In The Arena The KKK Is a Terrorist Organization

Max Abrahms is professor of political science at Northeastern University and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This weekend, three people were killed in violent incidents outside Kansas City. From the earliest reports, the killings bore all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack.

There is still no consensus over the definition, but terrorism usually denotes a nonstate actor attacking civilian targets to spread fear for some putative political goal. And here we had a 73-year-old lone wolf opening fire on a Jewish community center and retirement home on Passover eve yelling “Heil Hitler.”


With time, it’s become even clearer that the alleged perpetrator is a terrorist. As founder of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, Frazier Glenn Miller has a long history of militant anti-Semitism. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as a “raging anti-Semite” known for posting online rants, like “No Jews, Just Right.” The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has also noted, “His worship for Hitler and Hitlerism is real.” According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, Miller is “one of the pioneers in the modern hate world, he’s been entrenched in the hate movement his entire adult life.”

And yet, the word terrorism wasn’t mentioned “in a single bit of news coverage,” as one observer noted. Why?

For starters, the local police were at first reluctant to acknowledge the apparent political motive — namely, anti-Semitism. To their credit, they have subsequently described the shootings as a possible “hate crime.” These are acts of violence committed on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or disability. And like terrorism, they are meant to terrorize a third party beyond the immediate victims themselves — in this case, the broader American Jewry.

But what does it take for a hateful act to become a full-fledged terrorist attack? You might think the distinction hinges on lethality. A year ago this week, though, the Boston Marathon bombings killed the same number of bystanders, and Americans had little trouble fingering the incident as terrorism. And over the years, the Klan has killed many more Americans than has Al Qaeda, and the group has certainly fanned its share of fear.

The truth is that Americans almost never view the Klan and associated Patriot groups as terrorist organizations, notwithstanding their actual terroristic behavior. The difference in designation cannot hail from ideology alone. Perhaps the media would have been more inclined to call Miller a terrorist had he blurted out “Allahu Akbar” instead of “Heil Hitler.” But conduct an experiment: Ask an American friend to name the first three terrorist groups that come to mind. Odds are the list won’t include the KKK. It might include other non-Muslim groups like Aum Shinrikyo, ETA, the Irish Republican Army or the Tamil Tigers, perhaps alongside Al Qaeda. But the fact is that when Americans think of terrorism, they think of international terrorism — not the domestic variety.

Academics tend to exclude the Klan from the study of terrorism because of its domestic origins. Traditional terrorism datasets like the Rand-St. Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism, the State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism, and International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events (ITERATE) are all restricted to international terrorist groups. Only relatively recently did other global terrorism datasets include incidents by the Klan (or any other domestic group, for that matter). For this reason, the KKK is typically missing from the secondary literature on terrorism as well. If you want to read up on the Klan, search under “hate crimes” instead.

This tendency to whitewash Klan violence from the terrorism record is ironic. Americans are often accused of being insular. But when it comes to labeling terrorists, Americans fixate on foreign perpetrators. Around the world, though, domestic terrorist attacks actually outnumber international terrorist attacks by a large margin. Sept. 11, 2001, understandably gets all the attention, but it’s not representative of the broader pattern.

The good news is that domestic and international terrorism share an important trait — neither is any good at pressuring government concessions. When nonstate actors attack civilian targets, as Miller did, governments tend to go on the offensive. In the coming months, expect the Klan and broader Patriot movement to pay a heavy political price.