Terrorism in Europe is largely a separatist and left-wing phenomena
James Delingpole isn't happy:
There we were deluding ourselves after the USS Cole, and the Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam bombings, and the Madrid train bombings, and 7/7, and the â??Mumbaiâ?? Massacre and the shoebomber plot and the Heathrow plot and the LAX plot and the New York car bomb plot and the Fort Hood massacre and, oh, yeah, 9/11 that the worldâ??s greatest terrorist threat came from Islamists who love death even more than we love Coca Cola. But this in fact was all just a red herring, brought about by the racism and Islamophobia of conservatives and libertarians and Tea Partiers to distract anti-terrorism resources from the real menace: Right-wing extremists like themselves.
When the news of the Oslo attack first broke I admit my suspicions turned toward al-Qaeda or a like-minded group, but Stephen Walt provides some actual data on European terrorist activity that helpfully clarifies the threat environment:
In 2009, there were fewer than 300 terrorist incidents in Europe, a 33 percent decline from the previous year. The vast majority of these incidents (237 out of 294) were conducted by indigenous European separatist groups, with another forty or so attributed to leftists and/or anarchists. According to the report, a grand total of one (1) attack was conducted by Islamists. Put differently, Islamist groups were responsible for a whopping 0.34 percent of all terrorist incidents in Europe in 2009. In addition, the report notes, "the number of arrests relating to Islamist terrorism (110) decreased by 41 percent compared to 2008, which continues the trend of a steady decrease since 2006."
The other thing to note about the report (pdf), which Walt eludes to, is that most of the incidents of terrorism are overwhelmingly perpetrated by self-styled separatists and left-wing groups - not right-wing extremists. The number of right-wing terrorism attacks, arrests, and foiled/failed plots is small in relation to those two groups.
