Lone wolvesWhite House summit on extremism focuses on lone wolves

Today the White House will host community leaders and local law enforcement officials for the second day of a summit on “countering violent extremism,” the purpose of which is to highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent extremists from radicalizing and recruiting individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence. The three-day summit comes just days after the shooting deaths of three young Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by a suspect who may have been motivated by religious hatred, and the shooting attacks at a free speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, alleged to have been inspired by Islamic radicalism. The Obama administration’s counter extremism efforts reflect an understanding that lone wolf terror acts will continue to be a threat for law enforcement as much as acts by organized groups such as al-Qaeda.

According to theChristian Science Monitor, in a recent report, Age of the Wolf: A Study of the Rise of Lone Wolf and Leaderless Resistance Terrorism, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) examined roughly sixty domestic terror incidents between 1 April 2009 and 1 February 2015, and found that almost 75 percent of them were carried out or planned by an individual without accomplices (lone wolf). Only 10 percent of the incidents were carried out or planned by a team of more than two people, according to the report. The study also found that a domestic terrorist attack or foiled attack occurred roughly every thirty-four days.

“It’s important to recognize the trend away from organized groups committing acts of domestic terror,” said Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow and editor of the report. “As Timothy McVeigh demonstrated with the Oklahoma City bombing, lone wolves and small cells of domestic terrorists can create massive carnage.”

“The lone wolf’s chief asset is that no one else knows of his violent plans, which makes them exceedingly difficult to disrupt,” Potok added. “It is imperative that authorities, including those gathering at the White House next week, take this threat seriously. Anything less would be an invitation to disaster.”

At the summit, the White House will highlight a pilot program undertaken by Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-St. Paul to integrate social service providers, religious leaders, and law enforcement into unified forces tasked with addressing violent extremism from a local perspective. The plan is “part of the broader mandate of community safety and crime prevention,” the White House said in a January statement announcing the summit. “This summit will build on the strategy the White House released in August of 2011, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, the first national strategy to prevent violent extremism domestically,” read the statement.

Leaders of some Muslim organizations have expressed skepticism about the White House plans, pointing out that law enforcement, specifically the FBI, has formed a habit of entrapping vulnerable young Muslim men into plotting domestic attacks. “Stop treating us like suspects and start treating us like assets,” said Corey Saylor, director of the Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia at the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR). “We recognize there are people of ill intent trying to recruit American Muslims into their cause. But I think the community needs to be the one that leads on that front,” Saylor added.

On Thursday, Obama is scheduled to address a gathering at the State Department, where representatives from about sixty countries, including the United Kingdom, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, will meet to discuss their own counter extremism initiatives.