"That's where the danger is," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino. "If there's anything Oklahoma City demonstrated, it's that a committed domestic terrorist doesn't need to be a part of an organized group to have a devastating effect."
Right wing extremists acting on their own may be more dangerous than those who organize, according to this lengthy report on domestic terrorism. Lacking leaders who may caution restraint, extremists who are "influenced by the ideologies of the radical right" may pose a greater threat than members of radical organizations.
The key question is whether law enforcement priorities are misplaced.
[S]ome people express concern about whether law enforcement is focused enough on the radical right rather than on foreign terrorist groups or radical environmentalists like the Earth Liberation Front. The FBI lists right-wing extremists as a lesser domestic terror threat than the ELF, even though that group has never killed a single person.
Bureau Director Robert Mueller, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee recently, mentioned the threat from white supremacist groups, the right-wing Patriot movement and anti-abortion extremists. But he ranked higher the threats from radical environmentalists, anarchists and black nationalist groups.
Congressional Quarterly reported that a document it obtained from the Department of Homeland Security "appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation's security," but does not list right-wing groups at all.
According to Dan Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door, "the law enforcement community is so singularly focused on terrorists from abroad [it doesn't] seem to acknowledge that the majority of terrorist acts perpetrated on American soil have come from the radical right."
