According to terrorism expert Ehud Sprinzak, the common factor in all types of terrorism is an observable process of “de-legitimization” of the target by the terrorist or the terrorist group.¹ Moreover, he maintains that there are universal criteria by which the de-legitimization process can be observed and measured. First, there is the “crisis of confidence,” which may be the product of anger and which leads to extra-parliamentary action, but does not yet amount to total rejection of the target’s legitimacy. Second, there is the “conflict of legitimacy itself,” which is similar to the foregoing; here the opponent’s legitimacy is rejected although there may still be a gap between the intention and the capability of the “embryonic” terrorist. Finally, there is the “action,” which is a consequence of closing the gap between the words (or protests) and the action. According to Sprinzak, it is possible to analyze the nature of extra-parliamentary protest groups and determine which stage of the trajectory they have reached. He has suggested that the behavioral signs will indicate that an extremist group has passed the point of “conflict of legitimacy,” and is on its way to “action.”²

Sprinzak suggests that the most important indicators of the monitoring process are: previous involvement of the organization and/or its leaders in violence; conviction within the group that they can get away with violence; the presence, or absence, of charismatic, sometimes paranoiac, leaders who promote violence; a sense of looming disaster (e.g., an influx of foreign workers coinciding with an increase in unemployment); and recent humiliation and an urge for revenge.³

This chapter attempts to compare the new terrorism of today with pre-1990 terrorism, and to show that while the new terrorism still bears some features of the old terrorism, the most marked difference is that its new characteristics make it much more difficult to monitor and prevent.

The terrorism of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium includes some elements of the aforementioned pre-1990 terrorism, but it is also characterized by new ones, which require explanation.

Two types of terrorism now predominate above all others: “new” far right terrorism and religious terrorism. Unlike the traditional far right, the new far right is not distinguished by membership in visible and well-organized groups with hierarchical structures, the most overt features of which are public manifestations, such as marching in uniform or rioting against immigrants, and an open adherence to Nazi or fascist ideology. The new ideology stems almost completely from the American far right and is influenced by concepts such as “leaderless resistance” and “lone wolf” or “individual acts of terrorism.” The ideological mentors are not Hitler and Mussolini, or other far right ideologues of the 1930s and 1940s (although they play a part), but the American white supremacists William Pierce, Louis Beam, and others.

William Pierce, a former member of both the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party, now leads the National Alliance. In his fictional writing (using the nom de plume Andrew Macdonald) he promotes the concept of a “white race war” and the violent overthrow of the federal government. Beam, a former Ku Klux Klan instructor in guerrilla warfare, and now a leader in Aryan Nations, promotes the ideology of “leaderless resistance.”⁴

Religious terrorism promotes either a stark and uncompromising worldview dictated by the belief that religion has the sole key to a “messianic” age, or uses religion as a cloak for its revolutionary and violent theology. It may be anti-Western and anti-modernist, as in Islamism, or it may have developed as a reactionary response, as with Jewish and Hindu ultra-nationalists (e.g., Kahane-Chai, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bajrang Dal).

The new terrorism is mostly played out on the domestic scene. Recent evidence suggest that acts of international terrorism now account for only 10 percent of all terrorist attacks.⁵ This applies even to Islamist terrorism, with the exception of the international, unaffiliated, jihadist Mujahideen organizations which operate worldwide. In the US, domestic (i.e., carried out by US nationals) terrorist bombings or attempted bombings increased by 52 percent from 1990 (2,098 incidents) to 1994 (3,199 incidents), even before the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.⁶ In the same period international terrorist attacks declined by 24 percent, from 437 to 332 incidents. In the following four years they declined even further, by 46 percent, to 174 incidents.⁷

A second difference between “new” and “old” terrorism is that new terrorism tends to adopt a networked and less hierarchical form. Both the anti-capitalist and the national liberation terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s mostly had hierarchical forms and chains of command. Some even had identifiable operational leaders (e.g., Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, of the German extreme left Rote Armee Fraktion; Ahmad Jibril, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; and Abimael Guzman, of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso).

Moreover, new terrorism tends to be diffused. In defining “leaderless resistance,” Louis Beam, suggested that hierarchy be downplayed in favor of a network of “phantom cells,” which would communicate covertly, allowing offensive flexibility while protecting the security of the organization as a whole.

