Despite fears, American followers of Islamic State are few | McClatchy Washington Bureau

After remarks that painted a doomsday scenario of lone wolves, random attacks and radicalization via cellphone, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., had one last ominous thing to say about the Islamic State’s ability to attack the United States.

“This threat from the foreign fighters cannot be overstated,” he warned.

Yes, it can.

When it comes to the Islamic State’s threat to the United States, overstatements are the norm, with rhetoric of the kind Meadows used at a congressional hearing Wednesday sounding alarmist when compared with data and other assessments of the group’s ability to attack the United States after years of stepped-up U.S. efforts to fight extremism here and in the Middle East.

Although no one in the counterterrorism world would dare consider the Islamic State a vanquished threat, recent studies show that Islamic State-related arrests have slowed, that it’s harder now for jihadist recruiters to prey on impressionable Americans and that foreign fighters who leave the so-called caliphate are a much bigger risk for Europe than the United States.

Still, the Islamic State threat looms in the halls of Congress, throughout mass media and on the presidential campaign trail, with the focus on Islamist radicalization obscuring the rise of other forms of extremism, such as white nationalists whose online recruiting tactics are similar those of the Islamic State.

In the past four years, 104 people have been arrested in domestic cases related to the Islamic State, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. More than half those cases – at least 58 – came about through the use of confidential informants or undercover stings, tactics that have come under fire from civil liberties groups concerned with entrapment.

Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism, said, “It’s clear the arrest tempo has slowed down” and is likely to plateau, if it hasn’t already. Hughes said the drop came partly from successes by U.S. authorities in cracking down on Americans trying to travel to or communicate with the extremists. The Islamic State also has become more guarded with its recruiting tactics and forums, he added.

There are still ways the Islamic State could attack the United States, Hughes said. Frustrated would-be jihadists, stymied from traveling, might focus more on domestic plots.

But the number of Americans involved is tiny, he acknowledged, and the possibilities are so much smaller than they are in Europe, where thousands of residents have traveled to Syria to fight with the Islamic State. Hughes’ research team has identified only about 20 Americans who’ve made it to Islamic State territory, several of whom died there.

“In Europe you’re dealing with somewhere north of 5,000 and in America you’re talking 250 Americans who’ve traveled or attempted to travel,” Hughes said.

Terrorism trackers at the New America research institute in Washington issued a report, “ISIS in the West,” last updated in March, that identifies 94 Americans who were drawn to the war in Syria. Of those, only 27 reached the battlefield. Twelve of the 27 died, eight Americans remain at large, six have returned and been taken into custody, and one returned but then left again for Syria, making for a grand total of seven American “returnees.”

The report said that in only one of those cases – that of a 23-year-old Ohio man named Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud – was the returnee accused of planning an attack in the United States, and even in that case it was unclear how serious the plot was.

“Five years into the Syrian civil war, there is little evidence that American militants pose a significant threat of returning to conduct attacks inside the United States,” the New America report said.

The scale of the homegrown threat was exaggerated from the beginning, with politicians and news reports painting a picture of an epidemic of American Muslims flocking to the caliphate or plotting domestic attacks. The FBI says 250 Americans have joined or tried to join the Islamic State. What seldom follows that statistic is context: 250 people from a U.S. Muslim population of more than 3.3 million. In other words, 0.0075 percent.

So few American recruits turned up in the Islamic State’s caliphate that a 20-year-old militant from Alabama who made it into Syria grew angry when she arrived and found so few of her compatriots.

“Soooo many Aussies and Brits here,” the woman, identified as 20-year-old Hoda Muthana, posted on Twitter, according to a Buzzfeed profile of her last year. “But where are the Americans, wake up u cowards.”

The news media are as guilty of hyperbole as the politicians. Despite the minuscule numbers, CNN published a report called “How ISIS is luring so many Americans to join its ranks” and likened the group to “a new rock band storming the music charts” in its ability to attract followers. Marie Claire magazine, The Washington Post and several other outlets have focused on American women joining the Islamic State, but they all rely on the same handful of cases.

The headline on an NBC report warned that American ISIS recruits had doubled in a year, but only eight paragraphs in did readers learn that “U.S. intelligence officials have said only a tiny percentage of Americans respond to ISIS online messaging.”

The alarmism seeps into public opinion and then shapes policy priorities. At NBC’s recent Commander-in-Chief Forum with presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the word “ISIS” came up more than 30 times. There was not a single question on right-wing or anti-government extremism.

Ditto for Wednesday’s hearing, which was held by a subset of the House Oversight Committee. Legislators heard the testimony of analysts from three conservative think tanks who all gave a version of the jihadists-on-the-march speech, drawing heavily from attacks that were carried out in Europe rather than in the United States.

The one outlier among the witnesses was Richard Cohen, the head of the extremism watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center. Meadows, the North Carolina lawmaker, dismissed Cohen’s attempts to expand the discussion to other types of extremism.

Cohen’s written testimony included references to several studies that show how the radical right poses nearly as great a threat as radical Islam – since 2001, jihadist attacks have inflicted more casualties, but non-Muslim extremists have carried out more homicidal attacks. According to a 2014 nationwide survey by Duke University’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, “state and local law enforcement agencies were more likely to see anti-government extremism as a threat” as compared to al Qaida or other Islamist militants.

“There’s plenty of hate to go around,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said at the hearing. “Radicalization is a broader concept than just one religion or one ethnicity, and sooner or later this Congress has to come to grips with that.”