Trump’s list of under-reported attacks contains 0 perpetrated by white supremacists or Islamophobes
A person in America is much more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim.
The Trump administration’s list of 78 terror attacks it believes didn’t receive adequate media coverage contains zero perpetrated by white supremacists, Islamophobes, or right-wing extremists.
It also contains numerous attacks that received wall-to-wall media coverage, such as the San Bernardino mass shooting (for which the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize) and the November 2015 attacks in Paris. The BBC covered every single attack on the list.
There are indications it was produced hastily:
White House officials promised to provide the media with a list earlier Monday following President Trump’s speech to CENTCOM, where he accused the media of trying to cover up for terrorists — a line pushed by conspiracy theory websites like Infowars.
“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” Trump said. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”
Left unmentioned during that speech and during any other public comment Trump has made is a January 29 mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec City that left six dead and was reportedly perpetrated by a white nationalist, anti-immigrant Trump fan. And Trump’s list of underreported attacks omits recent mass shootings in the U.S. like the murder of nine African American worshippers at the historically black Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in June 2015 and the murder of three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a few months later that were committed by white non-Muslim men linked to extremist ideologies.
Three days after the Quebec City shooting, Reuters reported that the Trump administration wants a federal counter-terrorism program to stop focusing on violent white supremacists and any other extremist groups not comprised of Muslims. Asked about that report during a press conference last week, Press Secretary Sean Spicer didn’t deny it.
Despite the Trump administration’s focus on Muslims, a study published in 2015 found that people in America are seven times as likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim attacker.