The far right Free Militia manual put it thus:

In his second, fictitious work Hunter, Pierce describes the mission white supremacist Oscar Yeager set himself in murdering mixed racial couples. Hunter has served as a model for recent acts of terrorism in the US and the UK to a greater extent than has The Turner Diaries. Yeager is describedas a man compelled to fight the alleged evil which afflicted America in the 1990s, and who declares war on “race-mixers,” homosexuals, drug-pushers and adherents of pluralism.¹⁰

Eric Robert Rudolf (see below), Bufford Furrow and James Kopp all acted out the scenarios described in Hunter.¹¹ They sought no formal ties with organized far right groups, but all were influenced by them. More recently, in the UK, David Copeland, sentenced in June 2000 to four life terms for the London nail bombings in April 1999, acted alone but under the complete influence of Pierce’s writings, and various National Alliance postings he had downloaded from the Internet were found in his possession. Likewise, Cameron Martin Dudley, a former Ku Klux Klan supporter living in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, planned to murder blacks on the streets of his town and was in touch, via the Internet, with the National Alliance in the US. He had attempted to buy a hand-gun from an American far right website, but his postings were intercepted by US law enforcement officials and resulted in his arrest by British police and subsequent trial and conviction.¹²

In a recent examination of far right terrorism in the US, triggered by Beam’s ideology, terrorism expert Gregory A. Walker stated:

The analysis concludes:

Much the same can be said of international terrorism which is now dominated by actions inspired by religious fervor. The shift is “from well-organized, localized groups supported by state-sponsors to loosely organized international networks of terrorists… This shift parallels a change from primarily politically motivated terrorism to terrorism that is more religiously or ideologically motivated.”¹⁴

The State Department notes that the greatest terrorist threat comes from the Middle East and southeast Asia (with Afghanistan and Pakistan the primary sources). Here terrorism is almost completely Islamist. Islamist terrorists have also adopted the network form, with disparate actors coming together to commit a terrorist act. The GIA bombings in France in the early 1990s were carried out by a networked organization with its command and control center in London, safe-housing in Belgium and targets in France. Likewise the American Jihad group of Shaykh Omar ‘Abd al-Rahman was composed of members from disparate backgrounds, as is the al-Qa‘ida group of Usama bin Ladin, which was responsible for bombing the US embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the group arrested by police in January 2001 in Germany, Italy and the UK, who were allegedly plotting to blow up the Strasbourg Cathedral.

Islamists have successfully demonstrated that geographical dispersion provides the security that a rigid hierarchy does not. Hamas constitutes yet another example of the network format, compared with, for instance, the hierarchical format of Arafat’s al-Fatah. Hamas has separated its political and military wings, and its leadership is divided between Gaza and (until their exclusion) Jordan and now Syria. Yet, some of its political direction and most of its fund-raising has been carried out in the US whilst its publications are partly produced in the UK.¹⁵

It must be stated, however, that Islamists have been more effective in their coordination and networking than have the far right. The latter, particularly in the US and Germany, have been unable to follow through with their stated goals, and currently pose no effective terrorist challenge to the state. Because it has been so individualistic and random, it has taken on a self-destructive and nihilistic character. Islamists, even without state backing, have coordinated terrorism transnationally in pursuit of pre-determined goals. Criminal activity by Algerian Islamists in Canada and the UK to finance terrorism in a second country, while retaining command and control in a third country, indicates a sophisticated level of networking which so far the far right has been unable to achieve.

Third, the networked form is assisted by the growing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). ICTs enable extremists to communicate covertly and to bridge distances, and the far right was the first to understand its potential. According to US far right expert Ken Stern, the use of ICTs was one of the major reasons the militia movement expanded so rapidly.¹⁶ A movement eschewing an organized national center or leadership nevertheless needed to communicate its ideas and plans. The vast size of America represented no communication problem for the new medium and meant that an activist in a remote state in the Pacific North West could be as involved in the movement as one on the east coast or deep south.

The former “Net Nazi Number One” Milton John Kleim, jr. described these benefits, thus:

ICTs allow the publication of material which in hard copy format would be illegal. They also allow encryption, thus frustrating the efforts of law enforcement agencies to investigate their plans.

