Domestic and International Terrorists Have Religious Extremism in Common

ter•ror•is•m (n.)
The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
      —The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

by Michele Keller, Web Editor

We used to believe that increases in hate crimes and terrorist acts were tied to economic hardship. For example, in 1940, psychologists Carl Hovland and Robert Sears published a well-known study linking lynchings in the South to low cotton prices.

A recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, however, shows that religious extremism and hard-line theocratic thinking — the idea that government and the legal system must be structured along religious lines — is the major root of both domestic and international hate groups.

We've long known that intolerance is not isolated to any one region of the world, but it is now clear that the terrorists who committed thousands of acts of violence against abortion providers in the United States over the years are cut from the same cloth of religious extremism as those who bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and attacked New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001.

After Sept. 11, fugitive anti-abortion fanatic Clayton Lee Waagner of the Army of God claimed responsibility for sending anthrax threats to more than 100 abortion providers, then shared space on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list with the fugitive Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. There are a number of similarities between the two camps: