The State Department’s War on Far-Left Terrorism

The obituary for the Trump State Department’s efforts against “Far-Left Terrorism” (FLT) may have been premature. The Washington Post—from its lofty position as stenographer for the federal bureaucracy—declared the State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism a flop before it even began. Anonymous sources lined up to chortle that it was a waste of time and was intended only as public spectacle. According to the credentialed experts popular with the Post, the threat of far-left violence exists only in the minds of the president and his supporters.

But the “Antifa summit”—itself a misnomer—demonstrated precisely the opposite: the State Department has approached a critical issue for the future of the West with the seriousness it deserves. In the summit’s public session, Secretary Rubio offered an oblique but sharp rebuke to these critics as he laid out the bloody history of left-wing terrorism, both in the United States and across the Western world:

All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine-gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for fifty-five days before subjecting him to a revolutionary so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the November 17 organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.

And here in America, we remember…. In one eighteen-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil—a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.

Rubio called attention to the fact that this same form of historic terrorism, using the same methods, has again resurfaced. And the statistics bear this out. Left-wing extremism in Germany, for example, jumped by 40%; 80% of violent extremism in Greece originates on the Left.