Islamists have also seized on the advantages offered by ICTs, which allow advanced communications within the diaspora and between the military and religious leadership and their followers. As Middle East terrorism researcher Yehudit Barsky writes:

ICTs also allow diffused command and control previously only available within a single-theatre organization. In the early 1990s Hamas was able to collect and analyze field reports from Gaza in Chicago and send the resultant operational orders back to Gaza.¹⁹

Fourth, the new terrorist frequently does not claim responsibility for the action and may even deny it. It is the act that is important and not the claim to it, exemplified in the 1998 East African bombings. The terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s was often marked by the issuing of post-factum communiqués, and indeed with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and other terrorist groups, the issuing of coded warnings beforehand. The new terrorist intends to strike, and to go on striking without publicity for himself or his cause, until he is caught. He does not need to claim responsibility perhaps because he acknowledges only God as his master, and God has seen his action. No one else matters.

It transpired that one of Lampley’s co-conspirators was on the FBI payroll, and following Lampley’s conviction in 1996 he stated:

Fifth, many of the new terrorists are amateurs or operate on a part-time basis. The terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by professionalism in the sense that many of its actors had dropped out of society to concentrate on this activity. European anti-capitalist groups, in particular, were frequently composed of people living in communes. Therefore, law enforcers only had to infiltrate the commune to find out what their plans were. With the lone terrorist or small cell, this is now impossible.

It has been noted that law enforcement and security agencies now complain that while the new terrorists may have religious or quasi-religious motives they are not linked to any organization, have no base, raise their own funds and attack soft targets, leaving no trace. This has been described by Rand Corporation Director Bruce Hoffman as “a more amorphous, enigmatic, form of terrorism.”²¹

Sixth, the new terrorism, especially religiously-impelled terrorism, does not confine itself to boundaries and possesses a terrifying lethality. When terrorism was backed by states, there were limits to the extent to which the perpetrators would go. These inhibitions no longer apply. Frequently the old terrorism sought out representative targets and made its point by one or two surgical strikes. The new terrorism tends to go for the highest possible body count (e.g., the Oklahoma City bombing, 1995; the World Trade Center bombing, 1993; and the Tokyo sarin gas attack, 1995). Some recent cases did involve covert state-sponsored terrorism, e.g., the explosion of Pan Am 102 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, and of the UTA flight over Chad in August 1989, both perpetrated by Libya; and the bombing of the AMIA building in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which Iran is regarded as culpable, but these tend to be exceptions.

Not only are Islamists driven by religious motives, but also the American far right. The influence of Christian “Identity” ideology is vital to our understanding of modern far right terrorism. Christian “Identity” adherents believe that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is the true descendant of the lost tribes of Israel and that the Jews are impostors. They and the “Mud” people (Blacks and Asians) are polluting America and/or Europe, and their influence must be stopped. An even more extreme and violent variant of this is also emerging. Evidence suggests that several acts of terrorism in the US in recent years were committed by the Army of God, or the Phineas Priesthood. The Army of God is violently opposed to abortion, gays and lesbians, and promotes white supremacist teachings. It believes that government (including local government) is the enemy to be attacked. The term “Army of God” was first coined in 1982 and the group is believed to have been responsible for a series of terrorist acts. Eric Robert Rudolf, for example, still sought in connection with the Olympics Centennial Park bombing (1996), was connected to the Army of God.²²

The Phineas Priesthood, guided by Richard Kelly Hoskins’ book Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood, perverts the biblical story of Phineas (Numbers, Ch. 25) to promote the idea of violence against Jews, abortion clinics and banks, inter alia. However the Phineas Priesthood cannot be classified as an extremist organization, since it has no organizational system at all, although its adherents, who take it upon themselves to carry out “God’s will” are thought to have been responsible for a series of terrorist acts, starting in 1963 with the murder of civil rights leader Medger Evers.²³

The World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) is yet another white supremacist group which believes itself to be a religion carrying out God’s work. Unlike the Phineas Priesthood or the Army of God, the WCOTC now has chapters throughout the world, including Australia and Scandinavia. An attempt to establish a British branch in the early 1990s failed partly as a consequence of police action, but the British National Party (BNP) still advertises its publications.²⁴

The threat from the “religiously impelled” American far right and Islamists will continue for as long as its respective leaders make statements such as the following:

While the new terrorism still fundamentally resembles the old, the most dramatic difference lies in the diffusion of the groups involved and therefore the ability to track and interdict them. This poses a new and additional challenge, particularly to non-state targets such as Jewish communities. Penetrating such nomadic and amorphous networks requires a determined effort by national law enforcement agencies and coordination among them, which was lacking until recently.

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