[Infowarrior] - Fwd: Using Fake Facts to Make Us Afraid

[Richard Forno]

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Mark 
> 
> Using Fake Facts to Make Us Afraid
> On immigration and terrorism, the Trump administration misleads about its own misleading data
> March 12, 2018 Arnold Isaacs
> http://warisboring.com/using-fake-facts-to-make-us-afraid/ <http://warisboring.com/using-fake-facts-to-make-us-afraid/>
> 
> When you see an immigrant or a foreign visitor, especially from a Muslim country, should your first thought be that you might be looking at a possible terrorist?
> 
> Clearly, that’s how the Trump administration wants Americans to react. It was the message in the president’s first address to Congress a year ago last week when he declared that “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” At that time, he urged that the U.S. immigration system be reshaped because “we cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America.”
> 
> There’s a misleading omission in Donald Trump’s formulation, though. Homegrown fanatics have killed many more Americans on U.S. soil than foreign-born terrorists have. The disparity grows much wider if you include mass killings carried out not for any religious or ideological cause but — as we have recently been tragically reminded — by mentally troubled individuals. Indeed, in just two such shootings in the last five months in Las Vegas, Nevada and Parkland, Florida, deranged shooters with assault rifles killed more than three times as many people as all foreign-born jihadists have killed in this country in the last 16 years.
> 
> Another key fact is missing, too. Only a fairly small number of those “terror-related” convictions were for acts committed or planned in the United States. Many more involved support, in various forms, for terrorist activity in other countries.
> 
> Still, Trump and his associates have repeatedly declared that terrorists sneaking into the country through a too-lax immigration system are a pressing threat to public safety in the United States. That was, for instance, the administration’s principal headline in January 2018 when it released a report from the Justice and Homeland Security departments, which claimed that nearly three out of every four individuals convicted in international terror cases in U.S. federal courts from 9/11 through 2016 were foreign born — a total of 402, by their count.

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