Since its founding in 1865, the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) has carried out violent acts of terror against immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and other minority groups – especially African Americans. Churches and synagogues have been set on fire, black people have been lynched under the cover of nightfall, and mass shootings have taken place to devastate communities and instill fear.
In 2019, the KKK remains just the same. Their racism and anti-Semitism have spured attacks on black churches, Jewish synagogues, and even general public spaces such as the Walmart in El Paso, Texas. During these 154 years of its existence, the KKK has remained a constant threat to peaceful society and African American existence.
However, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has recently named the KKK a domestic terrorist threat. Kevin McAleenan, the acting Homeland secretary, claimed: “The continuing menace of racially-based violent extremism, particularly white supremacist extremism, is an abhorrent affront to our nation, the struggle and unity of its diverse population, and the core values of both our society and our department.”
The shooting that took place in El Paso had an especially crippling effect on the DHS – “six of the victims were family members of DHS employees.” This horrible devastation may have prompted the department to take action. McAleenan stated that recent shootings such as that one have “galvanized the Department of Homeland Security to expand its counterterrorism mission focus beyond terrorists operating abroad, to include those radicalized to violence within our borders by violent extremists of any ideology.”
Photo Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kkk-ad-front-page/
This governmental action could prompt “some on the far-right, many of whom have long denied that white supremacists pose a significant threat to national security, [to urge] government authorities to consider extremist left-wing activism as an equally serious threat as far-right extremist violence.” While this is a potential outcome, the reaction to this move is still to be determined.
The KKK has been a domestic terrorist threat for over 150 years and although thousands of lives have already been lost to the the KKK’s domestic terrorism, calling the KKK what it is – a terrorist group – is a step in the right direction.
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