Story highlights Jim Sciutto: White nationalists and KKK have a great deal in common with Islamist jihadis

He says they don't represent "real America" anymore than jihadis represent true Islam

(CNN) The white nationalists and KKK members who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, have a great deal in common with a separate group they would never lock arms with -- or march alongside, bearing store-bought tiki torches.

Jim Sciutto

They are driven by a search for identity, sick devotion to a cause, and angry reaction to perceived victimization in a manner that is strikingly similar to another group of violent extremists: Islamist jihadis.

I spent two years profiling jihadis in seven countries in the Middle East and in the West for my 2008 book , "Against Us: The New Face of America's Enemies in the Muslim World." What struck me then was how most jihadis I met were driven less by religion than by a skewed and delusional view of the politics of their world. And what strikes me now is how familiar their worldview is in the wake of Charlottesville.

I wrote at the time, "This feeling of being under attack has helped solidify a new Muslim identity -- a new cause -- of its own. Anti-Americanism is a form of Middle Eastern nationalism that transcends borders, even religion. ... They see it as resistance against American imperialism."

The narrative that extreme right-wingers in the United States and jihadis in the Middle East share goes something like this: "They" are destroying our world and our culture; they are outsiders who don't belong here and are inferior to us, they are taking away our well-being and way of life, and humiliating us in the process; to make matters worse, they are protected by elites who don't represent us and in fact have disdain for us; and we are the sole defenders of the true (fill in the blank) America or Islam.

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