The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Terrorists Not Jihadists
Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, argues in an ill-timed piece for the network’s website that America is too worried about Islamic terrorism: 

Since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and Pentagon 11 years ago, 19 people have died in terrorist attacks in the United States that were motivated by ideologies that have nothing to do with the ideas of Osama bin Laden, but rather were the victims of terrorists motivated by extreme anti-government views or virulent anti-Semitic/neo-Nazi views.

Jihadist terrorists, on the other hand, have killed 17 people, according to data compiled by the New America Foundation. . . .

Since 9/11, jihadist and nonjihadist terrorists have killed about the same number of people in the United States, yet 61% of the 337 people indicted for terrorism-related activities since the 9/11 attacks are jihadists, according to the New America Foundation data. . . .

Some politicians and much of the public continue to believe that the threat from terrorists comes from violent jihadists, when in reality far-right extremists pose as much or possibly even more of a threat, something that we would do well to consider on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

Peter Bergen began covering the rise of al-Qaeda long before the twin towers fell. One of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Bergen that the relatively small number of successful jihadist attacks is because the country has been vigilant about prevention.

But we have an idea. The Associated Press begins a dispatch from Cairo as follows: “Mainly ultraconservative protesters climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Egypt’s capital Tuesday and brought down the American flag, replacing it with a black Islamist flag to protest a U.S.-produced film attacking the Prophet Muhammad.”

If we all just call jihadists “ultraconservative,” then we can continue preventing them from attacking us while also satisfying Bergen’s demand for more attention to “far-right extremists.” Two birds with one stone!

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