In 2009, Congress took an important step in arming federal investigators to deal with hate crimes by passing the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Their violence culminated when a white supremacist from Ohio drove his car into a crowd of people, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring about 30 others. The following day, some of these Unite the Right enthusiasts attacked and injured counterprotesters in Charlottesville. They chanted “Jews will not replace us!” before attacking a small group of students and counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Among other odious acts, these “Unite the Right” protesters marched with lighted torches on the campus of the University of Virginia. In August 2017, several hundred people - mainly young white men heavily influenced by white-nationalist propaganda - converged on Charlottesville, ostensibly to protest the possible removal of Confederate monuments from public parks. Virginia, too, has experienced extremist violence. Several months ago, an assailant shouting anti-Semitic slurs stormed the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with a semiautomatic rifle and murdered 11 people. Last year in Kentucky, a white man with a history of making racist remarks was charged with shooting and killing two African-Americans in their 60s at a grocery store after trying to enter a nearby black church. In 2015, an avowed white supremacist murdered nine black congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The rising scourge of domestic hate has been underscored by particularly heinous acts in the past few years.
Islamic extremists were responsible for 26 percent. Seventy-one percent of the 387 “extremist related fatalities in the United States” from 2008 to 2017 were committed by members of far-right and white-supremacist groups, according the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Killings committed by individuals and groups associated with far-right extremist groups have risen significantly. In 2017, hate crimes, generally defined as criminal acts motivated by the victim’s race, ethnicity, religion, or gender, increased by about 17 percent nationally, to 7,175 from 6,121 (the number of police agencies reporting crimes also rose, by about 6 percent) in my state, Virginia, they were up by nearly 50 percent, to 202 from 137. But there are steps that can be taken to help the police and prosecutors address this growing threat - including, on the federal level, a domestic terrorism law. This is in part because of the limited number of enforcement tools available to prosecutors. Regrettably, over the past 25 years, law enforcement, at both the federal and state levels, has been slow to respond. This frightening case is just one of several recent reminders that white supremacy and far-right extremism are among the greatest domestic-security threats facing the United States. Christopher Hasson, apparently inspired by a right-wing Norwegian terrorist who slaughtered 77 people in 2011, stockpiled firearms and ammunition and researched locations around Washington to launch his attacks, according to investigators. Last week, federal agents in Maryland arrested a United States Coast Guard officer and said he was plotting to assassinate Democratic members of Congress, prominent television journalists and others.
Cullen, United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia New York Times Opinion (Published February 22, 2019)īy Thomas T.
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