Thread by @NBCNews

Jihadist plots used to be US and Europe's biggest terrorist threat. Now it's the far right.

nbcnews.to/3f50E9V (1/7) #NBCNewsThreads

The threat of terrorism — particularly from the far right — should be a major concern for governments as coronavirus restrictions continue to ease, according to multiple experts and former law enforcement officials who have experience monitoring violent extremist activity. (2/7)

High unemployment levels due to the pandemic, poor economic prospects and the spread of disinformation through the internet and social media could accelerate radicalization, the experts and law enforcement officials say. (3/7)

"We see an increasing percentage of plots and attacks in the US shifting over the past couple of years from jihadist motivations, increasingly, to far-right activity," says Seth Jones, who directs the Transnational Threats Project. (4/7)

A report he co-authored recorded 14 terrorist incidents, including attacks and disrupted plots, from Jan. 1 to May 8. 13 of them were classified as right-wing, and the other was recorded as being religiously motivated in the context of jihadism. (5/7)

Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, says that while the shift has not gone unnoticed, the kind of sites that radicalize right-wing actors have been subject to less scrutiny than to the equivalent jihadist literature. (6/7)

"The threat hasn't been perceived as sufficiently severe," Hegghammer says. "To put it bluntly, there hasn't been enough mass casualty
terrorism from the far right for Western governments to put the full weight of their intelligence apparatus into this." (7/7)