, there is no global network of “right-wing extremists” and they have not called for the indiscriminate murder of American civilians.

This propaganda is everywhere, but all the repetition of these lies doesn’t make them true.

“CNN’s Don Lemon doubles down after saying white men are ‘the biggest terror threat in this country,’” by Lindsey Bever, Washington Post, November 1, 2018:

During a recent segment about a supermarket shooting in Kentucky, CNN host Don Lemon said that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.”

Lemon was speaking on live television Monday about an incident in which a white man allegedly shot and killed two black people outside a Kroger grocery store in Jeffersontown, Ky., not far from Louisville.

The incident, which is being investigated as a hate crime, occurred during the same week that 13 potential explosive devices were sent to prominent Democratic and media figures across the country and 11 people were killed in a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. White men were also charged in both of those cases.

“I keep trying to point out to people not to demonize any one group or any one ethnicity. But we keep thinking that the biggest terror threat is something else — some people who are marching towards the border like it’s imminent,” Lemon told CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, referring to the Central American migrant caravan walking toward the United States. He added that “the last time they did this, a couple hundred people came and they — most of them didn’t get into the country. Most of them got tuckered out before they even made it to the border.”

“So,” he said, “we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white-guy ban. So what do we do about that?”

On Wednesday, following the backlash, Lemon doubled down.

“Earlier this week, I made some comments about that in a conversation with Chris,” he said during a broadcast Wednesday night. “I said that the biggest terror threat in this country comes from radicals on the far right, primarily white men. That angered some people. But let’s put emotion aside and look at the cold hard facts. The evidence is overwhelming.”

Lemon pointed to a recent Government Accountability Office report that shows that since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, far-right violent extremists have killed 106 people in 62 attacks in the United States, while radical Islamist violent extremists have killed 119 people in 23 attacks.

He also referenced several studies, including a 2017 report from the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, which found that from 2008 to 2016, there were almost twice as many terrorist incidents carried out on U.S. soil by right-wing extremists — many of whom are white — than by Islamist extremists.

It showed there were 115 incidents involving right-wing extremists and that those that ended in death were more deadly than incidents carried out by other groups.

“So people who were angered about what I said are missing the entire point,” Lemon said about his earlier statements. “We don’t need to worry about people who are thousands of miles away. The biggest threats are homegrown. The facts prove that.”…

This article was originally published at JihadWatch.org