Murders committed by white supremacist groups in the United States more than doubled in 2017 compared to the previous year, a report published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) showed on Wednesday.
The ADL said the killings far surpassed those committed by domestic Islamic extremists, and noted that 2017 was fifth-deadliest year for US extremist violence since 1970.
The report, called “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2017” and published by the ADL’s Centre on Extremism, found that ‘white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59% of all extremist-related fatalities in the US in 2017, up dramatically from 20% in 2016.”
Nine deaths were linked to Islamic extremists in the ADL’s annual assessment of extremist-related killings. The most recent ADL figures show that over the last 10 years, 71% of all the fatalities have been linked to domestic right-wing extremists, while 26% were slain by Islamic extremists.
“These findings are a stark reminder that domestic extremism is a serious threat to our safety and security,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO.
“We saw two car-ramming attacks in the US last year – one from an Islamic terrorist and another from a white supremacist in Charlottesville [in Virginia] – and the number of deaths attributed to white supremacists increased substantially. The bottom line is we cannot ignore one form of extremism over another. We must tackle them all,” he said.
Key findings revealed in the ADL’s annual report found that of the 18 homicides committed by white supremacist, several included killings linked to the “alt right as that movement expanded its operations in 2017 from the Internet into the physical world – raising the likely possibility of more such violent acts in the future.”
Unlike in 2016, a majority of the 2017 murders were committed by right-wing extremists, primarily white supremacists, as has typically been the case most years.