For far too long our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot — a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.
Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference.
In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized — that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system — I’m sorry — that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system.
A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is.
But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary — well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.
Ideological prejudice
For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.
It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.
It is why during those so-called George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror.
It is the reason for the now infamous image of a news anchor from a very prominent agency standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful.
This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.