Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Domestic extremists killed more than 400 people over the last decade, survey finds

(JTA) — Domestic extremists in the United States — most them from the far-right — killed 435 people in the decade that ended this past December.

According to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League, half of those murders were committed to further the killer’s ideology. The other half were murders that were committed by extremists but not necessarily for ideological reasons.

The report defines domestic extremists as “American citizens or long-term residents with connections to some sort of extreme movement or cause.”

According to the ADL, 90% of those extremist murderers this year came from the right. But the report noted that because right-wing extremists tend to be easily identifiable, it is “likely that non-ideological murders committed by extremists other than white supremacists are underrepresented in ADL’s data.”

In terms of ideologically-motivated killings, 2019 was the third-worst year of the past decade, with 29 ideologically motivated murders by extremists. Those include 22 people killed by a white supremacist shooter at a Walmart in El Paso, four people killed in a December shooting that ended at a Jersey City kosher supermarket, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, California, in which one woman was killed.

“[E]xtremist killings can have a disproportionate effect on communities, especially when they take the form of a hate crime or a terrorist attack,” read the report. “It is important to remember that extremist murders represent merely the tip of a pyramid of extremist violence in the United States.”

The deadliest year of the past decade in terms of domestic ideologically motivated murders was 2016, which saw 58 such murders. That includes the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which was carried out by an Islamist extremist and killed 49 people.

The post US domestic extremists killed more than 400 people over the last decade, survey says appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.