Are American And European Right-Wing Operatives Financing Muslim Terrorists For Political Gain?

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The London Terror Attacks of today spark another round of a now-all-too-familiar pattern: terrorist actions are done, ISIS takes credit, right-wing politicos take to social media to call for some kind of restriction on the movements of all Muslims, and funding and support to, and rhetoric from, extreme right-wing-groups.

While ISIS has not taken credit for the London Terror Attacks, and the attackers are not known, once again, social media has been used to express the idea that they are Muslim, and that all Muslims have to be restricted.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s a British Election on June 8th? Did I mention that it pits the current and newish Conservative Theresa May against the Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn? Did you know that polls had the underdog Jeremy Corbyn closing in on Prime Minister May? Moreover, campaigning was suspended after the Manchester Attack, and are quite likely to be called off after the London Attacks. And now, there is a call for the election itself to be suspended after the London Attacks, thus leaving May, the Conservative, in power as Prime Minister.

Consider the shooting on Paris’s Champs-Élysées in April. That was done before the French election for its new President. That had one notable conservative who benefited from anti-Muslim fears after terrorist attacks, U.S. President Donald Trump, tweeting that it would impact the election:

And today

Why do that?

Plus, there were claims from the intelligence community that The Russians were trying to hack the French Election, just as they tried to hack the American Presidential Election – the one that got The Russian’s friend Trump elected American President. And remember how Trump promised terrorist attacks if Clinton won the 2016 Election? And that would seem to be the point at which we start talking about Trump’s relationship with Vladomir Putin and Russian officials.

As a note, the French wanted to part of such tricks, and came out in force to pick Macron as the new President.

Some researchers only look at the outcome of elections versus the timing of the terrorist attack, but I argue it’s important to look at how terrorist attacks serve to frame the issues and give rise to right-wing extremist political groups.

As it happens, a number of researchers have found this to be true. In a look at the 2008 Israeli Elections, RAND Corporation investigators Claude Berrebi and Esteban Klor found that “the occurrence of a terror attack in a given locality within three months of the elections causes an increase of 1.35 percentage points on that locality’s support for the right bloc of political parties out of the two blocs vote. This effect is of a significant political magnitude because of the high level of terrorism in Israel and the fact that its electorate is closely split between the right and left blocs. Moreover, a terror fatality has important electoral effects beyond the locality where the attack is perpetrated, and its electoral impact is stronger the closer to the elections it occurs. Interestingly, in left-leaning localities, local terror fatalities cause an increase in the support for the right bloc, whereas terror fatalities outside the locality increase the support for the left bloc of parties. Given that a relatively small number of localities suffer terror attacks, we demonstrate that terrorism does cause the ideological polarization of the electorate.”

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